After spending four months studying nursing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I spent the months of June and July living in Beit Sahour,
Palestine. Beit Sahour is a beautiful town just down the road from
Bethlehem and home to the shepherd's fields where angels proclaimed the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago. There I spent two months volunteering at the local
Medical Center and studying Arabic at the
Bethlehem Bible College through the Palestine Summer Encounter (PSE). PSE is an internship that was created through a partnership between the Holy Land Trust and the Middle East Fellowship. The Middle East Fellowship is a non-profit
U.S. based group that aims to build bridges, understanding and partnership between the West and the
Middle East through service and learning programs. There are three overarching goals of the Holy Land Trust (HLT), a Palestinian organization, that form the basis for its programs. The organization seeks to support the Palestinian community in achieving political independence by ending
Israel’s Occupation of Palestine through nonviolent resistance. HLT hopes to build an independent
Palestine “founded on the principles of nonviolence, democracy, respect for human rights and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.” Finally, the group engages in advocacy work to promote international awareness of the Palestinian situation.
I had two roles this summer as a participant in the Palestine Summer Encounter: One, to be a medical assistant at the Beit Sahour Medical Clinic and two, to serve as an international witness to the situation of the Palestinian people. I lived with a beautiful Palestinian couple and their 10 month old daughter (with grandparents, nieces, cousins living right upstairs in the same building). My host Dad works in an olive wood shop carving small pieces to sell in the shops near the Church of the Nativity and in the Old City of Jerusalem, while my host mom is a 1-3rd grade teacher in Bethlehem. I was truly welcomed into the family and I could not be more thankful for the hospitality I received.
As a fourth year nursing student I was given the opportunity to assist in the emergency room of the local clinic, under Ibtisam, the head nurse. While each day I would take temperatures, blood pressures, give injections, monitor IV bags, and draw up lidocaine for yet another cut wound from an olive wood work shop, the medical tasks of my volunteer work are by far the least memorable and life-changing of my summer in the West Bank. I constantly struggled to improve my Arabic speaking abilities and to pick up more phrases to help me with my work at the clinic: sending patients on their way with a smile and “Salaamtek” (‘peace and safety with you’ or ‘get well soon’). Outside of clinic work, I took Debkah lessons (Palestinian traditional dance) and attended various family celebrations and weddings with my host family. On the weekends, I traveled with the other Palestine Summer Encounter participants to different cities and villages in the West Bank to meet with peace and advocacy organizations, both internationally based and Palestinian. We met with city leaders, religious leaders and civilians who spent their daily lives struggling to fight for their basic rights to life and liberty. We heard and witnessed the terrible hardship of life under occupation, even touring refugee camps in Nablus, a city that has been a hotbed of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I found quickly that Palestinian people love to tell their story and love nothing more than to share with someone new, an outsider, who can spread their story outside of the prison that they live in. Whether it was a doctor in the clinic or a shop keeper who insisted I sit with him and have tea, I became a sponge to absorb countless stories of hardship and frustration, of lost hope and hope regained. I somehow became so important to these people, a type of ambassador. Sometimes the weight was hard to bear, and I felt as though I was unworthy to be entrusted with such a message that needs to be relayed to the world.
The people of the West Bank live under the occupation of the state of Israel. It was perhaps most disturbing to find that they live without any recognized identity: a life without any true security, a life under constant stress. The people I encountered are uniquely Palestinian in custom, tradition, culture and language, and yet, to be Palestinian is not a recognized nationality: there is no country of Palestine. They are certainly not Israeli because a Palestinian cannot set foot beyond that great looming concrete wall that is continually being built around them, separating them from Israel proper. Not only does the wall effectively seal them off from Jerusalem, it has taken away acres and acres of farmland and has separated families and friends, even fathers from daughters. Nor can a Palestinian travel freely within “Palestinian” territory. There are constant checkpoints manned by Israeli soldiers set up even on Palestinian only roads, where they must get out of their cars and wait for their Israeli issued identity cards to be checked, meanwhile they are often harassed or turned back to where they came from without explanation.
