Because we live in a marble coated apartment, the noise levels can get to a painful extreme. I think Rashimi has what you might call 'high rise terminals' where the word or sentence gets higher at the end. And the combination of his semi-permanent crow-like shriek of: 'MumeeeeeeEEEE! MumeeeeeEEE!' even when I'm standing near him; with the accompaniment of bellyaching from the Lozenge; against a timpani of Duplo boxes crashing to the floor, and slamming lids and doors is enough to make me want to put two ear plugs in each ear, and hide my head under a large cushion.
I think I could survive many physical tortures to spare myself the agony of permanent noise and constant, determined vocal demands from our resident shamozzle of Shuyukh (the Arabic plural of Sheikh).
It's sometimes a challenge to save some spirit for work, but over the last few weeks since J's been away, I've found it to be the room of my own, the delicious retreat from every domestic demon and demanding dwarf.
With our move to Jerusalem approaching, I've set myself a few targets to finish before we leave. I'm becoming increasingly aware that the scene there will be a lot more complicated and I want to make the most of the relative ease of living and interesting contacts in this city before we go.
I was recently introduced to a fascinating Palestinian woman, Ghada, in her 70's who divides her time between London and Amman and is staunch and courageous about her views on the Israel Palestine situation and will hopefully be one of my interviewees for my Nakba project. Although the experience for her, at the age of 8, was so traumatic, that she thinks she has obliterated any memories of it, which will be an interesting counter-angle. I've heard a bit about the high concentration of crazies and fundamentalists now living in Jerusalem. At a party J and I were at recently, a wiry American man drew close and warned us, sotto vocce, about 'Jerusalem syndrome' where people who end up living there too long go crazy like the rest of them. I asked Ghada if there were any liberals left in the town, and she assured me there were, and would introduce me to lots of them, a couple of whom work for Ha'aretz newspaper.
One writer Daivd Shulman, goes so far as to call it a sickness of the soul in a piece in the New York Review of Books which I read a while back.
"There is a studied blindness to the cumulative trauma that we Israelis have inflicted upton the Palestinians in the course of realising our own national goals…This is no ordinary blindness; it is a sickness of the soul that takes many forms, from the silence and passivity of ordinary decent people to the malignant forms of racism and proto-fascist nationalism that are becoming more and more eivdent and powerful in today's Israel, including segments of the present government."
It will be good to be in touch with people with a balanced attitude, and I want to start knocking on doors soon. I've noticed through working here in Jordan, that with an itinerant lifestyle like ours, if you don't get weaving the minute you arrive in a place, even better a little before, the tapestry you're planning may never quite happen.
This same lady is mentioned in the book I'm (still) reading about Gaza by Dervla Murphy, as being one of the spokespeople for a 'binational' movement, or a one-person-one-vote system with a constitution like South Africa's, rather than a 'two state' solution which is still supported by many international governments, including ours. It was interesting to hear her views - and I have a lot to learn. As ever the line of international governments in a place, is often not the one that's championed by local thinkers and intellectuals.
I went to dinner this week with a wonderful Palestinian jewelery designer who had invited such a line up of fasctinating people that I didn't get back home until well after 1am. I heard about their friends living and working in Jerusalem's old city, including a hummus seller who has queues of everyone from Mossad officers, Christian Orthodox priests and everyday Palestinians…the one thing they all agree upon being the extraordinary quality of this particular chick pea paste; and they told me about the original founder of the Zalatimo Sweets company, also here in Jordan, who is still cooking up honey and pistachio morsels within the old city walls, well into his 80s. Also there was a lovely theologian in his 70's who had lived in Lebanon most of his life. He was feeling weary about warfare, and told me about a man in a refugee camp he saw once who was wearing a t-shirt which said: 'Fighting for peace is like having intercourse to preserve virginity.'
It's encounters like these that make me feel more excited about our next step, and that give me the energy and inspiration required to care for our dwarves to the best of my abilities. It's almost like I need to understand more about our reality here, to help them appreciate it on their own nearly-2 and nearly-4 year old terms.
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