Rising temperatures and news of a kidnapping

As the temperature rises, most afternoons and evenings the air is full of the sound of screeching brakes and burning tyres from the car park behind our house. The 'Shabaab' - local lads from our area. Since I did the workshop with Syrian, Jordanian and Palestinian teenagers, I've been struck by how limited life can be for this age group in this region. Closeted by family and politics, and limited by the paltry education most receive from state run schools, it must be an impossible time - both for themselves and parents.

The screening of the films the girls made went really well. As all the mothers and aunties and sisters and cousins streamed in to the room - faces well made up, heads decked in bright headscarves, hot feet squished into high heels only just visible under long skirts, I wondered what they would all think of the films their daughters had made. They are honest and open hearted.

https://vimeo.com/98419422

https://vimeo.com/98615349

https://vimeo.com/98617519

There were more tears. And some effusive speeches afterwards, which assured us of the great need for initiatives like this for teenagers, which allow just a tiny avenue of mind broadening, skill building and escape within a world where very few of any of these are on offer.

Back in Jerusalem, it feels a bit like the summer of the London riots. There's a steady increase in temperature both environmentally and politically at the moment. The extremely worrying news about ISIS or Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, taking Mosul and making their way to Baghdad is terrible news for this region. My Egyptian friend shook her head with great fear: 'Al Khalifa' (The Caliphate). 'You might as well consider it a new dark age if this one spreads'. J and I now have many, many muslim friends and acquaintances. And this, ISIS, or any of their precursors - Al Qaeda, Al Nusra and the rest. This is not Islam.

And now since the kidnapping of 3 Israeli teenagers and the subsequent rampage of Israeli security services through Palestinian communities, in a bid to find them, you realise that all it takes is a little spark, and this tinder box could go up again. There are loud bangs in the night, definitely not fireworks, Israeli police are everywhere and check points are clamping down more than normal.

While I don't condone kidnapping, when you look at what is happening to Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli police and soldiers, you don't have to use your imagination to see why people might resort to desperate measures:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL048x4msM

Gran Gran has been staying and has earned herself the nicknames 'The Assassin' after her very effective ant killing foray, then 'Cervantes' after her epic tales made up off the cuff, as she entertained the dwarves on our way to the beach last weekend. Rashimi got to grips with his wave-o-phobia and we sat collecting shells, the water lapping, looking back at J, Gran Gran and the Lozenge barbecuing and getting the picnic out. This is it, I thought, with Rashimi's small, wet, salty body perched on my leg. This tiny moment on one particular day in an insignificant year. It's all that many people want from life. With no fear and no worries and no politicians or religious leaders telling you what you can and cannot do, think, say or wear. To have a worry free weekend with a family on a beach. Is it so much to ask?

Life is comparatively easy for us here, as internationals. We can breeze to and fro on a whim, from Israel to Jordan and back; our house is spacious and lovely; the schools aren't bad; we are invested in learning the language and find it easy to have a meaningful existence here.

The dwarves are still at a stage where we can look after them and they can have a care free time in these lands, without us wondering too much about the influences. But sometimes, maybe because of the nature of both J's and my work, and the difficulty of making real, local friends here and probably helped by almost anything you read, or anyone you speak to, you realise Arabia is perhaps not the place it once was. I'm reading 'Damascus, Taste of a City' at the moment, a wonderful book written by Rafik Shami and his sister, as she gives her brother a tour over the telephone, of the city they grew up in, and from which Rafik has been exiled. The narrative is interlaced with delicious looking Damascene recipes concocted by the friends and residents described in the book.

But what now? Where as these people and what is happening to the buildings, and its societal structure?

Are the recipes all that remain?

My mind often shifts to these stories, that we read in books, that I hear almost every day from people I interview, and that we witness around us. And on a tired moment I look at Lozenge's face peeping out from under his shaggy head of hair and wonder. What are we achieving by surrounding ourselves by all this? Is it rubbing off in a negative way at all, and how would we ever know?

