A regular town

Just a regular town

I got the job. The phone interview with a crackly voice, one time-zone away, had gone well. Belgian development money would pay for me to go and support a small organization that’s active in the field of women’s rights, youth empowerment, and democracy.

As I was in the process of packing my bags TV news blared out the increasingly alarming vital signs of Yasser Arafat. I had just about finished packing those bags when the curtain finally came down for the old man, and an era ended. It was November 2004. Goodbye Belgium. My odyssey to Palestine had begun.

My arrival in Ramallah wasn’t half as spectacular as the helicopter blades shaving over an emotional sea of people that brought back the deceased leader. Nadine, an American-Palestinian colleague from the organization, picked me up from Ben Gurion airport. I stole through the night, surreptitiously, in an old car of Italian make, if “make” is at all the right word for such a haphazard throwing together of mechanical parts. At Qalandia, the gateway from Jerusalem to Ramallah, I got my first impression of a checkpoint; the incessant honking, soldiers, guns, kids selling mediocre chewing gum, and looming slabs of concrete; the infamous wall I’d heard so much about.

“Welcome to Palestine,” Nadine said. In three bags all of my belongings were contained and my knuckles whitened, passport in hand, as we drove through that portal, away into a place that in my mind television had molded to a scary realm of strife, squeaky saloon doors and tumbleweeds. On the shitty road the Fiat rattled like a possessed person’s bed fixed to a rollercoaster. “Nobody wants to patch up this road,” she grinned, “because it belongs to the municipality of Jerusalem, but the wall puts it firmly on the Palestinian side, and they don’t get clearance to touch it either.” You have to love absurd comedy.

I had just arrived, and felt, rightly, that I had only seen the tip of the iceberg. Now, after two and a half years, I still feel that way sometimes, but I’ve learned at least to stop yelling “Iceberg!” each time I stumble on a tragic farce. You learn to sail past them, or at least store the impact in that special part of the brain where one and one does not necessarily make two. In this place M.S. Titanic, although heavily damaged and rudderless, still floats, miraculously. The band plays on.

“Are you scared?” Nadine asked as we drove into the downtown of Ramallah.

I said, “no,” although the truth was probably somewhat on the “yes”-side of that, a fitting entry to this world of maybe.

That first week I slept in a hostel, occupied otherwise by construction workers from Nablus; there to make a proverbial buck. In the evening I drank tea with them, hemorrhaging amounts of the stuff, watched Al-Jazeera and attempted to crank-start my rusty Arabic. It was in no better shape than my feisty Italian conveyance. In the next couple of days I would see more of Ramallah from behind the windows of that car. Up or down the asphalted hills, regardless, it howled and protested, relaying more drama to a town that in many ways, I was set to learn in the coming years, wants to be… is just a regular town.