End of the Week
It’s Thursday night, the end of my second full academic week here at Ben Gurion University. I hope next week slows down some! There isn’t anything I’ve done this week I would have liked to miss, but I do wish everything would come at a more leisurely pace.
And my ride to Jerusalem tomorrow comes by at 6:50 AM, so I’m going to keep this short.
Tomorrow, as I understand it, there’s a day-long series of interactions and touring for a group of teachers. I’m staying in an Old City hospice Friday and Saturday night — my first stay within the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. On Sunday I’ll be speaking with a class at Al Quds University in Abu Dis (East Jerusalem). More about all that when I get back.
Yesterday I met with someone who has agreed to tutor me in Arabic a couple of times a week. What stands out for me in our initial conversation, during which we mostly talked about how to proceed starting next week, was that, when the tutor gave me his university email address, he remarked that, since he lives in an unrecognized Bedouin village, he can’t email from home because they have no electricity. Just one more reminder of a situation that strikes me, as an outsider unaccustomed to what passes here for normality, as utterly ridiculous on its face. It’s also an indication of the difficulties Bedouin students must overcome in order to make their way through school and into professional careers.
Last night I went with a friend who went to sing folk songs for the members of Kfar Rafael, a village community for developmentally disabled adults who live in family settings with staff members. This is part of a network of such communities, mostly in Europe, and apparently also in the States, but I’ve never heard of them before. The level of community, the level of crafts the members made to sell in the community store, and the general respect with which the staff seemed to treat the members, seemed to me a quantum leap above my own (admittedly limited) impression of sheltered workshops back home.
This morning I was a guest speaker in a class called “Basic Concepts in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,” a course about which I know almost nothing. The professor came last week to mhy colloquium talk on critical psychology, and asked me to talk to her graduate students about how and why therapists might expand their gaze a bit. The students were very sharp, asked good questions, and we quickly ran out of time. Some of them seemed interested in pursuing the conversation over the next four weeks that I’ll be here.
This afternoon was my Psychology, Law, and Justice class, with two guests I met in Ramallah last month who were connected with Birzeit University’s Law and Society Department, where I’ll be returning next month. I think it was a good discussion overall, although the course’s multi-pronged approach sometimes makes it hard to focus in on any one topic in much depth.
And tonight, once again, my useful but very long 3 and a half hour Hebrew class. I wondered if the two traditionally dressed Muslim students also live in an unrecognized village, but I didn’t ask them.
Time to get to sleep. Tomorrow, Jerusalem and thereabouts.
