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.

Real Heroes

Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me,
but try waking up every morning
& loving the world all over again.

That's what takes a real hero.
(StoryPeople)

“The Situation”

“The Conflict”

How often are these words used to describe the place that I now call home? People ask how “the situation” affects life, politicians talk about “the conflict”, I came to get a better understanding of “the situation” and almost everybody is aiming to solve “the conflict.” The focus is on UN resolutions, UNESCO admittance, peace talks, and quartet delegations. With all this focus on what is happening on the global stage, it is easy to forget about the people who live here every day, who each day wake up and make their life here.

After a recent Sunday morning church service, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Pastor and a group of visiting Lutherans. So much of me wishes I would have recorded this conversation so I could let you listen to it and hear his words and his voice for yourself. He talked about his hopes for a peace that would allow him to keep his rights. He spoke of a hope without optimism. He told stories of being a minority of a minority(Christian=minority #1, Lutheran=#2) but encouraging his congregation to add their “brick” with the hopes that when everybody adds a brick something wonderful can be built. He shared his changing the Lord’s Prayer to “Lead us not into humiliation" each time he crosses the checkpoint. He asked that when we returned home, we returned changed and ready to continue to walk with the Palestinian people. But mostly he reminded us that life is happening here daily:

“When people speak about Palestinians they talk about a people in crisis. They do not speak of the life here. When politicians stop seeing us as a people in crisis and start seeing us as a people with needs and with life, then peace will happen.”

“It isn’t happy all the time, we do cry, but after our crying there is a new day. Life here is a choice. To wake up each morning, that is a choice, that is life here. The parents who decided to get their children an education so they will be ready when there is peace, that is life here. To need permits to cross our borders and visit our holy sites, but to keep trying, that is life here. To be labeled dangerous by a government, and to choose non-violence, that is life here.”

Every day I spent here, I get to spend time working with and getting to know the real heroes here. They are the parents of the children I help teach, the teachers I work with, the host family I live with and the people who continue to share their stories in hopes that somebody will hear them.

Yes, Palestine’s acceptance into UNESCO is a great victory, the UN resolution is important and successful peace talks would be a huge step forward. But I do believe that the real heroes are the people who live here and decide to wake up each morning, choose life and work to love the world are the real heroes.

At this point, I leave you with words from Rafeef Ziadah, a Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. Please take the time to hear her words.

“We teach life, Sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning
to teach the rest of the world life!
Sir!”

Deep Roots

When I die, she said, I'm coming back as a tree with deep roots &
I'll wave my leaves at the children every morning on their way to school &
whisper tree songs at night in their dreams. 

Trees with deep roots know about the things children need.
(StoryPeople)

Olive trees are an everyday part of my life here. They are in my backyard. They are on my way to school. They pepper the fields on the hills across from my house. They are all over. Like apple harvesting back home, olive harvest marks the change in seasons. So as the weather gets a bit colder, those olive trees have surrounded by tarps and filled with people harvesting olives.

The past weekend, I had the chance to participate in two olive harvestings. The first day was spent with a local Palestinian family and the second was at the Lutheran World Federation campus on the Mount of Olives, yep I got to harvest olives on the Mount of Olives! SO COOL!!!

Olive harvesting is a bit of work but a lot of fun. For me it was chance to climb through the trees and get my hands dirty, to be outside in the sun doing work and feel good about accomplishing something.

First the olives must be removed from the tree.
This is done by either “milking” the branches or using a rake like comb. Rather than picking each olive individually they are milked or combed to drop on a large tarp.

After all the olives are out of the tree and on the tarp,
all the olives are gathered into a central location on the tarp and all of the extra branches, leaves and stones are picked out.

Then the olives are dumped into a bag which will be taken to
an olive press to be turned into olive oil.

The olive oil from the olives we harvested on the Mount of Olives will be sold and all proceeds will go to the Augusta Victoria Hospital, for more information about buying this olive oil check here: http://lwfjerusalem.org/projects/olive-oil/

The time spent in harvesting olives was a fantastic opportunity to be a part of Palestinian life.

The 8 trees I harvested with the local family have been in this family “forever,” which as far as we can figure meant several hundred, if not a thousand, years. The trees have lived through so much and if they could talk they would tell us stories of peace and war, struggles and joys, beginnings and ends. They have seen the history of this place and their roots are deeply planted in the land and its history

As we climbed in the trees, we heard the family tell some stories that these trees might tell. They told of olive harvests past, struggles of the present to keep their land and hopes for a peaceful future. And as I sat among the branches of the olive trees hearing this stories, I was struck by how much these trees are like the families and the people that care for them, deeply rooted in their land and in their history.

To see more pictures of olive harvest and other adventures check pictures on Facebook here and here.

I have also just sent out my first newsletter, if you didn’t get it and would like to please e-mail me at gastal01@luther.edu.

Recipes we create

In 2007, a movie called No Reservations- starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Abigail Breslin- was released. This movie follows Kate(Catherine Zeta-Jones), a master chef in NYC, as her life takes a dramatic turn when she becomes the guardian of her nine-year old niece Zoe(Abigail Breslin). (Thanks to IMDB for the summary)

Towards the end of the movie, Kate is talking to her therapist, frustrated with her feelings of failing and uncertainty as she navigates this new chapter of her life and the following conversation takes place:

Kate: I wish there was a cookbook for life, you know? Recipes telling us exactly what to do. I know, I know, you're gonna say "How else will you learn, Kate."

