i can't believe its only been a day since the last time i wrote (part 1)

so much has happened, i have decided to break this up into two sections, so that you won't get bored reading half-way through. but stick with it! please. because exciting things have happened in the past two days. so on sunday night i stayed in the palm hostel in east jerusalem. i met mohammed (not his real name, for safety), a man who has been involved with X organization for a long time. beautiful man. when i met him he had a shirt on that was hilarious - it simply said fuck bush, in really big letters. on the back, in smaller letters and in a list, it said fuck exxon mobile, fuck walmart, fuck the army, fuck nestle, fuck ___ evil corporation. i should have taken a picture. but i am not worried, he will probably be wearing it the next time i see him. immediately he gave me free tea and coffee, and the hostel offered free dinner of eggplant and rice. yummy. mohammed has been disabled for five years because of a stroke that has left most of his entire right side partially paralyzed. he had the option of recieving treatment in jordan, but refused to stay there because he said he needed to be close to the people and the movement.

then i went to my room, where i was not sure who i would be sleeping with in the dorm. turns out to be great folks. a young kid, jeff, from chicago, just turned 18 and it has been his activist's life dream to be here. he has been involved in all sorts of badass organizing in chicago for years. inspiring. he is here to go to birzeit university in ramallah to learn arabic. smart fucking kid. then i met the other two people, claudia and sebastian from vienna, austria. the conversation started slow, and suspicious, as most do here, but soon we found that we shared so much in common we all stayed up until 2 in the morning with wonderful conversation. the two austrians had been in hebron for a month in the tel rumeida area with ISM. a horrible situation, in hebron there are settlements actually inside the city, and the settlers engage in barbaric humiliation and violence against the palestinian occupants. settler children, under the age of being legally punished, are often the most violent. jeff told me he had rocks thrown at him and the women he was escorting by a group of 5 year olds. it is so sad to see the education that these children recieve, filled with hate from the beginning. but the international presence has been considered effective - the violence has decreased recently relative to the last 3 years. http://www.telrumeidaproject.org/ is a good website that talks about tel rumeida specifically.

so that night was great, it has been a long time that i have been in a room where i feel so comfortably politically with everyone that no explanation is necessary for any views, and we could laugh about a lot of things. in fact, i laughed more last night than in the past years, i think.

note - i have been sleeping only one or two hours per night lately, maybe because of stress, maybe because of time difference, i dont know. but at least it is warm here.

the next morning i was planning to leave for bethlahem but i ate breakfast with hesham who said he was going to ramallah, so i decided to go with him. good decision, as it turns out. when we arrived to ramallah i accompanied hesham to the bank and he was meeting some friends of his, and low and behold, there is abdul kareem, an independent journalist (who writes for lots of international arab newspapers) who i met four years ago while working in tulkarm. amazing. we exchanged hugs and surprise, and then he told me that 45 minutes before he met another acupuncturist, this one from britain. i said i need to meet her, and he said yalla! so he took me to the place where she was staying, she is here for a month volunteering in other work, and it turns out she had been a professor of acupuncture for 15 years at the university of westminster in the UK. cool, right. but then when she was asking me about what i am doing here, she freaked out. she said that she had a similar idea two years ago after a conversation with a psychologist in hevron talking about the generational psychological impacts of the occupation. she went home and developed a two-day training curriculum for the NADA protocol to be used for PTSD, etc. you can imagine the exciting and rapid-fire conversation that followed. it turns out that she lost steam and couldn't get funding from her university, and the guy on the other end in hebron backed out, so she gave up on that but has continued to do solidarity work. she said that she was excited to work with me and get this going, i could have access all her material, and get support from her university. this is great news. we agreed that a first step would be to get the nada two-day training in before the ultimate 10-day course, which i think is a good idea. so what a fortuitious meeting with her. mary. what a great lady. she supports the project 100percent and she said its in my hands now, but that she will back it later if things get off the ground. i take that as great news. she also invited me to go to an international conference with her to help present the case. sounds cool. she would pay for it...

after that meeting i went to a guys house for the night. i read an article on a znet website and emailed the author telling him that his article really resonated with me. he responded by saying he works in ramallah with the palestine centre for peace and democracy. i asked if i could meet with him when in the area, and he invited me to stay in his house. i have been here two days recieving incredible hospitality. he has the most comprehensive website on the occupation, http://www.pcpd.org/ . it should be on the web in the next 25 hours. inshala! he has been great too.