LETTERS FROM PALESTINE

Back to the village

Dear friends,

Ramallah hosted another interesting film festival last week, a study of how Palestinians and Arabs are represented in Israeli films. The opening movie was the first talking picture ever to come out of Palestine. It was made pre-1948 when it was all called Palestine and Arab and Jew alike called themselves Palestinians. The banks shown on screen were called Bank of Palestine, etc.

The Zionist attitude toward the Palestinians at the time was apparently: What Palestinians? The opening shots were of deserts, camels, one Bedouin guy, and a leech-filled swamp. They were soon replaced by farms and orchards and businesses and schools and houses, everyone happy and European, everything in Hebrew.

In the entire hour and a half of the movie, I saw only one bit of evidence of an Arab presence in pre-1948 Palestine. They were showing the houses and storefronts the Jewish people had built, and in the lower left hand corner of one of the storefronts, a sign was written in Arabic. By the time I nudged my roommate and pointed it out, it had blinked off the screen.

Otherwise it was just European Jews dancing and planting and building and dying at their plows and diverting the Jordan River, which before they arrived had "flowed unused into the Dead Sea," to the purposes of human progress. My roommate nudged me and said, "So they built the Jordan River, too?"

It goes without saying that the majority of the occupants of pre-1948 Palestine were Palestinian Arabs with a unique and ancient culture and history and civilization, but to see this film you'd think all of proto-Israel was set up at the expense of a single guy on a camel. It would have been comical if this kind of propaganda hadn’t been so effective in a world new to mass information.

I caught only one other movie in the series, called Operation Thunderbolt, an Israeli film about the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and the destruction of hundreds of villages in 1948. A summary of that period of Palestinian-Israeli history can be found here.

One scene was of a surly, trigger-happy young soldier who had just driven a load of villagers from their homes firing an automatic weapon from a hill and then shooting at them as they fled. He was sitting near an emptied village that was being dynamited, eating lunch and calmly explaining to the lone Israeli dissenter in the group that they were fighting for their lives. His statement was meant to be ironic, whether he meant it that way or not, because the people they were corralling, shooting, and loading up on trucks to take to Jordan were unarmed civilians, largely young kids and old people.

It was hard to tell if the movie was more sympathetic to the Israelis or Palestinians, because the lone dissenter (the one who kept having doubts, asking if this was really necessary, etc.) was kind of the main character, but the Palestinians were shown as cowering simpletons, giving up their homelands without much of a fuss, vomiting from fear, begging to be collaborators, etc. The Israelis were shown as cold and calculating, calmly blowing up the homes of old men, stealing things from people’s houses, shooting donkeys and people for fun, all of them heartless toward the Palestinians and what was clearly the destruction of thousands of lives except for the one main character.

In the end the main character gave a little soliloquy, something like, "When the last person decides not to speak out, when everything is gathered in silence and not a whisper is left of these crimes we are committing, then God will glide down into the valleys and wonder what all the fuss was about."

A comic posted on our bulletin board in the Al Mubadara office has Pres. Bush surrounded by two advisers, and the military guy goes, "They've broken a number of UN resolutions and the UN has failed to act... They've killed thousands of their local population and invaded a neighboring country... They torture suspects and assassinate opponents... And we've confirmed they secretly developed nuclear weapons."

Bush says, "That does it! Bomb Baghdad!"

The second adviser says, "Uh... Sir, this is a briefing on Israel."

Israel has one-upped the joke since then. In the West Bank town of Al-Zawiyya on June 10 this summer, a peaceful protest was broken up not with the usual tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets but with nerve gas.

The following day, Israel's "Peace Bloc," Gush Shalom, began a press release with the following quote from Al-Zawiya:

"What the army used here yesterday was not tear gas. We know what tear gas is, what it feels like. That was something totally different. … When we were still a long way off from where the bulldozers were working, they started shooting things like this one (holding up a dark green metal tube with the inscription "Hand and rifle grenade no.400" - in English). Black smoke came out. Anyone who breathed it lost consciousness immediately, more than a hundred people. They remained unconscious for nearly 24 hours. One is still unconscious, at Rapidiya Hospital in Nablus. They had high fever and their muscles became rigid. Some needed urgent blood transfusion. Now, is this a way of dispersing a demonstration, or is it chemical warfare?"

