A Palestinian friend’s story, wishes for Syria, farewells to our Syrian friends, and transition to Bolivia

(Written before and just posted now, since we now have easy internet access--yeah!! Sorry for the out-of-orderness)

Hello everyone and Happy New Year! We’re now in route to Bolivia, sitting in the transit lounge in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Neil and I were amazingly lucky to have my parents and sister, Lavelle, join us for two weeks over the Christmas holidays. We spent four of our days together in Damascus, during which we were generously hosted for dinner by the family of my friend Fadwa. I met Fadwa last year, during a week spent considering “eHealth” amidst the beauty of Bellagio, Italy. Fadwa has been in charge of Syria’s “health information system”—putting computer systems in place country-wide to track birth, death, disease burden, etc. Fadwa is feisty, dedicated, purposeful, humorous, courageous, loyal, honest, collegial. I’m proud to be a colleague of hers in global health. I want to tell you the story of my friend Fadwa’s family, especially her father.

In 1948, when Israel became a state, Fadwa’s grandparents were told by the British authorities in Palestine that, for their safety they should leave—probably just for 2-3 weeks, during the war. Having 8 children, they complied, expecting to return very soon and thus not taking their valuables, significant money, or titles to property. They had been a wealthy family, but as the reality sunk in that they weren’t going back anytime soon, their father took a job pumping gas. This didn’t bring in enough money to care for the large family. So it was decided—of the 8 kids, the two girls wouldn’t go to school. And of the remaining six boys, only three could study. To be fair, Fadwa’s grandparents put their six sons’ names “into a hat” and drew three names. Fadwa’s father, it was decided, would not go to school. He became a barber, another brother a tailor. Of those who studied, two studied math and one economics. Fadwa’s father taught himself German on the side.

Fast forward, then, to when Fadwa’s brothers were in school. Living in Syria, they are allowed full access to government services (e.g., education, health, etc.) though they are not given Syrian passports (since this would conflict with Syria’s official stance that Palestinians must be re-established within a Palestinian state). As for feisty Fadwa, at about age 11, she fought with an unreasonable French teacher and so demanded of her parents that she go to a school that didn’t teach French. The nearest school meeting that requirement was a school specifically run for Palestinian refugees—so that’s where Fadwa went. Fadwa’s brothers occasionally came home with less-than-stellar report cards. And as happens, history mixed with family dynamics, and her father was angered by their lack of dedication—since he had not himself had the chance to study. Fast forward further, then, to the Iraq war—when Fadwa’s father, watching TV over dinner, dropped all the food off the table in his rage at seeing repeated what had so dramatically affected his own life.

When my family ate with Fadwa and her parents, we were given slippers for our feet, generously and delightfully served mounds and mounds of food that had been lovingly prepared by her mother. Humor and good will surmounted our partial language barriers, and we felt tremendously loved by all of them. They were honest about opinions on world issues, religion (on which Fadwa and her dad see differently), and careful to prepare medicinal tea for our sore throats. We got to see the family pictures, see their apartment that has been home for 35 years (Fadwa: “My parents asked when we were little if we wanted to move to a different house, but we couldn’t imagine not living here!!”), meet their fish, and taste the candied eggplant delicacy Fadwa’s mother makes (a very time-consuming process).

My family has long known people from the Middle East, are familiar with the injuries if not the politics of the region. And yet that day made an impression on me by putting a face—my friend Fadwa’s face, and her dad’s—into the “his-story” of Palestine. It doesn’t provide any solutions, only compassion and a reminder that the big stories of the news, are the big stories of people’s lives. And with that, comes a renewed accountability to engage, to share my thoughts, to help my own community be aware and be accountable, especially given America’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (More on this below.) Such as here, with this blog. Now you, reader, are anointed too, to be interested, engaged, educated and influential.

What impressions of Syria do I leave with? That the people are fabulous, the food is great, and the country is, well, getting there. There is a lot of optimism, increasing foreign investment. It’s easier to buy a car than before. Despite some economic downturn relative as throughout the world, in general, people are vibrant, have things to do and are productive. At the same time, there is still some fear—for example, that the police might think us spies and question our Syrian friends. (Beyond one straight-forward phone call, we never knew it if the police were following us.) Kurdish people living in Syria also feel marginalized. And there’s nervousness about getting too interested in US and European news, issues, politics. American policy does cause problems for Syria and Syrians, both directly and indirectly. One friend’s business is losing customers as it can no longer import small light-bulbs for cars from the Hungarian producer since US-based GE has bought that producer and thus the product is sanctioned. Another friend whose beautiful manufacturing facility produces dental anesthesia won’t even consider US markets partly because of US trade relations. US support for Israel is a constant thorn in the flesh for Syrians. Numerous times a day, we were engaged in conversations re: Bush or Obama and why the US policy is what it is.

