15/10/09
Al Farah Refugee Camp to Nablus
The Qualquilya boys, are interspersed with our group, on the gritty roads we now encounter. The roads have been far better than I had expected, or remembered. International guilt money reaches the Palestinian Authority for such things. It's the big questions that remain unanswered, like why can't we have a state or when will this illegal occupation end?
The lads are strictly ruled by their captain ‘the best bodybuilder in the area’ Yousef. He barks orders at them, not afraid to shove them into line with his tree trunk arms when necessary. The boys clearly respect and like him. Yousef is in his thirties and almost as squat as he is tall. Alex has become their team mascot as well as a surrogate little sister to them all. Her ability to cycle at their pace, and on most days, as far they can, drawing admiring chuckles. If she never gets hugged and squeezed again in her life, she will still have had her quota.
The lads are brimming with teenage energy. They hold hands with one another, stroll with arms about one another's shoulders, with a lack of self consciousness. their is so little time to chat to them and the language barrier is a problem. They are dying to talk to us, flap their hands at me, bite their lips, blurt out bursts of Arabic, but the best we can secure from one another is that I have two children and that they are all under twenty years old. Despite their hard lives they utterly lack the angst of their western peers. This surely has a lot to do with the absence of alcohol in their society. This part of Palestine is an alcohol free zone. Areas with Christian communities and some kind of tourism trade, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nazareth, are where alcohol and (I hear) Hashish cross the border freely. But in these rural areas lads in their late teens have energy to burn, free from hangovers. The entire team are, in short, adorable. Despite this some of our more 'serious' cyclists feel their own cycling agenda has somehow been interfered with. Very different road rules exist here, for example you do NOT speed down hills no matter how hard this makes the inevitable vertical climb up the next one. This is to save injury as loose grit and chunks of stone littering the roads can lead to nasty injuries at speed.
I am in the van once again, the first, stretch of vertical tarmac doing for me before the camp is even out of sight. At the tiny town of Wadu Al Baden, an elderly man rushes over as the group gulp down water and look, unsuccessfully for shade.
‘Thank you for coming’ he says handing out free canned drinks. Vans go past beeping and local workers yell ‘welcome to our country’ at our two wheeled convoy.
Around a bend in the sweeping, endlessly climbing route, suddenly water is pouring from everywhere at once. A series of stalls are attached to a moss grown mountain cliff. From sandy verges we have entered a hillside oasis, we are in Valley Al Badan. A village of natural springs that gush randomly from holes in the mountainside. Between cascades, basket stalls dominate the kerbside. The small bend, which is also the towns main street, is full of locals, chatting, eating ice creams, enjoying their lunchtime. The arrival of twenty local lads and almost as many foreigners on bikes doesn’t seem to throw them in the slightest. They are mutely friendly, curious and then it happens. Inevitably, one of the qualquilya boys spots a drum hanging with others from the farthest stall, unhooks it without a thought and starts to pass his forefinger and thumb over its skin.
‘Oorah!’ goes the cry. The beat is mesmeric, a treat that intensifies the lush green branches, reminding us where we are and who we are with, a religious region, under Occupation, with a rich heritage, and an inspirational younger generation. So, the boys begin to dance, hips twisting this way and that, arms twirling. A big circle forms, with people going in two at a time. Alex’s hand is grabbed in the melee, she is shy and tries to resist but soon she and I and the wonderful elder statewoman of far flung travel, Janet, are doing the Arabic jive to claps and cheers. It’s so much fun, another drum is taken down, the oweners don’t seem to mind in the least, and the drumbeat swells, the laughter builds, we are having such a good time, the bikes are forgotten. One of the Mohammed’s (there are four), gives the old Bedoin style yodel, flicking his tongue from side to side against his lips. Others join in, a joyous, aromatic sound is growing, growing.Suddenly, it’s over, the captain of the team has shouted ‘yulla’ and the boys hang up their drums. It’s time to head off.
A small way on, roadworks make it too dusty to be wise to continue, so students and a professor from Al Najah university come to take our bikes and most of the cyclists past the problem. Unknown to me, Alex has twice come off her bike behind the van and is being walked up the final terrible slope. She is helped by our guide from the Sirraj centre, Rafaa and a fellow cyclist from Canada, Methear. The sun is pounding down, as the lads pull in at last, then at last Alex appears and I rush over to take her bike and help her. She bites her lip and shakes her head insisting on wheeling it right up to the van. She really is incredible.
Alex and I part climb and are part hauled onto the open backed van with the Q boys, Martin, Kevin, Simon and Anne. Two of the boys are standing up dancing about, shouts begin at first ‘Taqbir’ ‘Allah Akbhar’ then ‘Free Free Palestine, Free Free Palestine..’ Their energy is entirely infectious, Simon is grinning from ear to ear; ‘to be here..’ he motions to the olive dotted hills, ‘with young Palestinians singing about their freedom, I mean life just does not get better’n this does it?
NABLUS
October is olive picking season around Nablus and across Palestine. A timeless tradition, now obstructed, made ever more dangerous, by the presence of the Jewish extremists, known as ‘settlers.’ Despite Obama's 'Peace' prize the number of these violent psychopaths and economic migrants, (happy to live on stolen land and to protect it with guns) continue to swell.
The loathing these religious zealots have for the indigenous Palestinians knows no bounds. There are 40 settlements around Nablus alone. The settlers here are known for their violence. Attacks on Palestinian villagers are common, aided and abetted by the Jewish extremists, very own private army, aka; the IDF. Protected also by a government that no longer even bothers to deny its allegiance to their project of creating a ‘greater Israel’. This project has never recognised the so called “Oslo’ agreement, nor the laughable 'green line' whose border through historic Palestine was supposed to allow the Arab population who remained a generous 22 per cent of their own land. The Apartheid wall has already stolen half of that land too. But more of that later.