The first known Israeli chemical attack took place in the Gaza town of Khan Younis, as documented by the film "Gaza Strip" in 2001:

The February 12 gassing of neighborhoods in Khan Younis presaged the attacks that followed. When the gas canisters landed, they began to billow clouds of either white or black, sooty smoke. The gas was non-irritating and initially odorless, changing to a sweet, minty fragrance after a few minutes. One victim recalled, "the smell was good. You want to breathe more. You feel good when you inhale it." The smoke often shifted to a "rainbow" of changing colors.

From five to thirty minutes after breathing the gas, victims began to feel sick and have difficulty breathing. A searing pain began to wrench their gut, followed by vomiting, sometimes of blood, then complete hysteria and extremely violent convulsions. Many victims suffered a relentless syndrome for days or weeks afterward, alternating between convulsions and periods of conscious, twitching, vomiting agony. Palestinians agreed: "This is like nothing we've ever seen before."

On Wednesday I had to go to Jerusalem to change my plane tickets. After I got through the main checkpoint out of the West Bank, I took a servees (service taxi) to the next checkpoint, and the road was a ruined mess. They’re laying the foundations for the Annexation Wall right through the center of the road. Sometimes we could drive on the torn right side of the road, other times we had to take our chances on the left, and often we had a very tight squeeze, or someone had to back up, or we just had to wait ‘til a long line of cars thinned. I don’t know how people are going to get through once the wall is built.

The second checkpoint was a long, dusty wait while the young Israeli soldiers, children of 18 (I can't help but think of 18-year-olds of any nationality as too young to be soldiers, imagining what I would have felt and thought if I were given an automatic weapon and immense power over strangers at the sensitive age of 18), in their designer sunglasses, took their sweet time checking everyone on every form of transportation (including huge buses) and making at least one man walk back and forth from his van to the checkpoint building four or five times.

The next morning I caught a bus for Tulkarem that could drop me off at a place convenient to Azzun, from where I could catch a ride to Jayyous. The drive was beautiful; rolling hills, olive groves, idyllic villages, blue skies, white houses...

But every time I saw an Israeli settlement intruding on and stealing from this ancient life, every time I saw a settler walking among trees far older than his country with a sleek automatic weapon slung over his shoulder like a fashion accessory, my heart fell. Almost all the signs on the road pointed to Israeli settlements, occasionally to Israeli towns outside the West Bank, and sometimes to the largest Palestinian cities, as if the Palestinian villages passing by didn’t exist.

We passed several long lines of cars being checked at ‘flying checkpoints’ (the ones that pop up anywhere a Jeep decides to stop and block the road, including in the middle of towns, between you and your favorite coffee shop, etc.), but luckily we weren’t stopped. I made it to Jayyous in good time, the last leg being provided for free by a family going in that direction, and the man dropped me off at Hakam and Hakim’s house.

They weren’t home, so I walked across town to my friend Abir’s house, the woman I taught English with last year, and she was home alone. She looked radiant and had just gotten back from Jordan where her brother Mohamad was just married. I met Mohamad last time I was in Amman, and he had shown me the picture of his fiancée. He was shyly proud of her, clearly very smitten. Abir and I were happy to see each other, and she invited me in and filled me in on the news of the town.

She’s going to university now in Qalqiliya with the money she has made teaching English. She’s studying psychology and hoping to take a computer course soon so she can get a more stable job and keep funding her education. I am amazed she managed her first course at the university, both money-wise and initiative-wise. Her family is quite unsupportive, and the funding for her English teaching is very unstable.

I helped her register for the computer course, and I am hoping that I can find foreign funding to help pay for her daily commute and for her next semester of college. The current program she is working for teaching English has lost its funding, and she will probably be out of a job soon. I have contacted a French woman who once expressed interest in helping Abir and am awaiting her reply. Abir needs $400 by October to register for the fall course and continue her education.

I asked her how things were in the village compared to last year, and she said not to tell anyone in the village, but she knows three families whose land and livelihood have been made inaccessible by the Wall and therefore have absolutely nothing now—less than nothing—and each night after the village is asleep, they go through their neighbor’s trash looking for scraps. Palestinians are pretty economical, though, and don’t throw much away. Abir gave one of the families 15 shekels last week (about $3) which she doesn’t really have to give. They bought some bread and hummous with it. Many other formerly solid families I talked to since then are walking on the razor's edge of disaster because of the Wall.

