Morning over the Old City
Once again I’m in the lobby of the Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family, checking my email before deciding which of my goals to try to accomplish first today — continue preparing for my talk tomorrow to students in the Human Rights Law Clinic at Al Quds University, or grab my camera and wander around the Old City.
As it was last night, the lobby is once again filled with laptop-bearing young people, but now I know most of they’re part of a Middle East Study Tour organized by a group of American Christian Colleges. This I learned from a young man at breakfast. (The hospice’s buffet, which comes with the room, as is common here, was typically extensive, though tilted more toward Austrian than Arabic. No hummus.) The students have been in Jerusalem only a few days, after two months in Cairo where they studies Arabic and other subjects.
Before breakfast I did grab my camera and headed for the hospice roof.
From the rooftop, benches make it easy to sit and look out at the signs of old and new.
It’s hard, though, to see the street four stories below.
For that I’ll have to get outside and walk around, as I did two years ago.
That’s what the students just did. Their professor gathered them together, introduced them to their tour guide and lecturer for the day, a students at a Palestinian university, he explained, whose scholarship was cut off because of the Israeli refusal to let funds flow into Hamas-led Palestine.
Now I’m alone in the lobby. In a couple of minutes it will be empty.