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Wendy Reports: Meeting with Students
Arriving in Hares July 4 2005 |
News at PNVRC.net
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Dear Friends and Family,
We met with three of the Friends of Deir Ibzi'a scholarship recipients on Saturday night. It was so inspiring and hopeful to see bright young people who really want to learn. We had met one of the recipients, Saddam, at the first summer camp in 2002. At that time he had not done well enough on the Tawljihi to get into a university and so he was driving a taxi. (The Tawljihi is the high school exit exam that basically determines if the graduating high school student can go to college and what they may study. Every year, as the students await the results the air is filled with tension and expectation. When the results come in, there is either great celebration in the families whose children have done well, or great sadness.) Saddam was so inspired by the summer camp and its emphasis on education that he retook the exam and applied to the university. He has just finished his second year and has done very well, exceeding the minimum requirements to keep his scholarship from Friends of Deir Ibzi'a. During the whole meeting, he was smiling from ear to ear, bursting with pride and also very grateful and appreciative to us.
We left Deir Ibzi'a on Sunday morning to come to Hares where the IWPS house is located. We arrived in the early afternoon. After having some lunch we got a call from Nassfet, the coordinator of the Popular Committees Against the Wall who lives in Marda, a village not too far away. He said that some "clashes" were occurring. We went but by the time we got there it was over. Apparently the shebob, (young boys aged anywhere from 6 to 16) have been resisting the construction of the wall that is happening right now in their village by climbing up the hill to throw stones at the bulldozers. The security guards fire back with live ammunition.
We met a man, Monsiur, while we were at the home of Nassfet. He told us that in the past few weeks, almost half (186 out of 414) of his olive trees have been uprooted to clear the way for the wall construction (or destruction, depending on how you look at it). He asked us if we wanted to see it. So we went there with him. We saw the gash in the land and the olive tree corpses. He also pointed out that some of the trees were replanted below the site and he didn't know who did that. However, on the way down when he lost his balance and grabbed a branch of one of the "replanted" trees, he looked at it quizzically. He then shook it very hard. Then he looked carefully at the base. He looked up at us and cried, "These trees are not replanted. They are the old trees. They've cut off the branches and painted the trunk just to make it look as if they were trying to save some of the uprooted trees." We surmised that the Israelis were just trying to maintain the fiction that they are trying to minimize the hardship on the Palestinians. But they killed more trees to maintain the myth.
Love,
Wendy