An Israeli professor on the aims of the Wall, from A Jewish Voice for Peace.

I thought that since Abir was home alone, we had the run of the house and I had a perfect place to stay. But she said she had to sleep at her uncle’s house, because one time she and her sister were sleeping in their house alone when their mother was visiting relatives, and “The Jewish came into the house in the middle of the night. They were banging on the door, very high voices, and we let them in. They came in, one hour and a half, looking for things. We were not afraid, because we had nothing. We are simple people.” I was terrified for them, though, ex post facto, thinking that any soldiers of any nationality anywhere, heavily armed in the middle of the night in a house with two defenseless young girls, there was no telling what might happen.

So we slept in her uncle’s house. He’d had 300 of his 400 dunams (100 acres) of olive groves stolen by the Wall, and now he was raising three young kids with the money he could make selling chickens out of the coop attached to their house. His wife fixed us a dinner of fried potatoes, homemade ketchup (very zaki [delicious]), bread and three small pieces of fried cheese floating in vegetable oil.

The next day I found a spare room in the international house where three Ecumenical Accompaniers, sent by the World Council of Churches, were headquartered, in between monitoring the gates of the Wall, the conditions at the checkpoints, the treatment of people, and whether people with permits were denied entry into their lands. Of course it’s absurd to require people to have permits to access their own land; it is a way to strangulate slowly, without an all-out revolt that would come with denying everyone access at once. Slowly they are paring down the numbers who can cross the fence. The first outrage was issuing a certain number of permits at the start, so that they could say this many people were allowed to cross the fence. In fact many of the permits were made out to infants, invalids, dead people, and people living or working abroad. My friend Mohamad’s dead Grandma got one. Now, little by little, they are finding excuses to kick everyone else off.

That evening I visited my friend Ammar at his place. We sat on his porch and talked in our mix of Arabic, Russian, and English. Whenever one language failed us, we’d switch over, sometimes several times in one sentence, but we’re slowly getting better. His brother who lives in Sweden was in town to be married, and he joined us and talked a while. He speaks English and Swedish as well as Arabic, and possessed a kind of smirking but generous self-conscious confidence that was exceedingly charming.

Once two people get together on a porch, things tend to snowball quickly. We had eight or ten people soon, and all spoke English except for the cousin who wouldn’t shake my hand for religious reasons, so we spoke English sometimes for my benefit and Arabic sometimes for his, and people translated particularly good jokes or comments. One man who had spent years in Saudi spoke English very well, and he told me some Arabic jokes, mostly about the idiosyncrasies of the Arabic language and customs, Syrian people misunderstanding Egyptian people, and an Englishman trying to learn Arabic by sitting in coffee shops but giving up after he realized there were ten words for the hot coals you put on top of a nargila alone.

The man who had lived in Saudi had traveled a lot, and he demonstrated people’s body language for saying yes and no in several countries, sometimes just with a twitch of the eyebrows or a click of the tongue. He said he had Jordanian citizenship as well as Palestinian, but “Even if Jordan gave me a house and land for free, I wouldn’t go. Why? Because Jayyous is the best.”

Ammar said in Arabic, “Miserable Jayyous,” and everyone laughed.

The man also said to me, “Listen, before American people came here, I hated all American people. I thought they all agreed with their government. Now that they came here, I can see. They are just people, and many of them don’t agree. They come here to help us, with their own time.” As for me, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like to be here, and I like to be here because so many people are as kind and charming as him.

The crowd had thinned by about midnight, and by then there was a BBQ going on on the roof, and Ammar’s brother invited me up. I shared a nargila with a cousin while Ammar played with his nieces. Ammar’s brother introduced me to his new wife, and he confided to me that they may face difficulties of temperament because she was only 18. He said, “That’s what girls do here, finish school and get married.”

That didn’t sit well with me at all. There are strong women’s movements in Palestine, and women like Abir are going against the grain to work and educate themselves. But women all over the world are still fighting for equal rights, education and opportunities. I think the movement here would be much stronger if not for the exigencies of every day life under occupation and if not for the enormous collective efforts going into fighting it. There’s so much to do in Palestine, and everywhere. America pays soldiers here to waste their time and other people’s time, to take the Israeli soldiers’ young years away and to take Palestinians’ young lives away. There are so many better ways these efforts could be spent.

