A Problem Like Maria

Last Monday in World History with my tenth grade students, one of my kids brought in a story that really moved us all. A little girl name Maria was injured in an air strike in Gaza about a year ago and she was paralyzed from the neck down. It was a case of mistaken identity. Her mother and older brother along with her grandmother and her uncle were all killed. Maria, Her father, and her younger brother were spared. We all sat silently as my student read to us about how this little girl and her father and brother have received charity from two Israeli doctors to pay for her hospital care up until now. She was moved to a highly specialized hospital for paralyzed children in Jerusalem. Her father stays with her 24/7 because he’s not allowed to leave the hospital. He’s not sure if he goes home if he’ll be allowed back to see his daughter.
My students were all really touched by this little girl’s story and so I asked them if they’d like to write to her and maybe paint her a picture or something. To which they replied “Mister, why can’t we go visit her?” I thought for a minute and I couldn’t come up with any good reason why we shouldn’t. It’s a real beautiful thing when high schoolers think outside themselves. It’s not inherent in their nature, so when it happens you know God is working. So I told them if my visa would come through I would take them. Well, our visas came through the very next day. When God is moving, get on board or get out of the way.
So Mandy, another one of the teachers, and I all pile in the little school van with 5 tenth grade girls and we head off to Jerusalem to visit this little girl. Just the sight of her made some of my girls cry and they had to leave the room. Maria is about 5 years old and although she is paralyzed from the neck down she is full of life and full of joy. My students collected themselves and showered this little girl with love for almost 3 hours! It was amazing. We told one of the girls that she should become a nurse because she spent the entire time caring for this little girl’s needs; doing her hair, painting her nails, even rubbing her eyes for her when they itched.
There was laughter all around accompanied by smiles and pictures, but at times the sadness was almost immobilizing. As I stared into this little girls face the reality of it was crushing to the spirit. Palestinians bomb the Israelis, so the Israelis defend themselves, but the defense carries too far, so the Palestinians kill again, so the Israelis kill again and so on and so on. If it sounds like a maddening cycle come stare into Maria’s big brown eyes and see how much more infuriating it is then. Come spend an hour with this little girl and tell her it’s her fault simply because she’s from a certain town.
I’m sitting there mulling this all over in my mind when one of my students says the most remarkable thing. “Mister Doug, ask if we can pray for her.” All of the sudden I realized I was doing it again. I was thinking of how we can ‘solve the whole problem,’ when Jesus’ call to us is not to solve every problem. His call to us is to love one another. So we asked her family and they agreed. We circled around this little girl and I began to pray. And as we stood there, it hit me: A bunch of Christians circled around a little Muslim girl in a Jewish hospital. This is what it’s all about. This is the love of Christ crossing borders and boundaries. We didn’t “solve” anything but we made a difference in Maria’s life. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Hands

So this year I’ve been thinking about what I’m thankful for and it’s been tough to pick one thing. All the blessings that we’ve experienced in just the passed three months (yes, we just passed the 3 month mark on the 16th) would be so hard to condense down into one short little statement of “I’m thankful for ________.” I just don’t think I could do it. But as I sat at our kitchen table last night making my mom’s stuffing recipe for our High School’s Thanksgiving party I began to cry because I realized what I was thankful for: Hands.
You see, for the past couple of years my Nana Phyllis wasn’t able to help much at Thanksgiving because her hands hurt her so much. But she could still tear up the bread for my mom’s stuffing. So I remember her sitting at the kitchen table in Natick tearing up the bread while the smell of butter & onions hung thick in the air. It was bittersweet to be sitting there tearing up the bread and to have the thought occur to me again, ‘her hands don’t hurt her anymore.’
It made me think of Nana Mella too and how her hands hurt her so much yet every year she would work through the pain to make apple pie because she loved us so much.
Of course I thought of my own mother’s hands as well. It was the day before Thanksgiving and from the time I got out of school until the time I went to bed I barely sat down. I wanted everything to be great for our students at the party today. I guess I get that from my mom, because I know her hands have been working non-stop since yesterday to make everything perfect for Thanksgiving. I miss all those hands right now but how can I be sad when I received such blessing from the Lord through all those hands and many more I haven’t even mentioned. Whose hands are you thankful for today?