This year hundreds of dunums of agricultural land, of olive groves, the main produce here, have been razed to the ground in a series of settler arson attacks. The farmers whose trees remained unharmed must plead their case for harvesting access to their own lands with the Israeli authorities. Should ‘co ordination’ be given for this, the permits to do so allow the men a mere two to three days to harvest their own crops. At the end of these visas they are once again denied access to their agricultural land. Too little time, postponement until the crops are past their best. And local farmers fail to make the money from their crops that they rely on to feed their families.
I re join the cyclists for the (downhill) slope into Nablus, and the steep final climb to Al Najar universities new campus. I was here three years ago, when times were bad, incursions, nightly, right into the old town, and a curfew in place. 56 students have been killed by the IDF. Some in the campus dorms.
But things are a bit better this time. Despite the fact that there are more than one hundred checkpoints surrounding Nablus and its villages, in the past five months, students report that these have been easier to cross. I meet ‘Noor’ and her friends, a twenty one year old English student. She reports that this morning has been bad for her student colleagues.Noor, is not in a hijab, there is no dress policy nor religious code of conduct here, jeans, flowing hair, ipods and iphones, the stuff of modern universities worldwide are clearly in evidence. What is different from say Uk campus’s is the lack of a ‘bar’ and the smiling, happpy, connectedness of the students to eachother, their teachers and now to us, strangers who are greeted with handshakes and in Alex’s case sweets and fizzy drinks, hugs and warm coos of ‘ soo cuutte’ as she is carried along on the shoulders of a Palestinian cyclist.
Dozens of whom were kept waiting for more than an hour at the main Nablus checkpoint without a reason, as soldiers ‘checked’ their ID.
‘They do this so we miss our lectures. To make us fall behind, to stop us succeeding.’ she says, over hot chai with a professor from the faculty.
‘But this is neverthless a very good year’ he says ‘no one has been killed in Nablus (by the occupying forces)’.
Back in the canteen, the professor is stunned to learn that several Nablus residents have as it turns out been killed by the IDF over the previous year. The students who have joined us say one name and search for another of a civilian who was shot at a checkpoint, whose name is already forgotten. The professor is visibly shocked.
‘Here in Nablus we used to care when someone was killed, remember their name, talk about it, hear it always on the news. Now...’ he sighs ‘now we are so used to it, we are immune..’
Alex is called over to sit with her fans from Qualquilya who call her ‘our little hero’ and hang on to her every word despite not speaking English. They talk over and over again about how she has kept up with them mile on mile, pace for pace. In fact coming into Nablus, she refused yet again to come into the van to rest and to have some shade when I called her to do so. Rafaa our guide from the Sirraj centre told me it was too dangerous for her to be on the roads. The fact that three of the boys had almost been knocked off their bikes in the space of five minutes told me all I needed to know on that score. In a motherly wave of protectiveness I got our van driver to pull over slightly ahead of Alex at the next lights, I dived towards the roadside grabbed Alex round the waist, bundling her inside while Rafaa grabbed her bike and put it on top of the van.
Alex was stunned into silence a moment then said
‘Mum that felt like I was being kidnapped’ shaking her head angrily at my over protective 'silliness'.
Al Najar has a highly renowned, brand new fine art department. Here students have their own shop, as swanky as the one at Tate Modern, where the best of their work is put on sale. Ceramics of all shapes, colours and sizes are on display, Tables with mosaic tops, sit beneath oil paintings. My favourite is a work of thick brush strokes, a vast market scene, perhaps from East Jerusalem.
Music students present a traditional series of songs to our combined European/Qualquilya group. As a young man's hauntingly melodious voice rolls across the room, the lads clap and hail their respect. Once the tabla gets going they can't help themselves, in the corner (and to the fury of body builder Yusef, their trainer) dancing begins in earnest. Jumping around from leg to leg, laughing, scraping chairs back, two sides of Palestinian youth have forgotten their visitors altogether. The young man who leads the musicians shouts over to his poorer peers from the rural regions. 'You want this or this?' I guess he says. Their is no judgement from one side of the jubilant energy or the other, they are all brothers, they are all young, they are all Palestinian.
And they love eachother. Checkpoints are forgotten. Palestine unites in music.
We tour the Old City of Nablus in a rush as dusk closes in. A bustling souk, cloaked in aromatic scents, turkish coffee with cardamom. Clothes hanging overhead in brown, red and green. Men and young boys wheel wooden carts through the narrow streets transporting their produce in an area where cars do not travel. Some of these carts have coffee or tea urns on them, a man in a fez shouts' Welcome, chai?' Alex, for the first time is showing real tiredness. The pace of the cycle is hard for us both and Alex loves to be at the front. She starts to cry, one of the high points of the trip, a real, ancient, Palestinian market, no fun at all when her legs need rest and her little head, peace and quiet. We head quickly back to the hotel which is minutes from the souk, the call to prayer as aromatic as the cardamom in the air. Local women, carrying their own babies look at Alex with concern, clearly wishing to scoop up the overtired little girl and cover her in kisses.
A local man with white hair, asks if I am Swedish, then walks alongside us. When I sniff the air beside a coffee grinding shop, he darts in and buys me a bag to take home. Then he dives into an ancient archway under the city where the souk has been held for hundreds of years and hands me a small bar of olive oil soap.
'Thank you for coming to Palestine' he says, waving us off.
What he means is 'thank you for not forgetting Palestine.
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