During dinner we heard gunshots a couple of times and were not sure if they were Israeli soldiers just shooting at cans or something, or a real problem. If it was the former, we didn’t want to let them interrupt our dinner. If it was the latter, it felt callous and awkward just ignoring it. Each time we heard a shot, there was a moment of ambivalent hesitation, waiting to hear what would come next, if anything, any clue as to what had happened, and then we’d resume like nothing had happened. A flare was also shot into the sky, and we watched it lazily circle downwards in its helical path, shining red. I’m not sure what flares are for exactly, but I had a sense they were used to light up an area they were planning to bomb. No one seemed to expect a bomb, though, and they would know, so I relaxed somewhat. They said a burning flare had almost landed on their roof once.

After he said good-night to his brother, he said rather sadly to me in Russian, “This is that last time I will see my brother.” He was leaving for university and his final exams the next day, and the day after that his brother goes back to Sweden.

When it was nearly 2:00 am, when the electricity in the village would shut off, I said good-bye to everyone, and Ammar walked me to the main street. He apologized that he couldn’t walk me all the way home. One time he had been out on the street late at night, and Israelis came and were rounding up and taking away young men all over the village. He said, “It was very uzhas.” (Uzhas is Russian for horrible.)

The next day Abir’s uncle and his family invited me to Tulkarem to visit a place where you could sit around and drink sodas and smoke nargili while your kids (or you) swam in a giant kiddie pool or adult pool. Women could swim in an enclosed pool where no one could see. Girls who had not reached puberty yet could horse around in the main pools with the boys.

We joined up with some of Abir’s uncle’s family in a nearby village first. As we left Jayyous I looked back and saw the village standing there on the hill, the white houses contrasting with the shimmering green of the olive groves, the dark green of the evergreens and deciduous trees planted in the village, and the deepening sky. I remember seeing similar scenes in Renaissance paintings from Greece and Italy in museums when I was younger and wondering if villages like that still existed.

Not much further along the road, we were stopped at a flying checkpoint and held up on the road for 40 minutes while the sun set. The three small kids in the car were restless but amazingly patient. Abir’s uncle recently had his driver’s license taken away by Israeli soldiers. It’s very easy for them to confiscate documents, with or without reason, and so difficult and often expensive for people to replace them. And I had foolishly forgotten my passport.

Luckily by the time we were second in line to be checked, the Israeli soldiers packed up and drove off. On the other side of the checkpoint, the line of cars coming from the other direction was incredible. There were at least 40 or 50, but I couldn’t bear to count. How long had they been there? Four hours? Five hours? Where were they going? What was the total amount of blood pressure that had gone up? What dinner or engagement or time with their family had they missed? Why?

After forty minutes of being held captive, though, free movement felt amazingly good.

The father of the family we met in the nearby village, Mahmoud, took us to Tulkarem in his cab. While we were standing around talking, and Mahmoud’s small son was left in the cab by himself, he stuck his head out the window and laughed as if his commandeering a cab were the funniest thing in the history of the world. When we were on the road, every time we hit a bump his mirth could not be contained.

The swimming pool place was an impressive open space with nice grounds and a carnival atmosphere. The kids had a blast, and after swimming we swung on the kamikaze swingset that was built in a circle, so everyone could meet and kick each other in the middle.

That night I was invited to stay with Mahmoud’s family for the night in a nearby village, and I hung out with his friendly, smart, giggly daughters until the late hours. The older two daughters tried to fumble along with a few words of English, and I with my few words in Arabic. The third daughter didn’t say much, but when she did it was usually whatever English word the two older girls were looking for.

The next day I tagged along with a Swedish Girl, Norwegian guy, and Palestinian guy to watch some skits and speeches at the end of a girls’ summer camp sponsored by UNICEF and, I believe, Al-Mubadara. One of the skits was about the evils of smoking, and it was hilarious even though I couldn’t understand a word. One little girl was dressed up like a sheikh with a beard and kaffiyeh, and he came home to his wife, not only after spending all their food money on cigarettes, but also with another wife. The first wife really got into her part, yelling at her errant husband, and he finally fell over dead from smoking.