On a lighter note, here’s a thought to make you all smile. I had quite a surreal moment this morning when we went to pick up the turkeys from the Bakery that cooked them over in Bethlehem. My student, Jamal, and I drove over at 8:00 to get them from the man who had been cooking them since midnight. So Jamal and I cross Manger Square in front of the Church of the Nativity to pick up these two turkeys with nothing more than dish towels to hold the pans with. And as we’re running across Manger Square each holding a 20 pound, flaming hot turkey I say to Jamal, “You know Jamal, most of my friends in the States will never get to visit Manger Square let alone run through it holding a 20 pound cooked turkey!” To which Jamal replied “Please Mister, just don’t drop it or the whole High School will be mad at us!” Needless to say the turkeys made it and the party was success. Happy Thanksgiving everybody, we love you and miss you all.

All these things-Part 2

Maybe it's a liberal interpretation of the verse but I watched Matthew 6:33 happen to my husband yesterday. One of the tough parts about packing to leave for two years are the things that you'd really love to bring but you're not sure you'll ever get to use. And if you can't say, "yes I'm sure I'll use that all the time" then it probably won't make the cut. For Doug that meant bacon. Anyone who knows Doug knows that he loves bacon. He relished Saturday mornings with the family at “Franny’s” in Natick, where bacon accompanied every meal. He has been known to say, “What doesn’t go well with bacon??” But when we left we just weren't sure bacon would be available in supermarkets in Bethlehem so we left the bacon home. Sure it was tough and I knew Doug was pretty bummed but what can you do? What sort of missionary refuses to go to the mission field because he can't have bacon? Well don't you know there’s a lovely store that Doug frequents just about daily, called “Fufu.” He had checked out whether they had bacon right when we got here, but to no avail. We've been trying to find out if other stores have it, but nobody does. Then last night Doug paid a visit to our store “Fufu.” Doug barely had gotten in the door and an employee at Fufu says,"I have bacon (that looked scary) or I have THIS,” and she held up real bacon! Long story short, as I heard Doug cooking up breakfast this morning, I listened to the familiar sound of bacon frying in the pan, and I realized that he had given up bacon for God. God gave it back. "...seek first the Kindom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well."

"...unless you become like little children..."

The power is out in our apartment right now so I thought I would blog about a
memorable moment from my classroom this past week. Earlier in the week,
two students of mine had gotten into a tiff on the playground, which is the norm
around here most days. It got blown way out of proportion as the day went on.
The next day I got an earful from both mothers even before the school day began.
The sad thing is, I come to find out that the kids are cousins and the mothers are
in-laws. As one mother is complaining to me outside school, the other mother is
inside school listening to our conversation and shaking her head. I go into school
and hear her side of the story. The other mother goes into the “teacher’s room/closet”
with her son to avoid discussion with us. I want both parents to come together, but
it’s clear they will not. They were downright disgusted with the other child. One
mother even told me “not to let her child near the other one.” She says, “to avoid
problems,” which is a good problem-solving technique to model to your child, right?
It goes against every grain of my being. The children make it through the rest of the
day with little trouble. I even saw one assisting the other with putting on a band-aid.
I gave the children a Thanksgiving word search the next day. I don’t exactly know
how it came about, but the two children came skipping up to me and asked, “Miss, can we work together?” When I said yes, you would have thought I said I was taking them to Disney World or something; they were thrilled to work together. It didn’t strike me until after the day was done what a cool moment I had witnessed, but I thought how cool would it have been if I could have videotaped it for their parents? Well, honestly, it would have been lost on the mothers. (Families are very competitive around here) If only the parents would have gotten it, though, because their children sure did. All I could think was good work, Lord!.

