Saturday, March 21, 12:30 pm (5:30am CST)

Today we visited the school (Greek Orthodox, grades K-12) next door to the guest house where we stayed. They were having a Mother's Day celebration. While some kids were performing for the audience, there were a bunch of young ones (6-9 years), mostly boys, who kept wandering off and playing... well, and a lot of play fighting. It was kind of astonishing to watch how aggressive they could be. I spoke with one of the teachers from the school, and she said it is a serious problem that the teachers cannot handle in the classroom. All they have learned - from TV and from what's hapening around them - is violence. Another trauma that these little children are growing up with. However, the kids were also really sweet - I tried to convince some of them to go sit with their moms, but they said "no" and starting talking with me (all of the kids here tend to say three things: "hello!' "how are you!" "what's your name!"), and next thing I knew I was surrounded by about 10 little boys all demanding my attention at once. The celebration was neat... puts me to shame, since all I usually do is give my mom a card for mother's day. It is interesting to me that in this culture, amidst so much oppression and struggle, the people maintain such a strong and important emphasis on celebration. It must be essential for enduring life. Oh, and we also met the (Orthodox) Bishop of the Jerusalem diocese. I tell you - we internationals are pretty popular just about everywhere we go! The people really appreciate our presence, such as at the march yesterday.

Now we are in Hebron at the CPT apartment. We had a tour of Hebron - the divided city - including Old Hebron (which is where the apartment is)... it is amazing, with a very dramatic history. We went to the Il-Ibrahimi mosque and saw the tombs of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joseph, etc... and bullet marks on the wall from the 1994 (I think) massacre of 29 Muslims. We saw a few (Israeli) settlers, and had some interactions with a few IDF soldiers (including the 3 checkpoints we had to go through in order to enter the mosque).
CPT is very beloved here in Hebron. A similar organization (but they do more documentation-type stuff) here is TIPH - Temporary Internatonal Presence in Hebron, and we saw them driving and walking around a bit today.

Tomorrow we head to Tuwani!