By Idoia Gaston, August team 2018

The man in front of the wall

I wanted to spend the last morning before coming back to England taking more pictures inside the camp, going around and speaking with people in Aida Camp. I went one more time near the wall and while I was reading one of the stories written there, I turned my head and I saw one man sitting on his chair who invited me to sit next to him, in his small mechanical workshop.
Mohammed was born in Bethlehem and his business was really good before the construction of the wall. “I could see Jerusalem from this chair. It was only five minutes from here”, he said nostalgic. Now he can not see anything other than the wall and he spends the day sitting in his chair seeing how the tourists take pictures of this construction and waiting for customers to appear to have something to do with his hands. His family is divided between Bethlehem and Jerusalem but he can not visit them much as he needs a permit to go to Israel.
He gives me his hand and I can feel his sadness. I wish him all the luck in the world and I promise him that I will tell people in Spain how life is in Palestine, I will tell them to boycott Israel, I will tell them how unfair the world is to the Palestinians.

Tyres for planting, not for demonstrations

I was taking up tyres with a rope from the garden to the terrace in Lajee center. The idea was to paint them, covering some rusty irons and then put plants and flowers inside these tyres to make the terrace more beautiful and colourful. The Israeli watchtower was a few meters away and they control any movement, we began to see how six soldiers crossed the cemetery that is next to the garden to be placed in line directly in front of us, by the wall that separates the garden and the cemetery. I was doing this job with two Palestinian from the cultural center: Mahmud and Isra.
Mahmud has been shot in his knee and his foot by an Israeli soldier a few years ago. This had happened when he was working on the terrace of the center. To the house of Isra, the person in charge of the accounts in Lajee, Israeli soldiers have entered five times to inspect it. For both of them, the presence of the soldiers was normal, they made jokes to me about it, they laughed about the situation as they were used to being under surveillance. The presence of the soldiers made me uncomfortable, I knew that they were not going to do anything to us, just make us nervous, but the simple fact of knowing that they have the power to shoot whenever they want if they feel any threat, leave us in a position of inferiority and defencelessness.
When we finished our work, the soldiers left through the cemetery again and after a while someone called to Lajee from the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to know what we wanted to do with those tyres.

The 18 cows

It was in 1987 during the first Intifada, when residents of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, wanted to boycott Israeli products. They bought 18 cows from an Israeli kibbutznik to create their own source of milk. One day an Israeli soldier came to the farm, took photos of the cows, and told the Palestinians they weren't allowed to have the cows and gave them 24 hours to shut it down. He said the cows were a threat to Israel's national security.
"For the Palestinians, the cows meant a step closer to being free, to being able to decide their future, to being independent. Basically this was the security threat for Israel. It's not the cow itself. It's what the cow represents: a step toward independence", says Mazin Qumsiyeh, founder of Museum of natural History in Bethlehem.
“Someone would see it as something stupid but it makes all the sense in the world. The inhabitants live from the cows and if you control the cows you control the people and control their territory. It is the same if you kill the buffalos: you influence in the emigration of the people and therefore in the control of the territory”.

Palace without freedom

After finishing the 2 weeks of volunteering, we were invited by the director of the Lajee center to his house to have dinner. Shala lives in a house near the center with his wife and his four children. The house has four floors, a very large living room, kitchen, the main room has its own bathroom and on its giant terrace his four year old daughter can ride the tricycle and take several turns around. His three year old son plays with the dozens of toys that are scattered on the floor.

From the terrace, the tallest building that can be seen is the Israeli watchtower. At night, a light coming from the tower and points from left to right and illuminates Shala's terrace from time to time. It is a light that reminds us of the lack of freedom, not only of this upper middle class family that lives in a kind of palace, but of the many others in the refugee camp that live under tight control night and day.

It has been one month since we came back from Palestine. We are a team of eight people from CICD, interested in 21-century conflicts currently going on. This is why Palestine was our destiny for the investigation week. Before going, we learned about the Arabic culture, the story of the Palestine-Israel conflict and we took our backpacks and left.
Once we landed, we faced a first passport control where we were asked the reasons to fly to Tel Aviv, where we would stay and if we were going to Palestine, even if we knew people there. One of us, with origins in an Arabic country, was asked to do a second interview with more detailed questions. After two hours waiting for the Israeli approval to allow her entrance to the country, we continued successfully our way to Bethlehem.

