I am now… a MAN!!

That’s right!  You heard it here first! I am a man, according to Palestine?  I drove!!  I drove for the first time last night in this little red car all around the streets of Bethlehem!  It’s actually kind of fun driving around with no rules!  You cruise around under the assumption that EVERYONE is going to hit you… and it all works out.  We took a couple of people home into Bethlehem (we live in Bet Sahour) and it was all good until we had to navigate our way back without anyone in the car who knew where they were going.  A little scary? sure.  But a good experience.  We ended up driving through Bethlehem’s old city, where the “streets” are actually alleys that are only inches wider than the car.  I felt like Indiana Jones. 

Actually I don’t think driving is what cinched my manhood here…  There’s a lot of other factors that I don’t think I’m going to meet.  I had it explained to me the other night that I will never win myself a bride here because “my house is empty.”  Let me explain.  Apparently in this culture, it is customary for the guy/groom to take full financial responsibility for all that getting married entails.  First off, a guy shouldn’t even consider marriage (nor would a woman consider marrying a guy) unless he has his act together.  And by that I mean, a house (paid off), fully furnished, a yard, a car, and a steady job.  On top of the that, he is responsible for paying for the wedding, and in this culture, skimping on the wedding is a big no no.  The wedding industry is huge here.  Extravagant parties.  Finally, I was informed by my chocolate/sugar/fast food/candy-loving Palestinian co-worker that I was missing one crucial element.  He patted is rather substantial gut and told me “you see, a man without a belly is like… a house without furniture.  It’s just not comfy.”  Well, fortunately for me I already won myself a wife, the best one out there. 

This last week has been really busy, we’ve been working 12 hour days, mixed office work and manual labor.  We’ve been doing a big push on our “Leadership Center” which is where out high ropes course is and we’ll be running a lot of programs (once/if it’s ready).  The space used to be an outdoor restaurant, but after the second intifada here, the soldiers came through and trashed the place and owner left it.  So it was in pretty bad shape.  But They’ve done a lot of work to it.  The high ropes course is pretty cool:

It’s the only one in the Israel area and on of a few in the  middle east.  Needless to say, it attracted a lot of attention around the neighborhood and when they first erected it, they had problems with locals breaking in and stealing ropes and hardware right off the course.  Yup, kids climbing right up to the top of those forty foot poles to steal… whatever.  Safety’s not a big thing here. 

Char and I have been working on a “special” project this last week.  We’re in the process of building a composting toilet at the center.  Also cool: we’re building the walls out of tires, dirt, trash and cement.  There’s tons of trash and tires here, all over the roads and fields, what a cool way to do something with it.  Char mentioned the process earlier, here are some pics

 

So you can see the progression: after we built the wall, chicken wire, trash, cement.  Check out www.earthship.com to see how the pro’s  do it. 

With all these long days, it’s been pretty tiring.  I was excited to come to this part of the world thinking that Arabic coffee would be pretty big… well apparently that’s outdated here.  Nobody uses coffee makers here.  Apparently all the rage is… instant coffee… nooooo!  This is what the cool kids drink:

That’s right.  Oh Nescafe… how you defeat me.

Admittedly not the worst instant coffee I’ve ever had.  But this stuff is big enough that’s it’s the regular on restaurant menus.  You don’t just order a cup of coffee here.   Oh no.  “I would like a cup of Nescafe please.”

By the by, we took an afternoon walk over to the Shepherd’s Field, where is supposed that the shepherds were visited by the angel and told of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem (up on the hill there).  As it turns out, this field is where the Catholics think the Shepherds were informed.  And just across the valley, there’s another Shepherd’s Field where the Greek Orthodox church believes was the actual site.  Maybe they’re both wrong.  Maybe it actually happened in our living room!  Either way, it was kinda cool.  There was this excavation site that I’m not sure we were supposed to be in, but there were all these caves and underground passageways were people used to live (which is perfect because while it felt like 120 outside, it felt like 60 in these caves).  There were all these little individual rooms carved into the rock, and then this big meeting room:

That was pretty cool.  Then there was this fancy shmancy chapel thing on the site (which building extravagant, luxurious structures to remember a field is a discussion in and of itself) that we went and checked out:

And on the inside they had these little alcoves in the walls with murals portraying the story:

I tried to do this picture composite thing… you get the idea:

 

Whew!

There’s lots of other fun stuff we’re learning here, especially more about the conflict, which has been really eye opening.  But I’ll leave it at that for now. OH and the other night we went to a birthday part/going away party for people we didn’t really know and had all sorts of fun cultural crossings.

I don’t feel like typing any more now.