Teaching and Learning

I've been lazy about posting since I actually started teaching - working with children might be the most wonderful yet tiring experience I've yet had. My schedule isn't even that rigorous - two hours of organized class a day, then a few hours of visiting houses, playing English-language games and speaking with the children - and yet by the end of the day all I want to do is collapse into bed with my book and a cup of tea. It's cold at night now - my tiny space heater barely heats the room, I sleep in a sweatshirt under three blankets, and the cold linoleum floor startles me to consciousness in the morning. I fall asleep to the sound of wild dogs barking and wandering through the fields, and I wake up to 100 high-pitched voices boarding the bus to school at 7 am.

I'm learning that teaching is all about learning to accept criticism, especially the harsh, biting criticism of 8 year old children. If I thought I was comfortable with failure before, I was totally wrong - some days I leave class feeling like I should just pack my bags and go home, that the kids would be better off without me as their teacher. Other days though - the days when the kids come running from their houses asking what time class begins, the days when I sing Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes one hundred times over with a bunch of seven year olds, and they still want to sing it again, the days that end with me sitting on the floor in one of the houses, sipping tea and watching Barcelona kick Mallorca's butt with a group of 12 year old boys - those days I can't imagine being anywhere but here.

And then there is the ever-looming presence of occupation always creeping its way into the everyday lives of the people here. On most days, the people in Bethlehem's SOS village are able to carry on life without close incursion - they watch the violence elsewhere in Palestine on their televisions in the morning, then head to work or school or play, happy to be part of an international organization that has and will continue to withstand the destruction that is slowly eating away at Palestinian society. Yesterday, however, was not one of those days.

Government schools opened two weeks ago after having been on strike since the beginning of the school year. On the first day of school, you could almost smell the sense of relief in the air - everyone was happy that, at least for the short-term, life would continue normally for the students. Only two weeks later, a group of Israeli soldiers blocked off the main road passing by one of the schools, preventing buses from entering the premises to take the students home. A few (clearly not very thoughtful) students began throwing stones at the soldiers, in my estimation because of a mix of anger, frustration, desperation, and humor. Among those boys were three SOS kids - boys who grew up in the village where I live and now live in youth houses in downtown Bethlehem.

We didn't find out until later last night that one of the boys was shot. Fortunately, the bullet only grazed his stomach and arm, and a short operation has restored him (or will restore him) to perfect health relatively quickly. I just keep thinking that one inch in either direction and he could be dead, a more accurate shot by the soldier and he could be dead, any person - young, old, boy, girl - who picks up a stone and throws it in the wrong direction could be dead.

The world doesn't hear very much about these daily instances of physical violence - let alone the continuous structural violence that permeates every corner of life here. We read about the big events, like last week's massacre in Beit Hanoun. We read that an Israeli security team "inadvertently" killed 19 people in the Gaza town, mostly civilians, and that Palestinian military groups are threatening retaliation. We read that every country in the world except six agreed to publicly condemn the massacre, but no public condemnation ever happened because these six were able to prevent it. Perhaps if we read about these daily tragedies, we might not be so quick to pin the "terrorist" tag where we do.