That night I went to Hakam and Hakim’s house to visit. His house was entirely redone, looked absolutely different than last time, and really lovely. The tragedy of it, though, was that his porch, one of my favorite spots in town, had been demolished for the rebuilding. I felt almost like an old friend had died.

He used to live with his brother and father, and I asked where they were. He said they were sleeping on the other side of the Wall and only came home once a week. They are tending their greenhouse and their goats, but vegetables are selling now for very low prices. He said it was illegal for them to sleep on the other side of the Wall by Israeli law, but so far they had gotten away with it.

I visited another friend after that, a member of the political group that starts with an H and ends with an ‘amass’. He and I part ways politically and religiously, but we are friends. We always talk politics, and he said, as usual, that the world would figure out one day that the Palestinians are not the killers, they are the ones being killed daily and defending themselves however they can under the exceedingly mismatched circumstances.

He asks me often, “They kill us, take our land, take our freedom. What are we supposed to do?” I thought, well, what you are supposed to do is leave your home, your land, your family, your livelihood, your identity, your history, and your culture, and move to Jordan. You are supposed to yield calmly to authorities who have access to wealth and weapons and use them violently and illegally against you and your friends, family, and people.

He was watching the Hizbullah channel, and I told him about visiting the Khiam prison in southern Lebanon. It is Lebanon’s version of Abu Ghraib, where Israeli occupiers detained, tortured, and humiliated prisoners up until they left southern Lebanon in 2000. The prison has been turned into a museum by Hizbullah, and it reminded me chillingly of the KGB prison-museum I visited in Lithuania. Its legacy is not confined to history, though. If Palestine is ever an autonomous region, it will have reason for several chilling museums.

My friend said, “Abu Ghraib, that was Americans doing that? Americans who bring democracy to Iraq? How is that bringing democracy?”

For me sometimes it is a struggle to see the people who occupy this land, harass me and my friends at checkpoints and in their homes, kill children in front of their parents and vice versa, and beat my roommate’s dad in front of her, as human beings, but I try very hard. I try because I know that they have moms and dads and brothers and friends like anyone else, and because before I came to the Middle East, it was difficult for me to see people here as human beings because I didn’t know or understand much about them except what I heard through the mainstream news.

I suspect that when I mentioned the political group my friend is a part of, some of you might shut off from him or his humanity, and maybe mine because I associate with him. All I can say is, he is a human being. He has a point of view. He has had a lot of friends killed and a lot of dignity stolen. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he does and stands for. But if I were to choose only friends with whom I agreed about absolutely everything, (a) I wouldn’t learn anything, and (b) I wouldn’t have any.

I have friends who are self-described Zionists, friends who believe non-Palestinians have no right to have dominion over any of historic Palestine, friends who are farmers and professors, soldiers and peace activists, Republicans and anarchists, Communists and bankers, and I don't agree with any one of them 100%, but I can't disagree with them 100% either. As Terence said, "I am a man; nothing human is alien to me." Some things might be objectionable to me, but unless we respect each other, how can we talk all this out in a good way?

Dehumanization is at the root of terrorism. Faceless people in an office building in New York. Faceless people in a neighborhood in Fallujah or an apartment building in Nablus. They all have faces.

Six youths were shot and killed that night by undercover Israeli forces in Tulkarem as they ate dinner in a restaurant. Five were suspected members of a militant group that has ties to Arafat, one was an innocent 18-year-old bystander. No need to remind anyone of the illegality and immorality of extrajudicial summary executions and the murder of innocent teenagers. Everyone knows. Which makes our continuing to do so that much harder to understand or explain.

Settlers and supporters in Gaza recently put on a massive protest against Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan that promises to remove all settlements from Gaza and four small settlements from the West Bank by September 2005. Critics of the plan from the Palestinian side say it is a stall for time which will not change much for the situation in Gaza, as Sharon will maintain the right to invade at any time. It will win him kudos for being a ‘man of peace’ despite his history of war crimes, leave Gaza as a giant prison, and distract the world from his wholesale destruction and continual killings in the West Bank and Gaza while he attempts to make life unlivable and impossible for Palestinians in the occupied lands. Removing four small settlements from the West Bank is a symbolic gesture at best while Israel is damaging many parts of the region and the economy almost beyond repair with its Wall and with the expansion of other settlements.

