Thursday, February 4th 2010

I woke up late. I brushed my teeth. I got dressed. I grabbed the little biscuits on my desk and I was out the front door by 645 AM. It was brisk and I was very sore. Last night, I went to my first basketball practice and my team got whooped 96-58. We will only have to walk for 10 minutes; down the narrow set of stairs by Project Hope and to the entrance of Camp No. 1. I was wearing a toque and my gray gloves and I was still feeling the crisp air whirlwind down my back. The school was huge and the classrooms were arranged more like jail cells. I had to wait until 720 before any of the kids arrived, but by 745 I was surrounded by a dozen Palestinian kids laughing at my support for Algeria at the African Cup of Nations. Most of them weren't interested in learning English -they were screaming, laughing and sitting on the desks. Looks like I will be doing more discipline than teaching on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Not exactly the way I had imagined my first class at Al-Ein Refugee Camp would go.

Dani, an American volunteer, and I walked back to the Sharia Najah Al-Qadim, the street where our apartments and the Project Hope offices were located. I spent the next two hours preparing for my afternoon classes, a new one at the Technology College and my usual Wednesday class with the girls at Nahl Al-Ojah, in Balata Camp. I hate preparing for my class. It is the most tedious and annoying part about teaching… although with 20 hours of classes a week, I don't really have a choice. For the first class, I prepared a game where students had to survey their colleagues with questions I had randomly written down (Have you ever eaten Nutella? Would you rather visit Paris or LA? Did you watch the Algerian/Egypt football match? Do you smoke?). I though it would be a good way to get to know one another and spark some conversation.

Prepared, I quickly grabbed some lunch with a friend and made my way to a "service" –a 2 schekel taxi that gets filled up and follows a designated route from the city centre It goes to Balata Camp, Askar Camp, Hisham Ajjawi College, Rafidia Street, and a bunch of other places I have never been to. My first English class with the University students was quite successful –the survey worked like a charm and the students, who were mostly young women, were very eager to learn. I'll have to think about new game to keep them interested. I took my next service directly to Balata. By this time, the clouds started rolling in and it looked like rain was imminent.

In Nablus, when it rains it is usually in spurts and torrential. Most kids and parents for that matter, think that rain is a fair excuse to miss class. On any rainy day I would say that 50 percent of classes are cancelled and the other 50 percent are attended by a few keen students. My two translators arrived just after I did. These two girls are studying French at Nablus's Al-Najah University and they use Project Hope to practice French and gain some credible experience with the language. We waited until 14h45 before the centre's director decided to send a boy with a list of names into the rainy streets. The boy returned with a promise that half a dozen girls would show up. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later we started our class going over salutations and reviewing numbers in French. Then I launched into a memorizing exercise for the various body parts. The girls are enthusiastic and very very competitive. Half the class boycotted one of my games because they claimed that the translators were slipping answer to the other team. This class is seemingly as much about diplomacy as it is about learning French.

Taking another service to the city centre, I stopped for coffee with a New Yorker who was teaching at one of the local private schools. We spoke at length about behaviour issues and tried to compare kids from refugee camps and kids from some of the richest families in Nablus –it seems that both groups are sometimes equally uncontrollable. It was now about 6 PM and I headed back to the Project Hope Office. Paradise Now was being screened for a small group of us. The movie was filmed in Nablus and it entertains some of the philosophical and pragmatic problems of living and fighting against the occupation. The room in which the film was being screened was freezing. There is rarely central heating in Palestinian homes. During the film, I shivered wearing my toque, gloves and an extra sweater below my jacket.

After the film, we were fed chakchouka…I think… I am confusing the names of a dozen different Palestinian dishes, so I'll make sure to upload a picture tomorrow morning. In any case, it was delicious. After our improvised Arab dance party, I walked the 10 metres back to the apartment, flipped on the space heater in my room, set my alarm clock for 6 AM, and slept like a baby.

The next day, rain turned into hail, all of my classes were cancelled, and we had no power for an hour or two.