But then, off and out we went one afternoon to the dwarves' favourite bit of open space below the city wall and the Cinematheque, dotted with 'toot' (mulberry) trees and large rocks. We ran fast downhill, tripping over ourselves, and kicked a ball around before noticing there were some Palestinian children doing the same. The five children - girls and boys spaced within about a year and a half from each other, belonged to a headscarved lady who was sitting up the hill a little way with her sister. None of them had any English, but before long we were making friendly conversation, albeit basic, and the dwarves were rampaging around the park with the five children - swapping bikes for balls and frisbees. There were some quizzical looks at the Lozenge's back-to-front pants, shorts and tee shirt ('But Mummy, I like it like this. You know I like to be different.') Making real friends doesn't happen overnight, and sometimes you just have to get out there and open yourselves, to meet local people, who probably aren't used to this kind of reception from foreigners. Children can be the vital glue.

We played a game of hide and seek, and while crouching behind a rock with Rashimi I saw the Lozenge start running down from far away on the other side towards us. He arrived panting and sweaty and gripped me around my neck in a breathless hug. 'I love you Mummy. I jutht came over to tell you that.'

The Stones

I left Jordan a day after the boys, having finished the workshop. My Egyptian friend handed me a quiche she'd made to take back with me, still warm and smelling delicious which she sat to rest on the front seat. At the Israeli border they always ask if you have a weapon, or if anyone has given you anything to carry over. I was itching to mention I had an Egyptian quiche on the front seat, but I reckoned that would have brought out the bomb squad.

It's been good to be back and in the swing of our lives again. It's 'toot' (mulberry) season and they're everywhere on the trees and in the shops. The dwarves have permanently purple digits.

J and I discovered the Rolling Stones were playing in Tel Aviv and managed to get a couple of tickets. The night was muggy and hot, and newspapers predicted 'sluggish sales'  but the Hayarkon Park slowly filled with a stream of people until well over 50,000 were gathered, waiting for the rockers to make their entrance.

And in they came. Charlie Watts at 73, Ronnie and Mick at 70 and Keith Richards, a mere 67. Lithe and bursting with energy they rocked the park. Mick spoke a bit in Hebrew. Keith in English: 'I'm happy to be here,' he said, 'happy to be anywhere in fact.'

As I explained their performance to my Egyptian friend, she said: 'Well of course, if you're doing something you love, it gives you the energy of a 17 year old.'

And so they might have been. And I wondered if some of the greatest British exports at the moment, are in fact certain of our people.

Septuagenarian ROCK

Now Gran Gran is staying. We've found the long-lost secateurs, the garden looks like there's someone living here that knows what they're doing, and we found a lovely Palestinian retreat overlooking the olive groves below Bethlehem, serving organic food. The perfect place for a little rest.

Behind the scenes

Behind the scenes, while I was busy with the training, the Lozenge and Rashimi went to stay with the Glammy, down the road from where I was working in Amman.

If there's ever anyone that works with love in her heart, it's the Glammy with our boys. But what they weren't to know was that she's just got divorced after her disastrous 5 month arranged liaison. Not sufficient that her ex-husband was vile to her for that time; she's also receiving concerned messages from an old boyfriend who believes she is casting spells on his life, and causing bad things to happen. This is no joke. It's the reality of many 'middle class' women in this region.

She went to see a recommended therapist who, rather than letting her talk through her problems, prescribed her a bag full of prozac and some other punchy looking pill. Rashimi discovered them in her drawer, and she explained all. She's never even consumed a paracetamol in her life, so you can imagine the effects the hard stuff had. So she stopped.

She's worried about her weight, so I suggested doing a bit of endorphin-raising exercise instead, and one night after I'd been to visit them all, she strode out of the bedroom decked in a sleek black running outfit, complete with red lipstick and red headphones. 'If I'm going to sweat, I'm still going to look good,' she giggled, and set off round the block at a slow jog.

One night she explained the boys wanted her to say prayers. Raised as a Muslim, she confessed she didn't really know about Christian prayers. 'All I knew was you say 'Amin' at the end' she laughed. 'So we prayed for all the people in your life, and then we said, 'Amin'. Is that okay?' Rashimi then swung the prayers around to a game of I spy with my little eye, which he must have associated with shutting his eyes.

