Sana: How are you, my uncle?
Uncle: I'm ok.
Sana: How is your health?
Uncle: It's fine.
Sana (concerned): You look tired. Is there something the matter?
Uncle: No, nothing's the matter. It's boredom.
As an American, I take my freedom for granted. I take it for granted that I can travel anywhere I want to, that I can get a job, and that I can study anything I want. In fact, I do more than take this for granted, I expect it, I feel that I deserve my freedoms. This may be wrong of me, but my experience in life has taught me that because of my background and the words on my passport over the eagle and his arrows, that I should expect no less.
Right after sunset, my host mother (hereafter referred to as "aunty" Miyasar, because that's what I call her) takes a walk down the main street from Dheisheh Refugee Camp to the crossroads of Bab Izkak in Bethlehem. Often Sana, Majd, or Fairouz, herdaughters, or Ziad, her youngest son, will accompany her. She does this walk for excercise. Ironically, she is a P. E. teacher. However, she cannot afford to be a member of any of Bethlehem's numerous sports clubs to take a Pilates class or go swimming. She cannot even afford to take a taxi to a more scenic spot for a walk. Needless to say, the family does not own a car. Instead, she walks at a brisk pace--a calm pace for somebody accustomed to walking in New York--along the main road. She dose this in the evening, because there is no sun, and on the main road because it is safer because there is a lot of traffic--both foot and vehicle. It is a walk perfumed by diesel fuel and cooled by a breeze that once, somehow, I smelled crushed mint on.
Miyasar has not been paid for her work at Irtas Girls' Middle School for 16 months--since the Palestinian Parliamentary elections in which Hamas was voted into the majority of seats, and subsequently the Western powers of the US and EU stopped funding the Palestinian Authority, and Israel prevented tax receipts from goods intended for Palestinian markets from researching the Palestinian Authority (PA). Anything or anybody whose destination is a Palestinian market or an area where the PA is at least nominally in control of internal affairs, must pass through some sort of Israeli inspection. Goods bound for Palestinian markets often arive through the Israeli port at Haifa before going through Israeli-controlled crossing-points into the West Bank or Gaza Strip. People can come into PA-controlled areas through Jordan, Israel, or Egypt, before passing through Israeli checkpoints into PA-controlled areas in the West Bank and Gaza. What I'm describing here is confusing to you see the map of the Occupied West Bank I have attached. The blue areas are in full Israeli control. The brown areas are supposed to be in PA-control. Israel controls all of the borders of the Gaza Strip. This system of control has been named the Matrix of Control by Israeli activist and professor Jeff Halper. People Anyway, the PA employs primary and secondary teachers like Miyasar along with about 170,000 of other civil servants (BBC).
On the day I arrived in Bethlehem, I went to the bank with Sana, my 23-year-old host sister. I was met with a sight that I had not seen ever before. There was a crowd at the ATM machine! Sana explained to me that people employed by the PA were lining up because they were getting paid. The BBC reported that on July 4, the state of Israel released the tax receipts it had been withholding for 16 months. When I came back Miyasar told me that she had gone to the bank the day before and found no trace of any salary in her account. Later that day, her sister Rusaila called and said that Miyasar could go and get her pay but it was only her pay for less than one fourth of a month: 400 shekels. 400 shekels is roughly a little more than $100. Her salary is 2100 a month. Miyasar's husband, Aziz, is a construction worker but he rarely works because he has a bad back. Before January 2006, Miyasar had been feeding her son, her three daughters, her husband, and herself on her salary. Because they are registered as refugees with UNWRA, the UN organization that supplies Palestinian refugees in the Middle East with basic food, shelter, primary education, and health care, they will not starve.
"They're liars," Miyasar told me as she prepared lunch, a chicken and rice dish called upside-down, maklooba, in Arabic. "They told me I would get paid, and now all I get is not even a month's. I can't do anything with this." Like many other civil servants, even one month's pay would not pay even half of the debts they have accumulated since the powers stopped funding the PA. Miyasar put the steaming pot of rice and chicken on the table in front of a large metal tray. She turned to put the cucumber-tomato salad and started putting it in small bowls. Her youngest daughter, Fairouz, age 15, snuck up and took the pot, and with a deft motion, turned it over.
"I did it myself, Mama."
We looked at the overturned pot on the tray.
"Should I pick it up?"
Miyasar inclined her head to say go ahead. Fairouz slowly picked up the pot and the rice steamed out. Chicken and rice. Upside down. Maklooba.
The next day I went with Miyasar to pick up her paycheck at the bank.
