Red, Brown, Yellow, Black and White…

Singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” as a child made me self-conscious. The line “red and yellow, black and white they are precious in his sight” always drew quick stares from my classmates. I couldn’t blame them because I was trying to picture people I knew who matched those colors as we sang, too. I thought choosing those four colors was limiting, and could never picture someone I knew who was yellow. Besides, I had thought, what’s the difference between someone with yellow skin and a person with white skin? Weren’t they one in the same? I knew I was the one who brought the child with black skin to light for everyone, even though I knew I was brown. Black is the closest to brown, right? At least they were partially right because my hair is/was black. I always wondered why brown was left out. A few years ago, I was delighted to hear that the colors of the children’s skin changed in the song! The latest version includes brown now (If any new colors have been added recently, please let me know). It’s very exciting, I know! Yesterday we were singing the song with Miss Martha’s group, a wonderful group of Christian people who come from Georgia every year to love, sing, and do crafts with our students. (Miss Martha, a woman close to her 80’s, has been coming to Bethlehem for about 10 years now, bringing different people with her each time. The children adore her!) As we sang about the “red, brown, yellow, black, and white” children of the world, I became hot with embarrassment like I had as a child. I quickly glanced around to see if anybody was looking at me to identify a brown person, and then realized we were ALL brown people in the audience! Nobody was staring at me! It was the most liberating experience I’ve had in a long time, being a part of the majority, here in Palestine of all places! Oh, and if you can give me an example of a yellow person, please let me know.

Maria Update

For those of you who have been faithful followers of the blog you’ll recall our first encounter with Maria (see “A Problem Like Maria”). Maria is doing well. Mandy and I went back to visit her again with two of my tenth grade girls. She’s still in the hospital in Jerusalem. For Maria though, still being in the hospital is a good thing. Being paralyzed from the neck down, this is the only place where Maria can receive the kind of care she needs.
We brought her some fun little things to put in her hair and the girls painted her nails, did her hair and put some of the clips in. We laughed and smiled. It’s hard for Mandy and I because we don’t speak much Arabic so we tend to just sit there and smile and wonder if we look like idiots. But as we got up to leave Maria’s father came with us. He told us about how much it means that we came back again and that it really makes Maria happy when people come to visit. You have to figure different faces must really break up the monotony of living in a hospital all the time. So he asked us to come back again if we could and thanked us.
It turns out that the father is trying to petition the Israeli government for permission to live near the hospital, in which case I felt like telling him not to mention that I had been there but if he had to not to say anything about any 2000 year old tree stumps. (I’m pretty sure I’m on a list somewhere now.) He said they’ve agreed to some things but not to others. I don’t know what he’s asking for but I’m pretty sure whoever he’s asking has never spent anytime at the hospital listening to Maria practice her Hebrew (which has improved dramatically even since we were there last.) If they did their heart would melt and they would see how innocent and sweet this girl is and how lovingly her father waits on her hand and foot and cares for her in every way he possibly can. I’m sure if they saw that they would realize that there is no valid reason for saying no to these people.
We went; we smiled; we loved; we did our best to be Jesus to these people. This land could use more Christians. They’re such a minority. Today we went to the First Communion of a boy in Mandy’s class. It was a really cool experience. It was all in Arabic and I have no idea what they said but I’ve been to enough catholic services to know what was going on. I sat there thinking about how the little gray haired lady a few rows in front of us looked like an Arabic version of my Nana Mella. And I thought about how really after something like this we ought to be heading over to Aunty Betty’s house for gnocchis. We have had some discouraging conversations lately with people both Arabic and American who look down their noses at the Catholic and the Orthodox people around here as if they’re not really believers. This just bugs the heck out of me. Of course I realize there are nominal Catholics and nominal Orthodox Christians just like there are nominal Protestant Christians. What does it help to go around pointing fingers saying this way or that way is the perfect way to follow Jesus and all others are wrong? There are just too few of us here to be that petty. Can we please work together so that we can have a more effective witness? I seem to remember Jesus pleading for this somewhere around John 17. As this little boy stood up there today and took his first communion I rejoiced. I think God can meet him in that and is not hindered by the denominations and divisions we create. Praise God, one more little Arabic kid is being welcomed into Christian community in the Land where Jesus was born.

Stumped Pt. 2

So for those of you keeping tabs on the on going whodunit which I have entitled the Herodian Caper, I’ll give you an update. Miss Grace, the elementary school principle and school headmaster decided it would be best to go over to the Herodian and talk directly to the caretaker there and explain what we’d found out from our students. I had my doubts about how effective this was going to be. After all this guy seemed to be holding a pretty decent grudge against us since he did call the fuzz and all. Furthermore, what could we tell the guy… “Well sir we questioned our students and we got squat. Hope that helps with your investigation.”
With all these thoughts running around in my head, I pile into the van with Miss Grace and we trek over to the Herodian. I just had to trust that Miss Grace understands the culture more than I do, God will work things out, it will all be ok.
We got to the Herodian and the caretaker has a huge dog, which is great start because Miss Grace just got done telling me on the van ride over how she is terrified of dogs. Luckily, this dog was more interested in shade than in us so we walked right past him with scarcely more than a sniff (from the dog, not us.) We sat down in the caretaker’s office. His name is Natan (Nathan in Hebrew). He showed us pictures of the lights that had been broken and the tree stump that was missing and he told us how they have school groups there all the time but they’d never had anything like this happen. He said he hated to think that our kids might have done this because it was Jewish site but he was kind of feeling like that was the case. We assured him that if it was our kids, which it kind of seems like it may have been, that they were not thinking on that level. It seems more like the stupid stuff kids just do when there’s not enough people watching. We told him that felt responsible because we should have brought a smaller group or watched them more closely and he seemed to appreciate that. He told us he would like to see a formal letter of apology from our school and then he would drop his complaint with the police.
So that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll write him a letter and hopefully smooth things over with Natan and the Police. Pray that this letter works and that they do let the matter go without pressing any charges. That could cause big problems for our school and any future field trips we might like to attempt.
I guess what I got out of this whole experience is this: well first of all, I’m never taking the whole high school on a field trip again. But also, it was cool to see Natan and Miss Grace interact. Palestinian and Israeli, they sat down and talked about their differences. It’s possible. Who knew?