My apologies to anyone who thought I was keeping a travel blog. As
anyone who actually reads this blog regularly (all 2.5 of you! Who is
the .5? Is your last name Oblong?) it's just a blog filled with generic
posts that happens to often be written in foreign countries and
occasionally takes extremely bizarre side turns. My Facebook was not in
my control when it was falsely advertised as a travel blog. So. Stop
complaining to me!
Also I'm not actually reading tentacle porn here. It's a joke. I really will call my memoir that though, should I ever get a book deal. I feel like I could never come up with a better title than that! I mean, seriously.
...I have been reading too much Vonnegot. I would stop, but I feel the only real alternative is tentacle porn.
In fact, I have already changed my mind and started reading that tentacle porn after all. It was inevitable. A (wo)man can't live on one book alone. Sometimes eyes must wander!!
I am in a very strange mood. This week my children have been reading an article about how lions are dying out entitled The King Needs Help. It is an extremely difficult article to get through, filled with what they consider is incomprehensible English. My first class, however, has managed to fight through it admirably. My second class can do nothing but complain about how hot and tired they are. Since I am sadistic, I made my second class do more work.
I thought I might write more about my camp. Like I said earlier, I've been assigned Rashidieh. It is the smallest of the camps. About 26,000 people live in an area only one mile and a half. 1.5 miles!!! To put this in perspective, my town growing up had the same amount of people and was four miles big and was largely considered tiny by everyone living there.
My camp is on the beach, but lest you be envoius you should know we're not allowed to swim in it during school hours. We're possibly allowed to swim in it outside of school hours, but even this is up in the air. Furthermore, if we did swim in it, we would have to do so fully clothed. Did I ever mention this? Whenever we're in public our legs and shoulders must be covered up, and this includes when we are in large bodies of water so we all swim in t-shirts and either tights or sweatpants. The only exception to this was when we were in Byblos. I got to show off my sunburned shoulders! I'm telling you, it was very sexy. Anyway we're not even badly off. When our female children went swimming in the river they all went in with shirts, pants and hijabs, poor ducks.
The Rashidieh beach is also extremely dirty. It is in fact swimming in filth (pun intended this time). No one ever throws away their trash on the beach, so there's all sorts of weird stuff just lying there. Empty bags of chips are just the beginning. When I first went on the beach there was a doll's detatched head just lying there blinking up at me. It was like something out of of a sci-fi film!! And what's worse is that the few times I've seen people pick up their trash, they've put it all in plastic bags and then buried it in the sand! ewwww. I kind've want to start a "clean our beach" program at my school. I don't know how to suggest this without sounding condescending though. Any ideas?
Also we are not actually teaching in Lebanon, we are actually teaching in Palestine. I don't mean we literally travel to the West Bank each day, I mean there is absolutely no indication we are in Lebanon once inside the camp. There are Palestinian flags everywhere. In my hallways alone I've counted 8 different framed posters of Palestine, many of which display multiple pictures. Many of these are just maps of the region, but some are photos from before 1948. And everything relates back to Palestine. In the hallway there are pictures of flowers with a little description saying where in Palestine they can each be found. The first thing you see when you enter my school are flags hanging from the ceiling that all say "Free Palestine." Today we were running late so the principal of our school made them sing "the" national anthem. It only occurred to me halfway through to ask which nation it was the anthem from. Three guesses which one it was! I'll give you a hint: It wasn't Lebanon's. In my actual classroom there is a poster that says "Remember the Nakba: we will never accept another homeland!" When you walk to the obligatory tourist ship on the camp, it sells everything you can imagine under the sun with the word "Palestine" on it and not a single item for purchase that says "Lebanon."
Another day I will attempt describing the actual camp with the detail it deserves. It is crumbling, but it isn't too terrible, it's just overcrowded. I'm not allowed to post pictures, because the people there don't want the world to see they're living in poverty, even though they kind've are. I mean, no one's starving to death, but no one has much meat on their bones either.
