Jerusalem Light Festival

The past few posts have been very heavy on the words and light on the pictures. So I thought I would balance that out with some pictures. A week or so before I left Jerusalem, I went to the final day of the Jerusalem Light Festival with one of my friends, Carli, and my coworker, Rakheli. Due to the fact that there were massive amounts of people stuffed into the Old City, I was exhausted, it was a warm night, and I had just visited the Jenin refugee camp earlier that day (plus a 4+ hour round trip in non-airconditioned shared bus-van-taxi things), it was not exactly the best experience for me. But I won't ruin the pictures for you. Aren't they beautiful?

Temperature Extremes

I'm back in Utah now, and it's been hot. Really hot. The fact that my recently-purchased car doesn't have working a/c only adds to the misery.

And every day, I think to myself, "I'm so glad that I'm not in the Middle East anymore!"

When I lived in Jordan, it was HOT. I slept with the fan on full blast pointed at my face all night, and the lack of air conditioning everywhere made things miserable. 

When I lived in Taiwan, it was HOT in the summer. I was riding my bike several hours a day and sitting in hot houses and dripping sweat like there was no tomorrow. But I always had an air conditioning unit in my room, which was a lifesaver. In the winter, it was COLD. The only heaters we had were small non-blowing space heaters, and everything was made of tile. And everything was WET all the time. It rained all the time, so my shoes, my clothes, my hair, my body, my floor--everything was just wet and cold.

Because of my two prior experiences abroad, I thought I would be fine in a non-insulated, non-heated/air conditioned apartment in the West Bank.

But I thought wrong.

I was shocked at the temperature extremes I experienced this past year. Remember my apartment? The small thing with 15-foot high ceilings, no insulation, and a tile floor? The first night I moved in, I looked at the bedspread on the bed and thought, "I'd rather not touch that until I wash it." Plus, I never ever sleep under the covers, Often in the winters in Utah I open my window at night because I get too hot with my blanket on (because of the heaters).

So I laid a sheet down and laid on top of the heavy covers. Finally, about 2:30 am and after waking up at least every 30 minutes shivering, I thought to myself, "I am really going to die. There is no way I am making it through the night. They will have to drag my frozen body away when they find it in a few days, because I am freezing to death." I finally realized that I could put an end to all this suffering and sleep under the covers. It was such a novel idea to me that I hadn't even thought about it before. 

But that's how cold it was. Remember the distance from my couch to the stove?

During the winter I had a small, non-blowing space heater (the kind that gives you second-degree burns on your left leg as your right leg still has ice encrusted to it) placed next to my legs as I sat on the couch. And it was so cold that most nights I didn't want to leave the heater and walk over to the stove because my jean-clad legs would freeze on the way there. Each night I boiled water for my hot water bottle. I would walk over to the sink, fill up the pot, put it on the stove, and walk (run) back over to the heater. When the water started boiling, I would pour it in my hot water bottle and run it to my bed (to warm it up) and then run back to the heater. And that was about all the time I spent away from the heater until I went to bed. 

It was so cold that some mornings I woke up with burns on my arm from the rubber hot water bottle. And I had still been freezing during the night (even sleeping under the heavy covers!!).

My sister, standing by the gas stove trying to get warm after the electricity went out

My one consolation was that since my apartment was 10 degrees colder than the outside air (more when it rained) in the winter, it HAD to be cool in the summer.

Good thing I didn't know the truth, or I might not have survived the winter. After the customary 3 weeks in March of pleasant weather, where everything turns green and blooms and it looks like a beautiful country, the weather started getting HOT. And I found out about an unhappy reality: my apartment was 10 degrees hotter than the outside air in the summer (more when the sun was shining).

Although most Arab homes and apartments are built without air conditioning (at least in the West Bank and Jordan--electricity is way too expensive and Bedouin are used to living in tents anyway, right?), they usually put the windows in a way that creates an air tunnel (to air your house out and allow a breeze to blow through). Not so with my apartment. The three windows were placed in three different rooms with little opportunity for air flow.

It was so hot that I removed everything but a thin sheet from my mattress so that my body didn't have to come into contact with more fabric than necessary. It was so hot that I would sit on my couch with the fan pointed straight at me and would rarely leave, even to walk over to the fridge to get something to eat, because I would start dripping sweat as soon as I walked away from the fan. 

It was so hot that I would wake up several times a night, go to the sink, and dump cold water all over my body to try and cool off. Sometimes I just cried because I was so hot. And the tears were hot, too. It was so hot that one day I scraped all the ice out of my freezer and rubbed it all over my body. And then went and sat by the fan.

