I moved this morning from the conference hotel on Ramallah’s northeast outskirts to an apartment a short walk from the center of the city. It’s a block from Ramallah CIty Park and the hotel where I stayed during my first visit to Ramallah four years ago with a delegation from FFIPP, Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. This is a little closer to downtown’s Al Manarah Square than the hotel I stayed in two years ago, with a more crowded urban walk along the way.
The apartment building looks more institutional than pleasant. I’m on the second of three floors, which meant lugging my luggage up two flights of stairs. I’ll be glad not to have to move all my stuff for the next three weeks. This street must have a name but I don’t see a street sign at either corner and it’s not on my map. Maybe I’ll find a street sign when I walk up the street into the Old City, though steet names in general here seem relatively unimportant.
My three rooms are furnished with everything I’ll need for a short stay, and after I buy some food I should be all set.
My Ramallah Apartment
The only real annoyance is the lack of Internet access, which I knew might happen, though I found an open wifi connection on the street a block or two away. If that becomes too weird to use regularly from the street, I’ll go everyday to a nearby cafe or hotel, and I’ve been told there’s a good library where I can work and get online. On the other hand, the apartment has a TV with satellite channels, and right now I have the BBC playing in the background. Most of the channels are in Arabic from a wide range of countries, and I’ve already noticed I can pick up more words than last time I was here.
My landlady is helpful and talkative. Fortunately her English is pretty good. She and her family live on the next street, in a large, striking house with spacious rooms. She invited me inside yesterday when I came to see the apartment and again today when I came to pay, made me Turkish coffee both times (my choice rather than the ever-present Nescafe), and showed me around her house – nice tiles embedded in the floor, family photos, a needlepoint she did of Jesus.
Her family is Christian and she was born in Jordan. Her parents were refugees from Nazareth, where some of her relatives still own two hotels. Both yesterday and today she made a point of expressing dissatisfaction with the way things are going both here in Palestine between Fatah and Hamas and between Palestine and Israel. The family, she says, tries to stay out of political alliances, and she seems resigned to not much changing.
Today she asked if I’d been to Bethlehem, and when I said yes, she asked if I was Catholic. When I said Jewish, she said she has no problems with Jews, that she has many Israeli friends from before Ramallah was closed to Israelis. She told me about getting offers of help from Israeli friends during the first Iraq war, when her husband was out of the country.
She had her TV on during much of our conversation, and flipped channels, stopping at a story about Barack Obama. She asked why people want to kill him, did it have to do with Israel. When I said the people they arrested the other day were whites who don’t want a black president, she seemed surprised, saying “But there are a lot of blacks in America,” which she knew because she’s been to California and a couple of other places. I explained as best I could. She nodded.
At the end of coffee and talk, I paid her about what we think the right amount is. Rents are given in dollars, but payment in Israeli shekels, so the amount varies depending on the daily exchange rate. The rent is $350, which as of this morning was 1313 NIS (New Israeli Shekels, the currency here as well as in Israel). I paid extra for the container of cooking gas. If I want another gas container for heat I need to tell her, but so far I may see if I can avoid it. I’m also supposed to pay for electricity when I leave; I assume she has a meter of some kind. All in all, this apartment will probably cost under $400, which is what makes it possible to stay for more than just a few hotel-rate days.
In a little while I’ll head out and combine coffee with Internetting, and do some food shopping on my way back. Otherwise I am almost completely without plans for my time here, which is how I wanted it. Most people from the conference came with pretty specific agendas, often with various groups headed in different directions. I’m glad this time I’m less rushed, at least now that the conference is over, and I hope to generate some version of a familiar routine — long daily walks, which I haven’t been able to do as often as I’d like, wandering, working on my Arabic, writing, photographing. I’ll likely go out to Birzeit University, where I worked briefly two years ago, and I have some names of other people to get in touch with. I’ll also do a few short daytrips and overnights as things develop.
I do have two things in the works, so I’m not completely lacking an agenda. Three conference participants who work at a local psychosocial clinic (as I understand it), two of whom were at my presentation the other day, invited me to come by their office next week to hear more about their work and meet a few other people. I’m looking forward to it.
Also, a Boston-area therapist I met at the conference who’s going to Jayyous in a couple of days to stay with people she knows asked if I want to go see it. I said yes, if her contacts have room for me. I’d hoped to go there two years ago, partly because it was then the target of Jewish settlers encroaching on their land and partly because it’s near Qalqilya, a Palestinian city almost completely encircled by the Separation Wall; I took photos of the Israeli side of the wall four years ago from Kibbutz Nir Eliahu, and want to see how things look from the Palestinian side.
And that’s about it, for now.
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Sitting in the park….
