And How Was Your Day, Dear?

A few days ago I wrote about things here threatening to become "ordinary." After yesterday, I'm thinkin' maybe not.

I went to Bethlehem to follow through on some plans I'd made there a few weeks ago. Then I'd gone to meet people at the Al Rowwad Cultural Center in Aida Camp in Bethlehem. I'd gone there to explore possibilities for some peds clinic work in the West Bank that the Director of the Center is involved in. During my previous visit there one of the volunteers at the Center told me about a boy she had met with severe lung disease and asked me to see him at a future time. I went yesterday to do that.

After benignly passing the checkpoint into Bethlehem (they don't seem to care who goes into the West Bank, just who goes out), I waited for my friend to pick me up. Mahmoud, a boy about 10 or so, struck up a conversation. He sells postcards at the checkpoint to help support his family. His father was killed 3 years ago.

With my new postcards in hand, my friend picked me up and we went to the Center where I watched a group of kids learning a dance. The cultural center teaches dance, art, photography, theater to children in Aida Camp. The programs are not specifically geared toward traumatized kids, but most are, so the creative activities there are doubly beneficial. Aida is one of three refugee camps in Bethlehem. I've written about the refugee camps in a previous blog - they are hard places. We don't really have an analogous situation in the west. Since we're not occupied and all.....

We went on to the home of the boy I was to see. "A" is 18 and has a congenital immune deficiency. Complications and consequences of that over the years have led to severe lung disease that now has caused secondary heart disease. He has become oxygen-dependent and bed-bound. We wanted to see whether it might be possible to make a program for him to use a portable respiratory device and have at least a few hours a day of mobility and some kind of pleasure in life.

A physical therapist went with us. His 16 year-old nephew was killed two weeks ago by soldiers. Soldiers entered the camp at night (it's always at night), broke into a home looking for weapons of mass destruction, took over the home and in the sequence of events the boy was shot. The reason for these incursions, which are very frequent and which you never hear about, are often about looking for "weapons." Odd, but they never seem to find any. People are frequently killed in these incursions. They're innocents who are in the vicinity and of course you never hear about them either.

When we entered the home, A's brother was tending to him. The brother, I'd guess about 20 or so, just got out of prison a week ago. Another weapons thing. Thousands of Palestinians are in prison. I have not yet met a Palestinian family that doesn't have, or had, a family member in prison. (These are of course actual, official prisons, as opposed to the usual conditions for many people here.)

A's condition is very, very serious. He won't live long. We talked about a physical therapy program that we hope will help a little, then we sat and talked with the family about how things are with them.

Driving back to the checkpoint to return to Jerusalem, we passed a celebration in the streets for another young man just released from prison.

I took the bus back to where I live. It was an Arab bus because I live in East Jerusalem. (There are separate bus systems). On the way, an Israeli man threw a rock that hit the bus and shook his fist at us. Glad it was just a rock. Alot of people here have alot of anger.

Checkpoints, young men in prison, mourning for slain family members, working the checkpoint selling postcards when you're a child, being sick where little is available to you........

That's how it is here alot of the time. Another day at the office