J made an appearance for the weekend which was a good way to make the most of the weekend evenings, and we introduced my new Egyptian friend and her husband to the Duke, knowing they'd get on like a house on fire. We had a relaxed evening in the warm air on his balcony overlooking the Citadel, eating wild boar and aubergine, drinking all the wine we'd brought, the air filled with cigarette smoke and laughter. A new Ikea has opened near Amman, and the ladies just love it. But the men were complaining it's putting many of the local carpenters out of work due to the ease and relative low cost of a flat pack, assemble your self, set of bookshelves and the rest.

J took the boys home after a week. As he put it: 'It's a bit like getting the dogs from the kennels - they're always a little bit chubbier and come back smelling different'. In this case whiffing of stale fags thanks to the Glammy's Mum's sofa stasis with her packet of Winstons, watching the wrestling.

But they were cherished and loved, and in some ways took the Glammy's mind of her sadness, at least for a while.

New training shoes

The ladies

I wasn't much looking forward to the workshop. After bad training experiences in Chad I always worry I'm going to get a room full of blank faces who would really rather not be there, and probably rather I wasn't there either. And after a few years of brushing up against development activity in various lands, there's a lot of: 'capacity building; empowerment; conflict resolution' and other such jargon whose impact can be nebulous, at the best of times.

But I knew at least I'd be in good hands with my new Egyptian friend who I think must have been a dervish in her former life. The training was our idea and she has Arabic as a first language, fluent English and an educational background. She's thoughtful and kind with a brilliant sense of humour.

And, crucially, our objectives were clear and simple.

Our remit was to train teenage girls from Syria and Jordan how to make photo films about each other. The pilot project was sponsored by UNICEF. There are problems in host communities in Jordan after the massive influx of refugees from Syria. And I've always felt that sitting in a room, interviewing a stranger, taking their pictures, and listening to them tell their story, enables you to like them more - or at least to understand them better.

We had a group of 8 girls: Jordanian Jordanians, Palestinian Jordanians and Syrians from Homs, Dera'a and Damascus. They were receptive from the start, keen to learn and started making friends with each other immediately. Volume levels got steadily higher all week. We worked solidly for 8 days, culminating in 2 days editing the material they had collected during the week. Some of the photographs were stunning, and the interviews, although they needed a lot of guidance from us, contained some important truths.

At the beginning of the week, one of the Syrian girls looked entirely closed and terrified - a shy 16 year old like a house with none of the lights on, and no one at home. By day 5 she had given a lovely interview. She explained: 'Any little thing can make me afraid' and went on to say how her biggest dream was to work with children, paricularly Syrians as they were united in their fear, and she felt she could help. By day 8 she was dressed in colours reminiscent of a parakeet, her eyes shining and mouth set in a huge grin. Her photographs were beautiful, and she found she had a voice.

At some point during the week I realised it felt like I was being carried. I didn't know if it was because of the positive vibes and energy emitting from my new friend, or from the girls, or simply that I had reverted to my former life, with the dwarves in the able hands of the Glammy down the road in Amman. But something came to our aid that week. And the feedback was positive - brilliantly timed with the arrival of one of the UNICEF team who came to see how we were getting on.

One of the Syrians raised her hand and said: 'We've never been given anything like this before, and we never meet Jordanians as we're afraid. This has been one of the best weeks of my life.' A tearful Jordanian girl said: 'We feel you've been doing this training with love in your hearts.' As I say, something came to help us, and we both finished the week with as much energy as we had started. All I could muster in Arabic to say at the end to this great group of girls, whose faces had become as familiar as my own hand after our time together, was: 'Your faces are in my head and my heart.'

It's amazing to see what spraying a little bit of water on the desert can do. All those tiny green shoots, that you would never know were there, start to peek through the crust. On day 8 there were some tearful goodbyes. Mascara everywhere. And we've been booked to train 8 boys in the autumn.

Results to come when we've had the screening next week.

That face, and others, in Manger Square

Viva il Pappa!

