Gaza Becomes Darker
I have not posted for a few days because there were several electricity cuts, and with no electricity there is no internet.
A big problem in Gaza is the lack of spare parts. If the neon sign outside a shop breaks, the lights simply remain off- there are no spare parts to fix it. The light in the elevator of an office building that I was in broke and now one has to ride up 10 stories in the pitch dark. Each continuing day of the siege, Gaza becomes darker.
You really get the sense here that you are walking around in a large open air cage or prison, and in fact the best way to describe local politics is by using the cage analogy. You put two lions in a cage in the zoo, a cage small enough so that neither of them can mark out their own territory and fell like they have any real power or control. Though they are angry at you for caging them, they slowly start to let it out on each other, and eventually the proud and beautiful lions become skinny angry versions of themselves, covered in scratchs and scars from fighting each other with frustration and misery in their eyes.
Why do we learn foreign languages? Maybe because we want to learn about a new culture, travel to a different country, work there, etc. When I learned french, my education in the language was combined with an education in french cuisine, Edith Piaf, Gerard Depardieu, etc. Here the children start learning English in first grade. But looking at their work books I discovered something strange. Nowhere did it mention the rain in England, or the sights of New York or animals in Australia. The books taught children about Hasan from Ramallah, and Fairuz, and how to say Arabic ingredients in English. And I realized that for these children, who can not leave this strip, there is no point teaching them about foreign culture. They are learning English to help them get a job here, not to travel to an English-speaking country, and therefore the cultural education is not useful for them. This I found depressing.
In general the education system here is something of interest. There are government schools for local Palestinian children, and there are UNRWA schools that cater to any ancestors of the original refugees in 1948. The teaching staff in these schools is much better, though the curriculum is the same. The curriculum used to be the Egyptian one, and in the West Bank the Jordanian curriculum was taught, but finally the Palestinian Authority created it’s own curriculum. It had to be accepted by the Israeli government, and as one could guess, it is incredibly difficult to write a history of a people that satisfies the Palestinians and the Israelis. However it does try to remain apolitical as much as it can. The problem with the curriculum is that it is incredibly rigorous and does not accommodate for the events that take place, and the difficulties of many students to apply themselves to their studies because of the environment. As a result teachers are forced to rush through the material much too fast and the students end up learning very little.
Last night I had an experience that is I think very specific to Gazan. I was sitting in a lovely apartement overlooking the ocean- it would have been a lovely view, save all of the bombed buildings between me and the beach. I wanted to take my shoes of but was warned that during the war all the windows shattered into the apt, so though now there were now nice new windows in this UN staff apt building, the ground was still covered in shards of glass. Over an illegal Gin (alcohol is illegal and hard to come by) and 7up (there is absolutely no tonic in Gaza), I examined different reminants of explosives and discussed the possibility of the presense of DIME and looked at pictures a friend of mine had taken of victims of phosphorous bombs and was given a crash course into how exactly the chemical reactions take place by a team of specialists in the weapons disposal unit here with the UN.