The HLT is true to its mission in placing participants into the heart of Palestinian life, immersing us in the culture of the West Bank. They did not require anyone to participate in any of their non-violent actions, and this was left to the discretion of the participant. The program allowed for independence and for us to really experience, look, touch, see and feel, what living in the conflict is like for the everyday Palestinian. I heard and witnessed stories of harassment from the soldiers and saw the bullet holes from the beginning of the second Intifada in my host Dad’s old house. I traveled the roads with my “magic blue passport” (as I now refer to my privileged US passport) and went places where my host family can only dream of going. I watched my host mom start to shake when the army jeep would ride by and I thought of the day when my host sister would realize the kind of life she was born into. I thought about my US tax dollars that helped Israel fund the Separation Wall that is turning Bethlehem into a ghetto. The same dollars helped pay for the rubber bullets and tear gas shot at me when I marched with the villagers of Bil’in. We marched non-violently with our hands in the air calling for Israel to uphold their own Supreme Court decision made three years ago to change the course of the Separation Wall so that it does not steal the village livelihood, over 60 percent of the farmland of Bil’in.
I spent one night sleeping over at the Hebron Girl’s Orphanage with members form Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). The orphanage was raided back in April by the Israeli Defense Forces and is threatened with closure. CPT are trying to keep an international presence there so there is someone to witness and call the press on the fateful night when the soldiers show up to weld the gates shut to this home for over 200 girls and school for 650. We toured the bakery that once supplied the bread for the orphans until it was destroyed and the threadbare basement that was once a job training center and form of income for the girls who learned sewing and embroidery there. The $200,000 worth of equipment was recently found dumped in the city dump. Thankfully, that night proved uneventful aside from being woken at 4am by an unusually loud call to prayer (the orphanage is located directly next to a minaret). Even so, our small international group was able to stand along-side these orphans in their distress.
A particularly memorable part of my volunteer work was spending a week holding free clinics in nearby villages and refugee camps with a team of American doctors and nurses as well as Palestinian nursing students from Bethlehem University. The doctors were able to bring large amounts of medicines and supplies from the States. We went to one village that is very close to Bethlehem but it takes over 45 minutes to get from there to the nearest hospital because of the Wall and the segregated roads. The clinic we partnered with regularly had a few doctors and nurses, yet the clinic itself was threadbare. Working as a team with Palestinian staff, we were able to see over 50 patients that day and had to turn others away. I believe that sustainable health care needs to involve follow up and partnership and the empowerment of the local people. However, even through such a short interaction such as this, the solidarity we shared with our fellow professionals in Palestine was incredible. I was able to become very close with the two Palestinian nursing students who helped us at the clinic and we are still in touch, sharing with each other over e-mail the challenges of nursing school and our hopes for the future. The experience was also startlingly eye-opening: the lack of access to health care had allowed many treatable conditions to become debilitating and near fatal for many of the people we saw that week.
As I have returned back to the States to begin my last year at the University of Pennsylvania, I am still processing my summer experience in the West Bank. I am slowly discovering how this summer has greatly influenced my study and career plans. In the immediate sense, I would like to share my experiences with other Penn students and my friends and family. This semester I plan to be involved in a student group at Penn called Students for Justice in Palestine. This group strives to create awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and encourage people to look beyond the often biased (to one side or the other) media coverage and hear two sides to the story. In a more general sense, I am now more passionate than ever about working with vulnerable populations both abroad and in the United States, particularly refugees and displaced persons. After returning home from my summer in Palestine, I took on a work-study job at the Lutheran Children and Family Service where I set up health screening appointments for refugee families who are being resettled into the Philadelphia area. I have changed my focus in nursing to Psychiatric Nursing in hopes that I can some day work with refugees who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and other mental illness as a result of their experiences.
Through my time in Palestine, I have gained immeasurably valuable experience in cross-cultural healthcare and in advocacy work that I believe translates to my work here in Philadelphia, a city that is so beautifully diverse yet also wrought with social injustice. I hope to continue learning Arabic and would love to return to Palestine in the future or to another place in the Middle East to work with refugees.