Since our recent trip to London and couple of additions to my wardrobe, J has been wondering about the recent inclusion of a pair of Birkenstocks, which he assures me belong only on the Via Dolorosa on the bottom of a pair of stout and probably hairy legs.

So I was delighted to be able to attend, in the very same footwear, a huge gathering in Manger Square in Bethlehem, to receive the Pope, where my Birkenstocks were as at home as the man himself. And practical too, may I add, considering we spent the entire morning standing in the late May sun, while he conducted a mass for an enraptured crowd of Arab Christians, a dwindling demographic in these troubled times.

It was heavy, but I was glad I took my long camera lens. It paid off.

There must have been hundreds of nationalities there, with a strong Argentinian contingent, where Pope Francis is originally from. After we had managed to muscle into the front of one of the enclosures, after an hour's wait, the little white Popemobile drew into the square, reminiscent of Peppa Pig's I thought, only in white. Just one look at that 77 year old face, and you know you're looking at an exemplary human. And the crowd told him so, with all their might.

The square rang with singing and cheering, and he conducted a mass in Italian and Arabic. We each had a programme of the service and I was interested to see that Arabic music scores also work backwards which was bit of a head bender, but perhaps another good exercise to avert the onset of Alzheimer's.

He has received very good press from the Arab side, since he took care to visit Palestinian sites first - including the separation wall where he prayed. And one of the Arab newspapers wrote a delighted piece about his discussion with Netanyahu about whether Jesus would have spoken Hebrew or Aramaic. Bibi (Netanyahu) argued Hebrew, of course. Pope Francis begged to differ, and told him so.

Just as the choir belted out the Cantus Finalis with some Arabic hued Alleluliahs, the muezzin at the Mosque of Omar, opposite the Nativity Church at the other side of the square, began the call to prayer and the air was filled with a marvellous, though hardly melodious, melange of sounds of devotion, which of all places in the world, felt exactly how it should be.

And I would say, that 'Abouna' (literally: our Father) as Pope Francis is known in Arabic by Muslims and Christians alike, has probably done more for peace in this region than anyone in politics over the last few years.

It was a great privilege to see the man, and to get a good look at that humble face, which positively shines with moderation and grace.

Ca fait du bien

Watermelon season

Saturday morning. Occasionally there are minutes of silence, when the dwarves are ensconced, like a dysfunctional couple, on an iPad and a television in different rooms, watching the same programme. It allows me time to wander about opening doors and windows and allow the air and light to come flooding in.

The Lozenge had been collecting photographs of J and I and arranging them around the house. He brandished one picture, taken when we'd just got engaged. 'Where was I in this photo?' he asked. I tried to avoid the obvious conversation at that early hour, but was lured into giving a brief explanation of how we begin life on the planet. 'I don't like being an egg, Mummy.' 

The night before, J and I had found some fun in the form of a French party. Les Francais, they know how to do things abroad, and arranged: 'Un Bal pour la Communaute Francaise a Jerusalem' which we attended despite not quite fitting into that category. Sometimes a good night out is as valuable as a good night's sleep, I thought as I drew up another blind feeling like we live on a ship. Each window has one, and I hate them being closed in daytime.

We met lots of people that we wouldn't usually, including a couple of wives of French Gendarmes with not a word of English or Arabic between them. But we chatted as they elegantly puffed their way through a packet of Vogue Menthe cigarettes. After a few more glasses of vin rouge each, I bumped into one of them in the bathrooms, leaning elegantly against the wall in her golden stilettos. 'Ca va?' she asked. 'Oui,' I replied, 'J'ai perdu mon mari, mais sauf ca, tout va bien, merci.' 

'De temps en temps ca fait du bien, n'est pas?' she remarked.

I wasn't quite sure I agreed, since at a party where I knew know one, J was my lynchpin, but I loved the line. It encapsulates so much about what I love about French women and their frankness. 

We also got talking to an American diplomat and his wife, a self confessed 'soccer Mom' with four children. They were funny and interesting, and described how his parents, from deep Michigan, needed to apply for their first passport in order to visit him on his first posting in Tunisia. 

We are starting to formulate a mosaic of friendly faces in this city. Ca fait du bien, aussi.