"What will you do if you get your paycheck?" Fairouz wanted to know before she left.
"I don't know," said Miyasar, "But if I don't get it, we walk home," she laughed. However, she did not laugh because it was a joke. She laughed because if there was no money, even the two shekels spent on the ride back from the bank would feel like they were wasted because they were not spent on food, they would be spent simply on making the time between the bank and home shorter. And when there is no work or activities except making meals and keeping the house clean, why is there any need to rush?
She got 700 shekels. After she paid the phone bill and some other debts, she was left with 200. A little bit of groceries.
My two older host sisters, Majd (20) and Sana (23), want to find work. Sana has graduated from college with a degree in geography and is engaged to be married next summer. Aside from cleaning the house, there is not much for her to do. She wants to work to bring extra money to the family. The problem is there is no job for a female college graduate with only minimal computer and English skills. We went to ARIJ, an institute that conducts research about Palestinian land, social, and economic issues. The job application was in English. When she reached the section for her to write what she wanted to specialize in at ARIJ, she asked me what she should put. I didn't know. She asked one of the girls at the office. "What should I put here? I will to do anything. My family's situation is very difficult."
"What did you major in in college?" asked the girl.
"Geography."
"Put geography."
Sana also asked me how to spell several words.
Aside from the fact that the economy in the West Bank is suffocating under the Israeli Occupation, lack of tourism, and the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, there are no real jobs for girls in the blue-collar sector. In Bethlehem, girls are not waitresses, work at cellphone shops, or as barristers. Women's work requires degrees: pharmacology, nu sing, journalism.
Majd, on the other hand, does not care as much about money. Her life is the life of a typical "good girl:" from the home to college, from college to home. She studies hard and gets good grades. But this is a life stripped to its bare essentials, there is nothing in it to feed her spirit. She simply wants to do something to give back and expand her horizons. She dreams of going abroad to see the world, to study, and to work. The Bethlehem municipal borders have contained her life. About once a year she has gone on a school field trip to Jericho. In the past few months I have been on both sides of the United States and I have visited three other countries. On a day when there are no traffic jams or Israeli Army incursions, Majd's world can be driven through in fifteen minutes. It is contained and controlled. As a West Bank Palestinian, the Israeli military administration forbids her from going to Jerusalem or Israel proper. Her poverty forbids her from going from one place to another in the West Bank. As a girl in Bethlehem, menial jobs are simply not available to her.
Degrees require money. Without money for an education, most girls' best hope for happiness is to marry somebody richer than them for love. The other night I spoke to an Israeli friend who has many connections on both sides of the Green Line. I asked if she knew of any place two young women could find employment. She suggested a hospital. "But they aren't studying to be doctors," I said.
"As cleaners," my friend said.
When Majd heard that she laughed, "My father would not let me do that for sure!" No daughter of Aziz Hammash could work as a cleaning-lady.
Friday morning in a Palestinian Muslim house means waking up late to a huge breakfast. To catch the beautiful breeze and sun, we ate breakfast on the veranda, dipping homemade bread into olive oil and thyme (zeit w za6ar), hummous laced with olive oil and hot pepper, scrambled eggs, yogurt, and mint tea.
"We have a problem here in Dheisheh," my "uncle" Aziz said (Miyasar's husband, hereafter referred to as my "uncle" Aziz, because that's what I call him), "Cancer. Nobody knows what causes it. 60 people died in Dheisheh Camp last year, and we're a small camp. There is a lot of cancer in Israel but there never was here. Some internationals should come and to a research project about it."
"Why internationals?" I asked.
"We've got no brains here." Saddened as I was by Aziz's statement, I let the thought drift up, with the smell of my tea. In the drowsy, well-fed, sunny comfort of the Friday morning, my Arabic wasn't up to entering into a conversation about the Palestinain brain drain. I didn't even state the simple fact that degrees in many subjects, such as photojournalism, are simply not offered by universities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; if given the choice, students prefer to study abroad without the Israeli Occupation hindering, puncturing, and often completely stopping their studies. Some people who study abroad take years to return, if at all. Instead, I asked Aziz, "You said most of the cases were really young?"
"Yes," he said, "My friend's son was 16 when he got cancer last year. His father really advocated for him and got him treatment at Haddassa [an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem], and praise the Lord, he's better now. But he was lucky."
"Thank God," I agreed. "Thank God."
Halper, Jeff. "The Matrix of Control" http://www.icahd.org/eng/articles.asp?menu=6&submenu=3
BBC Article on PA paychecks http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6269172.stm
UNRWA website http://www.un.org/unrwa/
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