Marching for the Right to Return

Israeli sniper murdered 13 year old boy

The Palestinians are living in a gigantic prison

Aida Refugee camp from 1948 has become permanent

New settlements appearing everywhere

Very little water for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza

After, we continued through the security check and there we were again stopped and asked to open our bags, because one of us had a picture of a “terrorist”. We had a picture of a Palestinian Activist, Laila Kahled. They check all of us, one by one. We felt how they use their power against those supporting Palestine and how they intimidate and pressure us by asking the same questions repeatedly to see if we fail.
Listening to all those real stories, meeting the people in first hand and living this situations of power abuse, made us realize of the importance of the issue. Now we cannot anymore look in another direction. We are back to share the reality we saw there and spread the word.

Roser Maura Riera
12 month February 2018

We are in the very last weeks of this 3 months travel, now we are headed to Zambia, our last destination where we will conclude the travel and finalize the Investigation.
In the last two weeks we were in Malawi, more specifically in Ntchisi, a very rural area. We were making our investigation in different households and also helping the DAPP project called “Let the children go to school”.

This project focuses in the children attending school and does it in many different ways. One of the biggest problems in the primary schools is the drop up, there are many children that stop going to school for different reasons, one of the biggest and strongest reasons is the fact that most of the kids eat only once or twice a day. Imagine that you are attending school from 7am to 12.30pm with nothing in your stomach since the 6pm of the day before… What will you think about while you are in school if not the 13pm meal?! How can you focus properly and have the energy to learn, to be in silence, to be in school?! Well, this is a huge reason for the dropout rate so what the project “let the children go to school” is trying to provide a porridge meal for the learners in the morning. But this cannot be done so easily - the community has to be involved. So what the Project does is to provide the community (usually the mothers of the children in school) with seeds and then they grow maize for example. They will then consume it and if there is more than needed they can even sell it. The community takes care of the fields and when the time comes it is the own mothers of the kids making the porridge for all the children in school. This has been proved to make the dropout rate become smaller and many children come back to school. We were lucky to participate in the first day of the feeding project in one of the primary schools. We went there and the first thing the head teachers showed us was the fields of maize that they were so proud of and very thankful to DAPP. And then we see the 2 community members making the porridge and we ended up helping to make it and serve it to the children. When we arrived the school was full of kids, super noisy and energetic and then suddenly after eating the porridge everything was calmer and ready to come back to class and learn.

The project itself also takes care of the installations of the school, helps to build up a classroom or playgrounds, what we also helped with was on the decoration of a classroom. The walls were white when we came in and when we left there were colorful shapes, numbers, music instructions, and the ABC and Chichewa language examples on the walls. In a few hours we made a classroom much more alive.
We visited some other schools where we always went first to check out the garden farming and then look around the school and where they always asked for advice about how to make the primary school better.

These are some of the examples about our Actions here in Malawi. During our investigation we could conclude that that area of Malawi is very very poor. Access to Water is not the easiest but it seems there is always one water pump “nearby”. Electricity is super rare and even the ones that can afford electricity cannot totally rely on it cause the blackouts are constant. People cook with charcoal most of the time. Women get married between the 18 and 22 years old and have their first kids around that age too and have an average of 5 children. What we could see was that the families can usually only have lunch and dinner and no other meal can be provided. The area where we were there is basically no industry, the families live of farming and live is hard for them, even though they always receive visitors with the warmest smile and by the end of a conversation they even ask us if we want to stay and eat nshima with them. When we asked what makes them happy the answers are usually the same for all the families: having a good shelter ; good crops(which provide food on the table); clothing; children being able to go to school. Some woman are part of woman’s club but not so many and when the woman are asked “if you only had two children, a boy and a girl, and could only afford to send one to school which one would it be?” most of them answer they would send the girl and that proves that mentalities are changing cause in different conversations what the locals share with us is that usually in a situation like that it is the boys who are chosen to go to school.
The reality of the rural areas is a tough one, the life style is hard and there is a lot of poverty… even though Malawians are extremely friendly and in a time of need they will come and help.

I will conclude what happened to us a few days ago:
We woke up at 4am, we had a bus at 7.30 and some hours driving till the city where we had to catch the bus. It was raining all night and at 4.30 we were leaving the house. The road was muddy and the car after few meters got stuck on the mud. We were 5 pushing the car but it did not move an inch. We tried and tried and tried and nothing. One of us when to get help and after 15 minutes there we 4 men coming to help us pushing the car. Even though it was not easy, we had to spend some time filling the holes on the road with stones and there were2 or 3 people who were going to the fields and stopped to help us filling the up the holes with stones. Then it was the last big push and by then we were 9 people pushing the car and we finally managed to arrive to a “normal road”. It was extremely early in the morning and people just see the situation and think “if it was me I would need help” and they go and help with no questions. Was thanks to the people’s kindness we arrived on time to our bus!
Malawi – “the warm heart of Africa” as they say!

Mel 12.2.2017