As I described above, I do walk away with a renewed desire to take the risks (like this one) of sharing my perspective, of seeking to influence US policy in the Middle East toward greater alignment with fairness and human rights. However, I’d also like to venture a perspective for Syria, based admittedly on a brief stay. There is still deep, huge resentment toward Israel especially for the 1967 war where they took the Golan Heights from Syria. I would hope for Syria that they are able to negotiate a resolution internally if not internationally. As we traveled to Jordan, our Syrian friends told how wonderful Jordan was (there’s great malls, people are educated, the place is clean, the roads are good), and they were right. When we traveled to Turkey, it was the same (the bathrooms cleaner, the offices more professional, the shops more organized). Syria has different challenges (and a much larger population), but one of those challenges seems to be a willingness to bargain a piece of their future, for their past—to compromise how progressive they can be by holding out for something that may not come. I want the best for Syria, for all of our wonderful friends who enjoy the rich life but also struggle with the daily realities of living in a country where you’ve got to be a bit of a fighter to get ahead. So I hope that Syria will engage in the best solution regarding Israel and Palestine that it can, and then resolve to look more forward than backward. I sincerely hope that this perspective isn’t hurtful to any of my Syrian friends reading this blog, I offer it with all good will for them and for Syria.

So we’ve now packed up and moved on from Syria. I’ve decided that our plan of moving countries every three months was an invitation to have my heart somewhat broken every three months. It’s always hard for me to say good-bye to people who have, despite language barriers, the awkwardness of difference in culture or religion, and in some cases deep fear / suspicion, opened themselves to us with generosity, candor, humor, patience, and good will. I will remember so many wonderful people and their fond farewells, including:
• A last farewell dinner with friends (with kids coming in from karate)—delicious as ever with mujederra, fried potatoes, fried cauliflower, hummus, salad, boiled eggs, bread.
• Gifts from our neighbors—two coffee cups, two little jewelry boxes, a Kleenex box decorator, a bottle of baby powder from their 11-year-old’s work place (he fills these bottles to support the family, instead of going to school). And his willingness to take the injured bird from us (despite his mis-led efforts to bilk us out of $50 for two weeks of bird food), and care for it until it can be safely released.
• Fancy hot chocolate drinks, saying fond farewells to the “young hip crowd” we were generously included in.
• The carpenter and his kids with gifts of Arabesque geometric designs.
• Lunch with Ahmad and his sisters, and a coincidental “farewell on the bus” with Nour.
• Very fond text or voice messages from Judy, Bushra, Ahmad, Abdel, Mohammed, and others.
• Leaving Syria in convenience, comfort and style with a friend who took us to Turkey for a flight to Ankara

I now am excited about our next stop, Bolivia, with warmer climate, Spanish language (Roman characters—yeah!!), higher altitude, less concern re: modesty, and hopefully hot showers.

Bolivia - First Glimpses (by Neil)

“There is another world, but is in this one.” - W. B. Yeats

Bolivia es bueno. The transition from Syria has brought us to a culture a world (well a half-world) away.

Woman here display hair and legs and belly-buttons and cleavage all of which can be seen from the vantage of my wi-fi connected park bench. Of course we have also changed hemispheres so we have jumped from the cold of winter to the sun-burning skies of Bolivia.
The weather here in Sucre has been sublime – hard to imagine better – as we have blue skies now with cotton candy clouds. Yvette and I have been here one week and stayed at a sweet little guest house with vibrant paint colors, a charming host family, a great little communal kitchen, a fascinated throughput of travelers, and a well stocked library of pirated movies (as far as I can tell there are no others available…) I really enjoyed Doubt and found it thought provoking.

Last week I did 5 hours of Spanish lessons a day – an hour of individual lessons at 7 a.m., and then a 4 hour group class from 8:30 – 12:30. This next week I’m planning to cut back a bit and do 3 hours a day of individual lessons. Yvette, whose Spanish is far superior to mine, is also doing 3 hours a day of individual lessons and so that adds structure to our mornings.
The only thing to complain about has been that my bed (our room has two singles) is rather cup shaped and morning finds my back urging me to move towards vertical – which is good in that it has moved me to explore the city early in the morning and be up around 5:30 a.m… This morning I had studied my Spanish, drawn a picture, read a novella, and explored the Mercado campesino before Yvette managed to rouse herself.

