“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.” - Banksy

One of my favorite Banksy paintings

We went to Jerusalem and Bethlehem last weekend, so we saw all of Banksy's graffiti on and around the West Bank barrier wall. The experience of seeing all of the resistance art was incredibly moving, and has definitely been one of the starkest and yet most inspiring things I've seen since I've been here.

A beautiful mural of an olive tree breaking
down the wall

Jerusalem included a trip to the US consulate to talk about the possibility of foreign service work, a tour of the old city, a view of al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock from a distance (though not from inside because it was Friday so people were praying inside), as well as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which is  the burial site for Jesus and the Wailing Wall. It was so interesting to see a city so incredibly steeped in religious history. One of the biggest things about just entering Jerusalem is that you have to enter through one of two checkpoints. One, Calendia checkpoint, is a walking checkpoint, which is usually a faster way to get through into Jerusalem. Because we went on a Friday though, and so many people wanted to go to al Aqsa to pray, we took a bus to the drive through checkpoint in order to enter the city, an option available to us as non-Palestinians and to Palestinians who have managed to obtain permits to go into Israel proper, but not without IDF soldiers boarding the bus to check permits or passports first.

Another great Banksy painting

After spending the night in a hostel in Jerusalem, we took a bus back to the checkpoint and went through a huge maze of a walking checkpoint into Bethlehem. In fact, we got lost and confused about which way to go to the point that the IDF soldiers manning the checkpoints were laughing at us. The main checkpoint into Bethlehem walks you along the West Bank barrier wall, giving us our first up close experience with it. Once inside the city, we met up with a cab driver who took us around to each of the Banksy paintings, various other very powerful street art pieces, to holy sites such as the birthplace of Jesus (The Church of Nativity) and the shepherd's field, identified since ancient times as where the shepherds saw the star of nativity, to souvenir shops run by his friends where we bartered deals, and even to his home where we met his family and were offered a delicious and hot meal cooked by his wife. Finally, we ended up at a Banksy shop in Bethlehem where we bought a few posters of our favorite pieces of art, and got the opportunity add our two cents and graffiti the wall ourselves. It was quite an experience, to say the least. The religious significance of the place takes a backseat when you see a giant wall erected through a city that should be considered holy. It's hard for anything to seem too holy when it's surrounded by something so wrong.

Seeing so much hope and so many words of love and peace and acceptance and resistance to oppression painted on such a symbol of segregation was incredibly powerful. My favorite was just a simple sentence, written in both Arabic and English-- "You are welcome in Palestine". It highlighted so many of the misconceptions Americans have about Palestinians, and with one sentence, was a very obvious extension of friendship.

Another Banksy painting- protester
throwing flowers

"You are welcome in Palestine"

I was also sick all through last weekend, and by the time we were heading home from Bethlehem, I no longer had a voice at all. We caught a public taxi home, but as the one with the most Arabic in our little group, I was useless to us or our driver as we sought to explain where we were going, where we were from and why we were living in Nablus. I kept trying to squeak out answers, but the cab driver just kept laughing and saying he couldn't understand a word I was saying. We did make it home though, and I was able to help my group through our own version of Arabic telephone, in which I squeaked a sentence to the person next to me, who repeated the sentence to the person sitting in front of her, who repeated it to the cab driver.

The narrow alleyways of Balata

On Sunday, we headed for a long awaited tour of Balata, the biggest refugee camp in Palestine. I think seeing the living conditions where our kids come from, especially when we see them every day in our center, was a really eye opening experience. The camp is one square kilometer, the same size it was when the UN rented the land right after the 1948 war, despite the fact that families have continued to grow and be raised within that space. Because of that, buildings have been erected so close to one another that in some areas it is hard to walk through. Since people can't move out of the one square kilometer allotted to them by the UN,   people continue to build upward rather than outward, meaning that buildings which were never structurally built to handle several floors are now several stories tall, and have been built out to the point that they touch with the buildings next to them. It is so impossible to move furniture through the alleyways of the camp that people are forced to demolish walls and pass their furniture through the walls of their neighbors and then rebuild, adding to the lack of structural support in the buildings in the camps.

Us adding our two cents to the wall-- "No one can
makeyou feel inferior without
your consent" - Eleanor Roosevelt

The thing that has been most sobering and most frustrating to me since arriving here has been the fact that even many Palestinians seem to see themselves as a symbol rather than as individuals, and people are viewed as part of a political strategy or endgame. The lack of action toward solving the refugee issue is based on a desire to not solve Israel's problem for them, which makes sense to me, but in the meantime people are left living in abject poverty and extremely unhealthy conditions.I get that the personal is political, but to me, people should always come first, not policies.

"Now that I have seen, I am responsible"