The camp is much more conservative than the rest of Lebanon, even Southern Lebanon like where we're located. Pretty much everyone wears hijabs with the exception of a few girls, all under the age of 12. It is rare to see a female's elbow, and you never, ever see her legs. Still, there is some form of sexual education class, or so we've been told. And boys and girls aren't segregated from each other, though they rarely talk in class and naturally shy away from each other.
Also I'm not actually reading tentacle porn here. It's a joke. I really will call my memoir that though, should I ever get a book deal. I feel like I could never come up with a better title than that! I mean, seriously.
...I have been reading too much Vonnegot. I would stop, but I feel the only real alternative is tentacle porn.
In fact, I have already changed my mind and started reading that tentacle porn after all. It was inevitable. A (wo)man can't live on one book alone. Sometimes eyes must wander!!
I am in a very strange mood. This week my children have been reading an article about how lions are dying out entitled The King Needs Help. It is an extremely difficult article to get through, filled with what they consider is incomprehensible English. My first class, however, has managed to fight through it admirably. My second class can do nothing but complain about how hot and tired they are. Since I am sadistic, I made my second class do more work.
I thought I might write more about my camp. Like I said earlier, I've been assigned Rashidieh. It is the smallest of the camps. About 26,000 people live in an area only one mile and a half. 1.5 miles!!! To put this in perspective, my town growing up had the same amount of people and was four miles big and was largely considered tiny by everyone living there.
My camp is on the beach, but lest you be envoius you should know we're not allowed to swim in it during school hours. We're possibly allowed to swim in it outside of school hours, but even this is up in the air. Furthermore, if we did swim in it, we would have to do so fully clothed. Did I ever mention this? Whenever we're in public our legs and shoulders must be covered up, and this includes when we are in large bodies of water so we all swim in t-shirts and either tights or sweatpants. The only exception to this was when we were in Byblos. I got to show off my sunburned shoulders! I'm telling you, it was very sexy. Anyway we're not even badly off. When our female children went swimming in the river they all went in with shirts, pants and hijabs, poor ducks.
The Rashidieh beach is also extremely dirty. It is in fact swimming in filth (pun intended this time). No one ever throws away their trash on the beach, so there's all sorts of weird stuff just lying there. Empty bags of chips are just the beginning. When I first went on the beach there was a doll's detatched head just lying there blinking up at me. It was like something out of of a sci-fi film!! And what's worse is that the few times I've seen people pick up their trash, they've put it all in plastic bags and then buried it in the sand! ewwww. I kind've want to start a "clean our beach" program at my school. I don't know how to suggest this without sounding condescending though. Any ideas?
Also we are not actually teaching in Lebanon, we are actually teaching in Palestine. I don't mean we literally travel to the West Bank each day, I mean there is absolutely no indication we are in Lebanon once inside the camp. There are Palestinian flags everywhere. In my hallways alone I've counted 8 different framed posters of Palestine, many of which display multiple pictures. Many of these are just maps of the region, but some are photos from before 1948. And everything relates back to Palestine. In the hallway there are pictures of flowers with a little description saying where in Palestine they can each be found. The first thing you see when you enter my school are flags hanging from the ceiling that all say "Free Palestine." Today we were running late so the principal of our school made them sing "the" national anthem. It only occurred to me halfway through to ask which nation it was the anthem from. Three guesses which one it was! I'll give you a hint: It wasn't Lebanon's. In my actual classroom there is a poster that says "Remember the Nakba: we will never accept another homeland!" When you walk to the obligatory tourist ship on the camp, it sells everything you can imagine under the sun with the word "Palestine" on it and not a single item for purchase that says "Lebanon."
Another day I will attempt describing the actual camp with the detail it deserves. It is crumbling, but it isn't too terrible, it's just overcrowded. I'm not allowed to post pictures, because the people there don't want the world to see they're living in poverty, even though they kind've are. I mean, no one's starving to death, but no one has much meat on their bones either.
The camp is much more conservative than the rest of Lebanon, even Southern Lebanon like where we're located. Pretty much everyone wears hijabs with the exception of a few girls, all under the age of 12. It is rare to see a female's elbow, and you never, ever see her legs. Still, there is some form of sexual education class, or so we've been told. And boys and girls aren't segregated from each other, though they rarely talk in class and naturally shy away from each other.
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