TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2004

Ramallah, last day

Our original remit was to visit schools and colleges in Ramallah and Nablus to try to arrange for contacts between them and similar institutions or people in Oxford; to find out about the Palestinian prisoners, especially the hunger strikers; to talk to NGOs who can offer up-to-date information here and facilitate out meetings.
We've done most of what we set out to do. Only one more meeting is left in Ramallah with a worker's rights office and we'll do that before leaving for Beit Lehem. Our days have been full of meetings with all sorts of people who have been welcoming and helpful. We have had 3 or 4 meetings every day and at each one, once the business is finished, the stories get told and each one is more harrowing than the last.
We have found almost without exception that what is on most people's minds right now is the fate of the prisoners, so precedence has been given to that rather than to the educational aspect. On the other hand, university teachers are more interested in the concept of imprisonment - the whole of Palestine being a prison for them now they are under Occupation
K is already in Nablus of course and has made contact with Al Najar and between us we have initiated the Oxford Ramallah Educational Exchange with Bir Zeit University. We hope this will be fruitful and involve both students and staff in all sorts of exhanges. This has in fact already begun with a link being made between the Deputy Librarian of the Philosophy Faculty Library in Oxford and the Head of Reader Services at Bir Zeit University. Information about electronic resources has already been exchanged. Today we also visited the local Education Authority and the Palestine Ministry of Education and have been given weighty information! Now we need to liaise with Oxfordshire Education Authority and local schools to encourage linking in various forms.
One thing we wanted to check was the content of text books used in Palestinian schools which reputedly incite racial hatred and we have found absolutely no evidence of this. The texts we have seen are along the lines of Jenny and Walid go fishing in the sea (by the way, although you can see the Mediterranean from a village a few miles away from here, no Palestinians we have spoken to have been allowed to see it except for the lucky few who hold Israeli passports or who have managed to get permits to leave the country. The vast majority of people we have met are not allowed to travel within their own country let alone go back to swim in the sea from land once theirs. The sea would be an hours' drive away from here without road blocks). The stories we have heard in school lessons are proud, wistful, but not full of hatred; for example they mention the Palestinian Airline and the airport in Gaza; swimming in the sea and so on. The main checkpoint from Al Kuds to Ramallah is right by the Jerusalem airport, by the way. No longer in use.
To go back to the sea, we spent some time yesterday with the Medical Relief Youth Club and are so impressed by what they do. They train 700 students of various ages and more women than men in computer skills, art and crafts, first aid, electronic technology and other things out of school hours, all run by volunteers. They go to a summer camp at Al Bira in a school on the outskirts of Ramallah. They hold screenings in the basement (and so I told them about Undercurrents and Indymedia). We sat and spoke by a table with a half-finished game of chess on it under a lemon tree in the back yard, bourgainvillea like a crimson waterfall over one wall and the melancholy muezzin mixed with noisy traffic in the background.