The village market here is amazing for its breadth of offerings and geographic coverage… block upon block of potatoes, onions, mountains of bananas and plantains, baskets of grapes from the vineyards lined and covered with grape leaves, piles of melons, rows upon rows of carcasses and meats and cuts and innards, flower stalls, bountiful juice stands, corn and maize…. I bought some bright pink and yellow colored potatoes and purple fingerlings to cook up for lunch with some green beans and onions.

Our big news of the week is that we have rented a house here for the next 3 months. We traipsed the streets yesterday and navigated the local phone system – pop into a stall at an internet or phone store and make your local call (dial 0 first if it is a cell phone number – starts with 7). Our initially halting Spanish monologue became quite polished by the end: “We saw your ad in the paper for an apartment? We are Americans? Is it still available? Is it furnished? Can we see it? When can we see it? Thanks! See you at 4:30 this afternoon.” We looked at 10 houses and found a cute furnished apartment of a lawyer (formerly a judge) who is moving to Santa Cruz to practice corporate law. She is fluent in English and was fair and helpful in answering all our questions. $250/month is hard to beat (although we looked at ones that were as little as $70/month) for a cute place in a UNESCO World Heritage city – 4 blocks from the city center.

For some reason this last paragraph is being written at 4:30 a.m. having just watched Million Dollar Baby… I think I like Clint Eastwood better with each new movie he is involved in. The epilogue to our day yesterday was a funeral service at the Sucre Cemetary with hundreds of people in attendance and a mariachi band (or at least that style of dress and instruments) playing and singing funeral dirges – as the procession made its way from the gates of the cemetery to the vaulted crypt. We watched as they slid the coffin into the cement cubicle – 10’ off the ground – and cemented a coverplate over the front and plastered and stenciled the deceased’s name and filled the niche to overflowing with flowers. We both cried a few tears contemplating the sting of mortality and the loss of love ones – and the fear, as Yvette eloquently said, not of death, but that we might not live well enough. Because we don’t say it enough – to those friends and family who read this – we love you and all the quirks, memories, awkward moments, foibles, laughter, and richness you have made with us. We aren’t great at keeping in touch, especially when we are separated geographically, but we are often reflective and few hours pass by that things in our exotic other place here in Bolivia don’t remind us of loved ones or memories. Just yesterday we thought of Brian K and his guitar, of TJ and Susan and the Costa Rican Beach, of Debbie and Carlos and their beautiful family, of Lisa and her organized vacations, of Alan and Jane and their experience at Berkeley, of Sydney and her embracing of Common Ground, of Linda and John and their thoughtful engagement through travel, of Becky, of backpackers, of January birthdays – sorry Wayne, of Mari and Aiden, of our parents, of so many others… I like the quote I began this entry with, that I lifted from the front of True Confessions of a Part-Time Indian, I think this world contains many worlds – and we are blessed to be here – talking politics, feeding pigeons, pondering llama fetuses, visiting lunar landscapes, buying flowers, eating chocolate, negotiating for humintas, renting a house, watching babies be swaddled with packing straps into a papoose… The similarities in our humanity and sadly our inhumanity are much greater than the differences. We look forward to seeing all of you and know that we don’t have to travel far to live, to love, to grow. Vida mis amigos simpaticos. Hasta pronto.

Olive Trees and Burls and a Bowl and a Spoon – Syrian Labors (Neil)

My language ability keeps me from being able to communicate the ideas that I would like to, and thus I am assumed to be the maturity level of my language – namely a babbling toddler. It is the great frustration of being in a country where I am not fluent.

I voiced to someone that I wanted to work with a farmer for a day – I had visions of sheep and livestock, but ended up out at the olive orchard. The 10 workers shaking down the trees were all women, while the 3 men seemed set themselves to daily prayers, tea drinking and talking – interspersed with bouts of driving the pickup around. Actually for the men was reserved some difficult of removing burled and old root masses from the trees to allow new roots to grow and bring in water for the tree. The owner of the orchard, Abdul Rachman, had just had a surgery in Jordan, and the other man was lazy or tired and taking it easy by the time I reached there. So I had plenty of opportunity to swing the sledge and work my hands raw. Towards the end of my 2 hours there, we ate and my ride declared it was time to head back. I decided that I would go back the next day and take Yvette with me as there is something very connecting to a place about working in it. I took one of the burls with me to remember the experience and perhaps make into a bowl or sculpture.

The next day I did return and brought food for the crew – that was a fun shopping experience. I also developed an appreciation (through the lack of one) of a balanced sledge hammer with a straight and smooth handle that doesn’t twist in ones hands. I was a fine mess by the time the big burly worker arrived with calluses the thickness of my hands, but now 1 month on my hands have returned to their untoughened selves... while the connections formed by work remain strong and vivid.

