Kim Priore

Well it’s mid-morning break time here at the “American School” in BJ.  Shan and I have spent the morning with some of Doug’s classes – his 11th graders are a trip, your typical boisterous group of teenage boys, which you know, I’ve never been too popular with but Shan was a big hit.  I talked about Haiti and she talked about her work in the inner city.  Since apparently they are fascinated with black people, so it’s great that I could bring them a resident expert. 

Yesterday we had a tour of Bethlehem, organized by one of Doug’s students, Marwan.  And no I’m not at all bothered that that was the name of the terrorist on 24 a couple seasons ago.  Marwan’s awesome though – he set up a tour with our new friend Walid, who we think might be the mayor of Bethlehem, because he knows so many people.  So he took us to the Shepherd’s Field, the Church of the Nativity, and the Old City of Bethlehem.  He may be the world’s only living Catholic Muslim, because if I could boil the entire tour down to one salient point it would be this: the perpetual virginity of Mary.  Walid feels very strongly on this point.  Never any relations between her and St. Joseph.  No brothers for Jesus.  Always a virgin.  He’s Muslim, but he went to a school run by Fransciscans, and we really want to find them and let them know they did a bang-up job with him because the training really stuck.  And he punctuates every sentence with, “You understand?  You understand my meaning?” So that has become our new favorite catch phrase.  We were on the tour with one other American, this SUPER annoying old guy who was slightly crazy, but we tried our best to ignore him.  The tour wound up at Marwan’s family’s store, where they extended us Palestinian hospitality, which means your choice of a beverage.  Shan the coward who thinks she can take on the terrorists at Hebron opted for the tea, but yours truly was all, bring on the coffee.  And proceeded to have a cup of coffee that I could still feel in my esophagus like 8 hours later.  It was pretty awesome.  Marwan’s family offered us half off of anything in the store, because of our association with the school and Doug and everything, so that was nice, we got some souveniers. 

In the afternoon we visited Mandy’s class of adorable 4th graders and bestowed upon them the gift of their own personal white marker boards which Mandy had ordered, so they were really excited about that.  They demonstrated some of their English skills by practicing their contractions.  After school was out, Doug took us to see a few more sights in Bethlehem, including the old city gate and David’s wells.  OOH – I neglected to mention that our tour with Walid included the market and what is apparently the best falafel in town – made with onions in the middle of it.  mmmmmm falafel…..  Anyways then Doug ran some errands so I got to see where he gets his meat and fresh vegetables, and then this little store where he communicates with the shopkeeper in Spanish, because she doesn’t know English but knows Spanish, and he doesn’t know that much Arabic.  Pretty adorable.  It was in that store that I saw my favorite item spotted to date, which is some kind of GIANT liquor bottle in the shape of…are you ready for it…a machine gun.  If there was any way I could get that out of the country I would.  It’s the most fabulous thing I’ve ever seen.

This afternoon once we’re done warping young minds, we’re headed into Jerusalem for the first time – we’ve driven through it because that’s how you get in and out of the West Bank, but we haven’t done any of the sights yet.  So I think we’re going to start that this afternoon and then hopefully have dinner with Josh and Lauren.