October, 31 2003

So, I'm in the Occupied West Bank, now. I'll start out by saying thank you to Brian Duss for all his graciousness toward me these last few days. He's been great company, and has been such a brilliant adviser as to considerations I should be making with regard to how I act/speak/etc. here. At times, his honesty was really critical and blunt, but I love him all the more for it. Really, if you're reading this, Brian.... I can't thank you enough. It's meant the world to me.

I awoke this morning at 2:30am, due to jetlag. It's killing me, I swear. I decided to let Duss sleep, and snuck off to the common room of the guest house, to watch BBC, and drink tea until it was time for me to head down to the Old City. For the next five hours, I battled mosquitoes, while trying to locate some visual indication of the regular gunfire in the street. I'm not talking about the sort of thing we sometimes hear in Shaw, or Columbia Heights back home -- I'm guessing that some of what I heard was actually heavier artillery -- possibly cannons. It's really hard to wrap your mind around, until you're actually sitting in the middle of it.

Finally, I showered, packed my bags, and headed out the front gate of Augusta Victoria, intending to descend the hill to the first intersection and grab a cab down to the Damascus Gate, where I was meeting up with other ISM folks to cross over to Beit Sahour for two days of training. As I made my way out into the street, I noticed IDF on the very corner I intended to hail a cab from. So, my first real dilemma: Looking like an obvious international, leaving a notoriously Arab compound...What were my odds staring down these soldiers? Not good, I figured. Luckily, a cab was coming my way up the hill, and I flagged it down before they noticed me.

Duss had told me the ride to Damascus Gate would be about three sheckles (Israeli currency), but the driver had other ideas. He wanted 15 upon arrival. Fortunately, I only had 100 sheckle bills, and four sheckles in coins. He took the four, and told me the hotel I was looking for was in the Old City, just inside the gate. Bastard. I wandered around the Old City of Jerusalem for a good half hour, before a Palestinian kid was nice enough to tell me it was in fact just outside the gate -- but I did get a nice little glimpse of the Old City, which is one of those things you really just can't imagine even existing.

I met up with two women from the ISM -- one from London, another from Ireland. Both very, very nice. On our ride to Beit Sahour, we found the checkpoint for the road completely closed, and had to reroute to Beit Jala, where we bailed out, climbed over a hill strewn with discarded razorwire, and hopped in a cab to Beit Sahour on the other side. Somewhere in all of this, one of the women allowed me to email Lelia from her fancy planner/cell phone, to tell her I'd finally arrived safely. This was the highlight of my day.

Now, I'm in Beit Sahour for the weekend, in a rather intensive 12-hour per day nonviolence and ISM structure training, with jetlag kicking my ass like nobody's business. Lovely. I've made a point of apologizing to the coordinators, and they've been really warm and understanding about it. Hopefully, if I can ride the next seven hours out, I can just pass the fuck out and sleep all night for once.

That's all for now. I'll write more in detail later, when I'm not skipping lunch.