A few days ago I went to Ramallah again to train the new batch of volunteers. Since Aysenur was murdered, the number of people wanting to work with this organization has been at an all-time high. When I was here last, we had just enough people to cover Masafer Yatta, but now we have expanded to the Jordan Valley, Al-Khalil, Tulkarem, and Qusra. Hopefully we can make our presence in these locations sustainable.
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I took the new volunteers wanting to work in Masafer Yatta south in a serveece bus. Usually it takes two serveeces and two taxis to get back to the central guesthouse, but we found a man willing to drive us the entire way. Qalandia is the major IOF checkpoint we pass through on our way south, since Palestinians have to have a special permit to enter into Al-Quds/Jerusalem. It was unclear whether our driver did not have a permit, if the checkpoint was closed, or whether he wanted to avoid the extremely bad Friday traffic, but we ended up going very off-road for a portion of the journey. We weren’t the only vehicles either; the car in front of us got stuck trying to go over an especially steep sandy hill and the men had to get out and put rocks under the tires and push the back bumper to get it free. It took us two tries to get over the ridge and in the process the bottom of the bus scraped on a boulder and a chunk of metal fell off.
We raced down the other side since it was exposed, and we definitely were not supposed to be in that area. I sent a prayer to the universe that we we would make it back to the main road before we were caught and before we lost any more of the vehicle to the terrain, and sure enough we did. Palestinians are nothing if not innovative and resourceful. We were home in record time.
The next morning, which I’m now realizing was this morning (time moves so strangely here), was a Zionist half marathon where a few hundred settlers ran through several nearby Palestinian villages. We stationed people in homes along the route and hoped that the settlers would be too tired to be violent. It was scary to see the fleet of charter buses passing by on their way to the start of the race in Ancient Susya, which is the illegal settlement built in 1983 beside the actual ancient Palestinian village called Susiya, but thankfully the event was uneventful and nobody got hurt.
It is now night and I am on “rapid response,” which means I get to stay in the guesthouse with the field phone and be on-call if there is an emergency anywhere. My boots and bag are beside my bed, but I plan on trying to get some sleep soon. Sleep is a luxury here and I try to take it whenever I can get.