It is events like this one that reminds me of why I went into
teaching in the first place.

Olive these things

So I must give credit where credit is due, my sister, Kim, thought of the title. It fits though. Recently we were witnesses to one of the oldest cycles of life here in the Middle East: Olive Harvesting. I've spoken of it already in a few other posts because it really does consume a lot of people's time over here for quite a while. We've seen people picking Olives continually around here for the past 3-4 weeks. We were not exempt. We got a chance to try our hand at the Olive Harvest as well. We went up with Miss Grace's family to help pick their family's olives for a morning. It's tough work. There's no machine that harvests them for you. It's all done by hand. The men on the ladders with tarps under the trees and the women on the ground cleaning the olives. Even the kids have a job to do. They pick up whatever falls off the tarp and gets left behind. We've got a great round of pictures that is still waiting to be sent out. There's a picture of me up in an olive tree, a picture of Mandy on the ground cleaning and gathering olives. It was a lot fun for us to be a part of this. It's not that the work it a whole lot of fun, it's quite tedious actually, but what really is enjoyable is to watch the family all interact. For them it's like a picnic. A week long picnic. Sure they complain about the work and they say it's boring but meanwhile they're all laughing and joking around having a good time. They eat their meals right outside on the ground, they make their coffee over an olive wood fire with the branches they've pruned from the trees. It's like a family reunion in a way.

We even got to go to the Olive Press this past week. The whole community has an Olive Press Co-of. They all own it a way. They all bring their olives down to the press and they line up. Literally, they have a warehouse full of olives sacks. Then over the course of the next couple weeks the press (which is an Italian import, because as Miss Grace confirmed for us, the best stuff comes from Italy) runs continually day and night. In fact this part is quite competitive. The line forms on first-come-first-serve basis. If some family isn't there at say, 2 a.m. when they're press time is called, they lose their spot in line. Miss Grace says fights break out every year at the press when some family who misses their turn in line comes back and tries to jump in line. It's like a Soap Opera. I'd call it "Olive My Children." That one I just came up with myself, what do you think Kim? The cool thing was if you think back to our pictures that we sent out from the Galilee you probably passed quickly over a few pictures that were of ancient olive presses. We saw one at Capernaum and one at Corazin. This isn't a new process at all. Sure the Italians have maybe perfected it a bit as with most things like cars, soccer, and dinner but this part of the world has been doing this for thousands of years. We got to be a part of it and that was amazing.

It got thinking about other cycles that have been going on here for ever and ever. This week the Israelis were pounding Gaza. Of course they missed a few targets and as usual the civilian death toll is sickening. It hurts more now. We watch the news and it's no longer strange looking faces in weird place names. Beit Hanoun where this happened this past week doesn't sound too different from Beit Jala. Those faces don't look too different from our students. It makes us physically ill. It has to stop. Here's my theory, which I know will never happen, but I still think it will work. The Israelis always do this over respond thing like they've been doing in Gaza this week. They go in kill a bunch of civilians then the Palestinians spout the "we will avenge" rhetoric and there's a couple bombings etc. and the cycle repeats. What the Palestinians need to do is stand up next time and say "we will not respond to this atrocity, it's so grievous, so awful, that we want the world to see what an unequal response the Israelis have made and we will not respond in kind." The best case scenario is that the Israelis would be forced to stop the attacks because the violent response has ceased. Who are they going to attack if no one fights back? The worst case scenario is that the Israelis go on attacking a people who refuse to respond in kind. The world community wouldn't let this happen. The reason the world community lets the Israelis get a way with this now is because they see the Palestinians respond with terrorism. If you take that away, what are you left with? A big bully beating up on a little guy that won't defend himself.

The catch is, it's not in the Arab mind set to think like that. They consider it a great dishonor not to respond. It would be better to die as the last man fighting, revenging your family than to do nothing. That's why the cycle keeps repeating itself. Friends, please don't stop praying. We love you all.