Christmas in Bethlehem

I did a brief overview of my Christmas in Bethlehem in my most recent newsletter (if you didn’t get it and want to…let me know, gastal01@luther.edu) but I wanted to share a few more pictures and some video. If you want to see more pictures you can check out my Facebook album. 

When I agreed to come to the West Bank for the year, I knew I would be missing a lot of things: birthdays, family gatherings, friend’s weddings and other important events.  Most of these things I have come to terms with missing but I hadn’t quite come to terms with spending Christmas away from my family, away from friends, away from familiar traditions and away from snow.  However, if I couldn’t spend Christmas at home with all that is familiar had home, I couldn’t think of a better place to be than amidst what has become so familiar here. 

But without the Christmas music on the radio, frantic buying of presents and snowy cold weather(however, it sounds like Iowa has been missing that too), it took a while to begin to feel like Christmas.  However, when Christmas arrived here, it arrived in full swing, starting on Thursday, December 15^th, 9 days before Christmas day.

Kate, Matt and I

That Thursday afternoon brought an exciting re-connection as I headed into Jerusalem to pick up two dear friends, who I worked with at Camp EWALU, Kate and Matt.  They are currently traveling around the world, and decided to be in the area for Christmas.  After we dropped their stuff at my house, we headed to Beit Sahour church for some caroling and church decorating and Papa Noel even made an appearance to bring chocolate to the children, and adults too! 

Lit Christmas tree

Saturday night, Beit Sahour kicked off their Christmas celebrations by lighting their Christmas tree.   The celebration started with a parade of the area scout groups (kind of like a combination of marching band, youth group and boy/girl scouts), which included a lot of bagpipes. After the parade, we gathered with 3,000 plus people in the city center.   As people gathered, a band sang Christmas carols. Before the lighting of the tree we heard a speech from the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.  While we didn’t understand much of the speech, we did catch the words “Newt Gringrich"  and could only assume he was addressing the comments Newt Gringrich made about Palestinians being a made-up people.   After the speech, there was a countdown, the band sang “Angels We Have Heard on High” (or however that translates into Arabic) and with the chorus of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” the tree was lit.

Peanut packing

Tuesday brought two of the most interesting new Christmas experiences of the year.  At the school on Tuesday afternoon, we gathered with the teachers to fill a bunch of bags with peanuts and chocolate.  Initially, I didn’t know what to expect but we gathered in a common room and while the purpose was to gather to fill the bags, it seemed to be more of an excuse to gather together to joke, laugh and eat peanuts.

Tueseday evening, 3 fellow YAGM’s and I went to a concert by a group called Shibat, a Palestinian rock ‘n’ roll group that gets together for a series of Christmas concerts every year.   This year’s concert included a variety of traditional English and Arabic Christmas carols including Little Drummer Boy and Mary, Did You Know as well as songs like Sound of Music, Pinball Wizard and Jailhouse Rock. The concert concluded with a dance party to medley of Christmas songs starting with Feliz Navidad (I apologize for the quality of the video but I was dancing too…):

Teachers dancing at Christmas party

Adorable KG at program

Thursday was our last day of school.  The kids came to school for an hour to gather for worship and awards, afterwards the students were all given gifts and bags of peanuts (remember those from Tuesday?).  Thursday night brought the school’s Christmas program where each grade had a short performance.   After the program, the teachers from all of the Lutheran Schools gathered for their Christmas celebrations.  There was much laughter, eating and, of course, DANCING.  Well…ok there was a lot laughing at our dancing but we had a lot of fun trying to keep up with the dancing.

Nativity Set

Friday all the YAGM gathered together with our coordinators to celebrate Christmas.   While there we even got Christmas stockings (aka a pair of warm fuzzy socks YAY!) stuffed with candy, olive soap and our own olive wood nativity complete with a removable separation wall. I was also pretty excited to get a chance to build a fire in a fire place where we gathered to eat cookies, drink cocoa and sing carols. On the way back to our houses, we took a tour of the Christmas lights in the area. 

Saturday, Christmas Eve brought a series of parades, in and around Manager Square, by the local scouts groups, aka lots of drums and bagpipes!  We then spent most of the day hanging around Manager Square listening to concerts, including a group that sang John Lenon’s Imagine.   The day concluded with a tri-lingual (Arabic, English and German) worship service at Christmas Lutheran Church, where I sang in the choir and we sang in Spanish (so I guess that makes it a quad-lingual service).  The service finished with a candlelight singing of Silent Night. 

In a time when I was missing my community back home, the numerous opportunities to gather with a variety of communities here was a great reminder of the communities that I have become a part of in the past four months.  In a time where I didn’t expect to find much of the familiar, I was grateful to find myself surrounded by the familiar in the newness.

Candlelight service at Christmas Lutheran (Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath) 

Communication, communication

“One problem that recurs more and more frequently these days 

in books and plays and movies is the

 inability of people to communicate with the people they love…

and the characters in these books and plays and so on, 

and in real life I might add, 

spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. 

I feel that if a person can’t communicate the very least he can do is to SHUT UP!” 

 ~Tom Lehrer

This advice comes from Tom Lehrer, musical comedian probably most well known for his “Elements Song.”  There was a point in my life where I completely agreed with him, after all if you can’t communicate why keep talking?  That all changed when I moved to another country and had to start trying to learn another language.  

As a YAGM group we took a weeks worth of Arabic when we arrived here, but we moved at a pretty fast pace and I was pretty overwhelmed.  For a while, I used the Arabic I knew ONLY when I was certain of the words I was going to use.  I could say hello, introduce myself, ask how much something cost and tell somebody I spoke a little Arabic.    I spent a lot of time being certain that I didn’t know what was going on or that I couldn’t speak any Arabic.  I was frustrated that I wasn’t learning Arabic and that it wasn’t getting easier. In short, I felt I couldn’t communicate, and spent hours bemoaning this fact and saying to myself “I need to learn Arabic.”  So, in following Mr. Lehrer’s advice, I SHUT UP!

Then two things happened.  The first was I started taking Arabic lessons from a Kindergarten teacher at my school.  This was helpful on a practical level as I was now in a formal learning situation so I was actually learning Arabic again.

The second was having several people decide that they were going to speak to me in Arabic and expected me to respond in kind, including a wonderful older gentleman from my church named Abdullah.  Abdullah greets me every time he sees me in Arabic requires that I do the same, then he will continue our conversation in a mixture of Arabic and English, gently correcting my mistakes, filling in words I don’t know and congratulating me when I figure out how to communicate what I need. 

He keeps telling me that “where there is a will there is a way” and I generally respond with “where there are Kindergarteners who need to be understood there is a will” and he will tell me that I will speak Arabic by the end of the year. 

Slowly, I am beginning to believe him because the more I try to communicate in Arabic the more I discover I actually can.   By no means am I even remotely conversational but this is a moment where shutting up actually does more harm than good.  When I am willing to try to communicate, I discover that I can actually communicate to a cab driver that I need him to wait while I get my friend from a hotel and then need him to take us to the Lutheran Church.  I can communicate with one of the students that I need them to sit down and no, they cannot go to the bathroom again.  I can communicate to the shawerma man that I am vegetarian so I don’t want meat, I just want salads on my sandwich.

While these communications aren’t always pretty, never lengthy and are nowhere near grammatically correct, as I struggle through these conversations, people are incredibly gracious and forgiving.   Which makes these conversations more than attempts to communicate needs and wants, they are a way to keep building relationships here and of to continuing to make new friends.