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| Bilbo scopes out the competition for his own book "There & Back Again" |
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
Beirut
Or rather, *I'm* in Beirut. I have an apartment in Hamra. I haven't got a job yet, but I've started volunteering at Shatila. I went to Baalbek. And also, a PC party. I went back to Byblos for a bit. I nearly got raped near the pigeon rocks, in a small watery cave. Things yo yo so much I'm not sure if everything's amazing or awful in my life right now, I'll wake up one day and everything that needed solving is solved, and then I find out my sub-letter skipped out on me without ever paying rent and my landlords' want a $1000 in reparations. I don't even know. Still. I'll keep soldiering on. It's hard to think things are bad when you really know what bad is, so deep it's in your bones.
That thing I wanted to say, way back during my last days in Rashidieh. Tragedy doesn't cross out tragedy; nor does it justify any. This one girl in my camp talked about her worries that she would go to former concentration camps and could only think about how the Israeli government used them to stir up hatred for Palestinians during high school field trips by saying "Look at what the Nazis did to us; Look at what the Palestinians want to do to us now." Well if that's true, that's tragic, but it can't make what happened in those concentration camps any less.
During orientation we talked to '48 survivors who had fled their homes over 60 years ago. What struck me was how similar their stories were to those I'd heard from Holocaust survivors during my class last year. So much running and screaming and hiding. So many mistakes. One girl said she grabbed her little brother and ran and only realized later that she'd only grabbed a doll. If you had heard that story without context would you know if that little girl had been Palestinian or Jewish?
If any family or friends out there are reading this, stay tuned for more updates on my travels and more pictures of Bilbo soon.
That thing I wanted to say, way back during my last days in Rashidieh. Tragedy doesn't cross out tragedy; nor does it justify any. This one girl in my camp talked about her worries that she would go to former concentration camps and could only think about how the Israeli government used them to stir up hatred for Palestinians during high school field trips by saying "Look at what the Nazis did to us; Look at what the Palestinians want to do to us now." Well if that's true, that's tragic, but it can't make what happened in those concentration camps any less.
During orientation we talked to '48 survivors who had fled their homes over 60 years ago. What struck me was how similar their stories were to those I'd heard from Holocaust survivors during my class last year. So much running and screaming and hiding. So many mistakes. One girl said she grabbed her little brother and ran and only realized later that she'd only grabbed a doll. If you had heard that story without context would you know if that little girl had been Palestinian or Jewish?
If any family or friends out there are reading this, stay tuned for more updates on my travels and more pictures of Bilbo soon.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
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