More Pics

Mugaas, Daniel, and John doing their construction-worker-serious looks.

A giant cistern in Masada

Hermon Springs

Waterfowl taking off in flight at the Sea of Galilee

Candles in the Greek Orthodox part of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem

More Pictures

Me at Tel Megiddo otherwise known as Armageddon (Har Megiddo or the Megiddo Hill/Mt. for those of you who know Hebrew)

Lunch one day - a fish from the Sea of Galilee (and it was one of the best meals we had!)

Playing football with some local kids in Bethlehem! Ole, ole, ole!

The wall or "security fence" separating Israel from the West Bank in Bethlehem.

Some of My Favorite Pictures

A path at Bet She'an.

Daniel enjoying the view at the Mediterranean in Caesarea

Myself, Karis, Mugaas, and Lindsay protesting with the Women in Black. Our signs say "STOP THE OCCUPATION."

Tony reflecting at the Church of the Beatitudes.

The group with Adnan (the third in on the bottom) at the hooka bar and restaurant in Bethlehem.

(More pictures forthcoming)

The Calm Before the Storm

Alright, this is going to be my sorry attempt to catch up a bit on blogging or at least get some of the postings up that I meant to. Things got a bit busy in Jerusalem to say the least and we barely had any free time during the day and my internet time was very limited. So here goes...

This post was meant to go up on Tuesday, January 24th.

After a particularly heated group discussion with the group, a Jewish Rabbi, and some German University students that were also visiting Israel and Palestine and a very frustrating attempt to try to talk some sense into our professor that went nowhere, I found myself needing some solitude. I was tired, frustrated, and in need of some time to process all that had happened in the past couple of hours. I wandered up to the roof of our hostel by myself. It had rained about an hour earlier and the wind was still moving. The Old City at night is quite the site. There were no skyscrapers to obstruct views so you could see for miles around.

As I stood there and slowly relaxed myself, I noticed for the first time how quiet it was. I was in the middle of a city with a huge population and yet there was nothing. There weren't people on the streets talking. There were no cars (granted cars can't get around the Old City to easily especially where we were). There was just the wind. I continued to stand there and let this realization sink in.

As I did this I thought about the timing. It was the night before the election of the Palestinian Parliment. What this would mean for Palestine no one knew. People were excited, scared, hopeful, and the whole gamut of emotions. I had no idea what to expect. I wasn't scared for what the actual act of voting would bring. The Palestinians had elected their new leader, Abbas, after Arafat with no incident. But, this was just a small part something much bigger that I had been exposed to since I got to the Holy Land. Israel and Palestine. How was this ever going to work? Could it even work? Was there a solution? We had just spent the last half an hour talking about whether there was one or not. No one (save one of us which I don't consider legitimate) had answers.

A quote from the Bishop of the Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land that we had met the day before kept coming to mind. "Pray for us because the worst is yet to come." As I stood there in the silence I had the feeling that the silence in the city, no matter what it represented, wouldn't last too much longer whether it be because of the elections, the occupation, the wall, the tension between the peoples in the land. Either way, I also knew that the silence had to end. At this point the storm was inevitable...