Therapist: mm. No, actually I wasn't going to say that. You want to guess again?

Kate: No, no, go ahead.

Therapist: Well what I was going to say was, you know better than anyone, it's the recipes that you create yourself that are the best.

I think one of the reasons I like this movie is because of my love of cooking. I love the process of creating something new and seeing how it turns out. I love the idea of learning from my failures and attempting to recreate my successes. I love that at the end I have something I can share with people. Once when I asked my mom for some help with a recipe she told me that it was "more of an art than a science." I suppose if it were a science every apple pie and chocolate chip cookie would taste as good as my grandma's!

In the past couple of weeks, my roomie and I have fallen into a wonderful (well, wonderful for me) pattern, where I cook and she cleans up afterward.

I will usually start with what I can find in the kitchen, I will begin the hunt for a recipe. Finding a couple I like, I take the basics-ingredients, temperature and cook time- and then go from there. I add different spices, leave things out if I don’t like them, and make substitutions if something can’t be found. Sometimes the result is not so great, but most of the times I come up with something I am excited about and excited to share: roasted veggies, pita chips, cheesy rice and beans and most recently an apple dessert.

In many ways, this year with YAGM is just one more series of recipes I will create. There is no cookbook for this year, no recipes telling me “exactly what to do.” I have been given some of the basic ingredients: the people, the places and the primary worksite.

However, after that, how the recipes turn out is totally up to me. I get to decide how strong the relationships are, what other places I will add and the extra places I will volunteer. When things don’tgo quite as planned, I get to decide what subsitutions to make and how to tailor the results to make it better. I get to decide what things to say “yes” to some experiences that will enhance and say “no” to the things that I don’t think will fit. I get to create something new, learn from my mistakes and in the end share it with people when I return home. And at the end of the year, I will have a few brand new recipes to add to the cookbook of my life.

Small pools of light

My favorite time of day is just at dark
when all thoughts of what must be done stop &
small pools of light
come alive on tired faces everywhere.
~StoryPeople

This past Thursday night, Courtney and I had the opportunity to attended a retirement party for a former science teacher at Beit Sahour School. This teacher also happens to be my host mother. It was a wonderful night full of good food (LOTS AND LOTS OF GOOD FOOD!), stories, jokes and laughter.

As is the theme in my life right now, I understood barely any of the conversation because it was mostly in Arabic, except for the pieces that were in English for our benefit. However, despite not being able to understand the specifics of what were being said, it was pretty easy to understand the overall of the night.

We were gathering to celebrate the years that my host mom had worked at the school, and it was easy to see how much all of the other teachers loved her and how much she loved them all. That love filled the room and became a contagious energy. It was kind of like one of those commercials for Olive Garden where friends and family are sitting at a table passing food and alaughing, except rather than pasta and breadsticks it was hummus and kebobs being passed around.

As I sat and looked around the room, taking in the joy, laughter and love, I saw the “small pools of light come alive on tired faces.”

Taybeh

What do you think when you think of Oktoberfest?

If you are like me, you think of Germans, brats, polka and beer. If you are like me, nothing about Oktoberfest makes you think Palestine.

Well, this weekend past weekend the YAGMs got the opportunity to attend the wonderfully cultural event of Palestinian Oktoberfest. Yep, that’s right, we attended Oktoberfest in Palestine. Since 2005, the annual Oktoberfest happens in Taybeh. Taybeh (which means good in Arabic) is a town famous for its olive trees, figs, grapes and almonds, plus it is believed to be the village where Jesus stayed with the disciples before the crucifixion.

Taybeh is also famous because it is home to the brewery of the only Palestinian brewed beer-Taybeh. So every year, Oktoberfest happens to celebrate all that is Taybeh. It is a wonderful opportunity to enjoy good food, live music, dancing and yes Taybeh beer. We feasted doughnuts and ice cream, saw a Sri Lanka dancer and heard a Spanish Folk Rock band (at a Palestianian Oktoberfest, talk about culture shock). It was a time of joyous celebration, see the below clip for some ideas of what happened.

However, if that was all that Taybeh was, I probably would not be blogging about it. Taybeh is not just a beer and Oktoberfest is not just a chance to gather for good times. Rather, they are a celebration of Palestine, and at their very core a part of the resistance. In the words of the Taybeh brochure:

Every thing about Taybeh is extremely revolutionary,

if not extraordinary.

In the middle of intense conflict, you find a community

striving to be normal and crying out to the world for the need to do astonishing things in the middle of oppressed conditions.

Taybeh responds with peaceful resolutions of celebrating its existence.

So the weekend is also full of Palestinian food (Shawarma, Falafel), Palestinian art, Palestinian dancing(dabka) and Palestinian based musicians, like Toot Ard,:

From what we can figure the chorus translates “Peace with you, Beautiful Peace”

So aside from being a joyous celebration and beautiful weekend, it was also a chance to gather and to celebrate the beauty of the Palestinian culture. The celebration of all that Palestine has to offer serves as a way to say, we are here, don’t forget about us. It was also a powerful reminder that while there are debates happening on the international level, the real revolution and real resistance are happening in little ways, every day on the ground in “normal Palestinian” life.

Yummy, yummy falafel

Crowd enjoying Toot Ard.

“My name is Palestine and I will be Palestinian forever.”

Bethlehem based Hajj MC.