The olive wood burl had grown over the last 150 years, and having hacked it out of the earth I saw the beauty in its twists and turns and gnarls. It takes time to appreciate this type of beauty – it is the beauty of working hands, of fisherman faces shaped by a life of facing into the saltwater and sun, it is found in the patina of Italian stones taking their knocks since antiquity.

As we neared the end of our Syrian sojourn, we finally met our neighbor - the artist who had painted our room and restored much of our house. His house was lovely with carved plaster work, paintings, calligraphy, a stalactite decoration commom since the Syrian Ayyubid era, a 16 meter deep well and well chosen artifacts, textiles and art pieces adorning the walls and niches … We had tried to look at this home before, but had no response from our phone calls, emails, and notes left on the door. It turned out he was in Spain with his Spanish wife, but by coincidence we ended up renting a house 3 doors down from his in the old city.

I wanted to turn the burl into a bowl and found a shop with a band saw to begin the project by flattening one side. It turns out our neighbor – Achmed #101 as we came to know him – has a brother who is a wood turner and a phone call or two later found me with the lump of burl riding through the city streets to a back alley shop with a 3” padlock and 4 lathes and wood shavings aplenty. In the end I think my language ability had pegged my competence level around 7 years old, and so I wasn’t entrusted with the gouges and chippers that pared down the burl to a 9” bowl.

And while my skill level on a lathe definitely couldn’t match his, my carefulness would have compensated his cavalier-ness… I spied some calipers on the wall, and had even gotten them down, but in the end they weren’t used and the bottom was thinned two much for the jam to have structurally integrity. The gouge caught some of the twisted grain and torque the center of the bowl out of the wood. A dime sized whole now present in the bottom as though to drain a plant. I hid my disappointment and I think he hid his as well and we agreed that we would call it a feature – make up a story to tell of its function rather than admit the carelessness and the flawed execution of the desired product.

The olive wood smells of Mediterranean cuisine and begs one to just add tomatoes and crushed salt and basil to its aromas. It burns wonderfully as well – a fate that most of this burl’s neighbors endured after a lifetime of giving water – an irony of all wood destined for the flames really. I saved a small chunk from the burl that had been band sawed off to make a spoon to accompany the bowl, and my last full day in Syria I got the chance.

Achmed #101 had also introduced us to a master carpenter who specializes in Arabesque. He is an artist with wood, a humble, diligent and knowledgeable craftsman. I asked if I might work with him for a day, and he welcomed me to his shop, and although my language skills continue to bring my competence into question, he eventually entrusted me with the saws and I spent 6 hours table sawing, band sawing, chop sawing, and shaping 120 Arabesque mahogany pieces for a panel they were working on. My day was interspersed with lessons on the crosscutting, food and drink, band saw blade sharpening, coiling and uncoiling the 12 foot blade, using compasses and dividers for layout, jigs for making repetitive angular cuts, tips for avoiding tear-out, antique woodwork show-and-tells of the deteriorating 200 year old door panel he was commissioned to reconstruct using the same joinery techniques. That day was capped by an evening at his house – joined by Yvette and her family – where we were served up khanoon music and singing and dancing and food. The source of the carpenter’s compassion and sparkle evident in his parents faces who joined us and laughed and danced and urged us on to eat and sing and communicate and photograph.

The carpenter gave me an open invitation to come back. I arranged my last day to skip out on the final walk-through and financial settling of accounts with our landlord of our house so that I could spend 3 more hours in his shop. I brought my wooden burl with me that I wanted to turn into a spoon, and this soon became the project of the morning. He helped and supervised me and it felt like shop class as he suggested ways for me to make the saw take only the wood… In the next phase of the project he pulled from a drawer an old gouge and after watching my technique, sharpened it and gave me a few pointers. By then he had started to make a giant spoon, showing me how he would rough it out of a 3” log and stopping at each step to check with me as to the shape it should be and if that was what I wanted (my language skills not good enough to say that I only wanted one spoon – a memory more than a utensil, but of course I was getting a lesson and a memory which was doubly valuable to me).

The spoon is with me now, the bowl having made its way with family back to the states to await reunion in June. The spoon is very rough. I still need to work the edges and gouge out some more, but time did not permit a finished product my last day… But the memory of work on the trees, and the wood, and the bowl, and my spoon – one of my few tangibly productive acts in Syria – reminds me that work is a gift that connects us and imbues us with meaning and gives an outlet for creativity and creates things of beauty and develops our character and our friendships, and that I have been blessed throughout my life to have it.