As for critics from the other side:

"I have come to demonstrate against the disengagement of Jews from the land of Israel," said Alexander Slonim, 65, of the southern city of Beersheba. "If Sharon wants to disengage, he should do it to the Arabs, because they don't belong in the Land of Israel."

When I was in Jerusalem I wandered into a main plaza in West Jerusalem where a bunch of settler-types in religious garb were shouting and whistling and waving signs around. Everything was in Hebrew, and I hadn’t heard about the protests yet, so I asked a young woman if she spoke English. She said hopefully, “A little.” I said, “Do you know what this protest is about?” Immediately she ducked her head, said, “No,” and walked quickly away, seeming upset.

Today I was sitting on the porch studying a Norwegian guy’s Russian textbook (he’s going to Belarus next year to study) when a little girl stopped by and tried to strike up a conversation. She had studied a little English in school and knew a few words, and we were managing along until another little girl came by and said something excitedly in Arabic. I asked what it meant, and the first girl thought a minute and then acted like she was pointing an M-16. We went out in the road and saw where they were pointing, and not long afterwards an army jeep raced past the house much faster than was safe on the narrow winding main road.

The Swedish girl joined me on the porch and said, “There’s been a lot of activity lately. Just before we got here there were lots of tear gas attacks. They would come in the middle of the day and randomly throw canisters. The people were showing us their scars when we got here, the ones that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” There hasn’t been a day without soldiers coming in to the village during the day or the night since she's been here.

She said there was another disturbing phenomenon of ‘mock demonstrations’ at the Jayyous gate. People dressed like Palestinians, probably settlers or soldiers, would be bussed in on Israeli buses on the army access road along the wall (any Palestinians caught on that road would at the very least have had their tires shot out at once) and would pretend to demonstrate against the wall, yell and shake the wires, even throw stones at the soldiers, while people filmed. It was supposedly a training drill, but there were no tear gas canisters thrown and no shots fired. I imagine the films were for propaganda purposes, but in any case it really scared the villagers. They thought some of theirs were there, and they were afraid of them being shot or arrested.

Today the Swedish girl and the Norwegian went with the farmers to their land, but the soldiers were three hours late opening the gate. They said they hadn’t been able to find the keys. The internationals this time weren’t allowed through at all. They were told to wait until a DCO came by, but he never came.

After half an hour or so, the army Jeep roared back past the house, and the Swedish girl said brightly, “Well, I guess they had their daily peek.”

Later I overheard her talking to the black South African Anglican minister who is also staying in the international house, and he was trying to figure out why, after an Israeli soldier saw his passport, he had asked, "Are you guys allowed to be here?" The South African man said, "What did he mean? Why should Swedes be allowed here but not South Africans?"

I asked him, "I hope you don't mind me asking, but you lived in South Africa under apartheid, right?"

"Yes."

"And does the situation here remind you of that?"

"Sure."

"So, I think one of the things most dangerous for Israel right now is to be compared to Apartheid South Africa [so it can be pressured, like South Africa was, through sanctions and other means, to end current policies]. If South Africans are here and think it is similar, it is the most dangerous, because they would know."

I had dinner with another friend the next night who spent three years in New York trying to make money for his family. A year and a half of that time was spent in a prison. No charges were filed, but after all those months of imprisonment he was deported. He professes to be most interested in a non-violent solution to the problem and stressed the humanity of all involved in our discussions.

He told me as we were walking home that his nephew had been arrested about 16 days before. Soldiers had come into their house in the middle of the night and took everyone's IDs. They picked one of the young men, read his name off his card, and took him away to Qedumim, an Israeli settlement, where he's been held ever since. As usual, no charges have been filed. Three other boys were taken that night, too.

I slept on the roof of another friend's house that night, and I left the door to the roof open for the breeze. The next day my friend asked me if I left the door open all night, and I said, "I think so." His eyes widened, and I said, "Not good?"

He just smiled and said, "Soldiers."

The next day the mayor's charming son and his lovely fiancee went to Azzun to check up on the furniture being built for their new house and pick out fixtures, and they invited me along. They'll be married in a couple of weeks, but unfortunately I think I'll be in Jordan then. We'll see.

I've spent plenty of other nice time here with several friend old and new, but I'm running out of time and space. I hope all is well with all of you.

Salaam,

Pam

Next: From Jayyous to Jordan

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