4/14/2007

My phone rang early on Friday morning, at around 6 AM. I thought it was my alarm intruding on my sleep, waking me up for the day ahead, but I quickly remembered it was Friday, and on this day there was nowhere I needed to be. When I answered the phone I heard what sounded like a party taking place on the other end of the line. The voice on the phone was a familiar one, no matter what the hour. It was my best friend's sister and I was very pleased to hear her voice. It was nearly midnight in Boston, on a Thursday night. A few of my friends were out having a few drinks and decided they would put in a call to me. I was able to chat with three of my closest friends but I must admit that my conversation was limited, mostly as a result of the hour. I enjoy having the chance to chat with my friends back home, it makes me feel close to them, as if they were only down the street within walking distance. After talking with my friends it was still very early. Despite this fact I decided to get up and get on with my day, even though I knew it was going to be a very unproductive one, filled with rest and reading.

With it being only a bit past six in the morning I put off breakfast for a few hours and decided to engage myself in another activity which I enjoy almost as much as breakfast: laundry. Doing laundry at my flat has been an adventure since my first days here in Nablus. There's a washer in one of the bathrooms that I've never mastered and probably never will. The first time I tried to use it the electricity kept going out. I'd have to reset the breaker every time so that my laundry would continue. Since then I've discovered the weakness in one of the electrical outlets. With the use of an extension cord the machine works a little bit better, but when it attempts to spin dry the laundry, I find myself sitting in the dark. I've found it almost as easy to just hand wash my laundry, however I chose to use the machine, perhaps just for an adventure if nothing else.

To my surprise, the machine worked great that day, the only problem was a result of human error. I had forgotten to fasten the hose so the water could properly drain, and by the time I had discovered it, the bathroom floor was covered with water. It was actually quite a blessing. While my short run workload increased quite dramatically, the end result was a clean bathroom floor.

I had my laundry washed and hung by 7:30 and moved on to the kitchen and the living room. Rabeh and I had cleaned the entire flat a few days past, so it was not much of a chore to tidy up the two rooms. By 8:00 I was finished and had move on to eating breakfast and drinking coffee. Sometime after this I heard a loud bang outside. I wasn't so out of the ordinary to hear such things, but nonetheless I was always curious when I did. I walked out on my balcony to investigate and didn't see anything that looked suspicious. I did hear what sounded like a military jet nearby. I figured that the Israelis were conducting exercises, and that the jet had broken the sound barrier. An hour later I was watching the international news on Al-Jazeera when my entire apartment building shook. The tremor was accompanied by an even louder explosion. I could see the doors of my roommates bedrooms lunge forward towards me, as if someone was on the other side trying to push their way through. I must admit I was quite startled by the jolt at first, but after a few minutes I decided that it must have been another Israeli jet, this time flying very low when it broke the sound barrier. It was a cruel way to greet Muslims on their holiest day of the week.

The rest of my day was uneventful. I finally finished the book Saed had lent me: David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace. I learned a great deal about the fall of the ottoman empire and how the end of the first world war contributed to the creation of the modern middle east. I highly recommend this book to anyone who may be reading this blog. I also caught up on some other reading I'd been putting off. This included a report about Al-Qaeda in Iraq, an assessment of the situation in Iraq which one of my friends had passed to me, as well as a short story a student at An-Najah had asked me to read for her. Her story was sad. It was about the Israelis placing her under arrest at a checkpoint for nearly seven hours. It just so happened that her first name was the same as someone they were searching for, so they seemed to think the logical thing to do was to detain everyone with the same name. She was joined by fifteen other's with the same name. After hours of interrogation, throughout which she constantly was overwhelmed with emotion, and throughout which she noticed no such reactions from the Israeli soldiers, she was released. Obviously my account does not do justice to what was done to her, or to her story for that matter, and to what is done to people just like her everyday at the checkpoints. As a result of being detained she missed an entire day at university. She wrote about how when she was released, it was as if nothing had happened to her, she took her place in line, just as she had been waiting before, only she'd been personally humiliated, the sorrow was her own. She cried for the rest of the time she stood in line waiting to pass through the checkpoint.

Last night before I went to sleep there was heavy gunfire on the streets below my flat. I'm not sure what the cause of the exchange was, and I'm no expert on weaponry, but the firearms being used were of a much more sophisticated nature than I usually hear in Nablus. My best guess was that it was a skirmish between two of the Palestinian political parties. Rabeh and I had once talked about how it is such an important part of the internal political problem here that all the parties have armed factions. As I feel asleep I was thinking about a friend of mine who lives in D.C., I'm sure I'll see him soon. He's a great friend of mine and it's been for to long since I've seen him. For the most part we're very similar people. We both enjoy women, sports, and above all politics. Our major difference is that he's a Republican and I'm a Democrat. I imagined explaining to him about the internal political situation here. While we sit and chat over a beer, they exchange gunfire in the streets. The cooperation between political parties is crucial, in my opinion, towards any future peace, that's why I've previously expressed optimism about the unity government and still think it's the only way the people can be represented legitimately. In the meantime, I just hope the shooting on my street subsides.

I've gotten some feedback, which I welcome, in regards to my blog. I just want to remind everyone that the purpose of this blog is not to make sweeping political statements, but simply to keep in touch with my family and friends back home. At times it may seem like I'm simply re-iterating my day. Well, in many cases, that's exactly what I'm doing.

A few postings ago I referred to a humanitarian catastrophe taking place in Britain. I was referring to the legislation mounting against smoking in public, specifically to Shisha bars. Of all the things I write about in these pages, I can't believe home many responses I got about this statement. I was being facetious folks :).