I think you get my point. It was SO COLD in the winter and SO HOT in the summer. Thank goodness my car doesn't have a/c so I don't miss the heat too much...

And then they gave me a key

I'm such a workaholic it's pathetic. The thought of spending a year without work was just too much for me to handle, so I decided to get an unpaid internship in Jerusalem. Because even without making any money, a year with a job was much better than a year without a job, in my opinion.

After arriving at Hebrew University, I realized that I could get an "internship"--unpaid, of course (I like to refer to it as "free labor," but others call it an "internship") and it would satisfy my need for having a job to keep me busy. I was incredibly lucky to land an internship with the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, or ICCI.

ICCI works with Christians, Jews, and Muslims to, according to their mission statement, "harness the teachings and values of the three monotheistic religions and transform them into a source of reconciliation and co-existence." And what they do is awesome. They have year-long dialogue groups with teenagers and college students, they have women's groups, they sponsor lectures and tours, and a lot of other stuff that I just don't know about.

My job was to interview participants from the college-age and teenage dialogue groups from 2010. This was ideal for me because I got to talk to Israelis and Palestinians from lots of different backgrounds about what they liked and didn't like about being in a dialogue group in a conflict-torn area. I learned a lot of things about myself, about dialogue groups, and about what I would do if I were to ever participate in sponsoring or working with a similar dialogue group. And I got to attend lots of awesome lectures for free, from the relationship between Catholics and Protestants at the height of the fighting in northern Ireland to Armenian Christians' presence in the Holy Land to a tour of the Christian Quarter of the Old City for Jews studying Christianity. It was an incredibly diverse learning experience, and I loved my coworkers to boot.

But the best part was the day they gave me a key. Being an unpaid intern, I didn't really need a key. A lot of the interviews that I did were out of the office, and why would I be at work when other employees were not? But on Tuesdays I went to work in the morning, and it was easiest to cross the checkpoint really early. Meaning I got to work about 7 am and sat in the lobby until about 10 am when my coworker came in and unlocked the door. I could still get an internet signal from the lobby, but there were no outlets within range of the internet, so when my computer was about to die I had to go to another floor to plug it in and let it recharge so I could go back down and use the internet. And it was often freezing in the lobby, especially on days when it was raining and I was already wet.

The coworker who saved me from the lobby each morning. No, this is not our office.

One day my boss and I were the last two people in the office. As he was leaving, he said, "You have a key, right?" Well, actually, no I didn't, and I thought this was my cue to leave. "Oh, you don't have a key? I just happened to bring two today. Just lock up when you leave."

All of a sudden a whole new world of freedom was opened up to me. On days when I needed to be in Jerusalem, I suddenly had a place I could go that had internet, plugs, and airconditioning. I started going to the office all the time. I finally had to tell my boss, "Just so you know, I'm not a super over-achieving intern. I'm just doing my homework here because it's a lot closer than the university." And most days I was in so early in the morning that I had the office to myself anyway.

One day, I realized that in order to have real freedom I needed a key to the office and a key to the building (which had several offices). It was a Friday afternoon and my computer was dead (my computer cord stopped working) so I went in to send some emails and get some work done. I got in about 3 and was excited to have three or four hours to work on transcribing some of these interviews I had conducted and writing the report before I came back to the States. And I knew no one would be in the office because, well, it was Friday and people don't work on Fridays in Jerusalem. About 4 I left my office to walk down to the basement to make sure the door to the parking area was still open. I knew they locked the building, but I thought that surely they would leave the door to the parking lot open (and I could jump a fence to get out if they locked the gates).

Unfortunately, I was very wrong. It was closed and locked. I ran upstairs to check the main door. Still open. Phew. I went back up to my office and knocked on the door of the yoga studio next door to ask them when they lock the building. "Probably in about 2 minutes," they said. "Go now or you will be locked in."

So I went back downstairs. Locked. The door was locked. Thankfully I knew that the yoga ladies probably weren't going to stay there all night and so had to have keys, so I went back up and found one who was leaving to let me out. Thankfully it was the last week of my time in Jerusalem, so I didn't have to be too frustrated. But coming back to a place where buildings stay open until midnight on Saturday nights (and on Fridays!!!) was the only thing that saved me from being too frustrated that day.\

Anyway, the point is, the internship was awesome. And the key and the office? Even more awesome.

Oh, and I've decided that if I ever go and live in another country again, I'm going to do it with a paying job this time. I'm tired of all this free labor! Just what, exactly, did I go to college for if I made less after graduating than before?