First Class at Zawata

(Top: Students at Zawata village. Bottom:Teaching Tom)

Yesterday evening bought with it something of a late flourish as the barren roast of the post noon heat gave way to the playful gestures of an afternoon breeze which impishly joshed with the unweighted flotsam on the gritty wending way back down from Zawata village. Myself and Tom - another volunteer - had been up on the northern flank of the valley with which the city is cradled, giving an English lesson to a community group consisting of ten to twelve year old girls.

As this was my first class I knew little of what to expect and when we arrived we found the community centre locked, both Tom and our local guide Ali gave the kind of unconcerned gestures that suggested this was to be expected and confirmed as much when I asked them. Perhaps inevitably it was not long before our presence was noted and someone dispatched to fetch the key holder, at the same time we were slowly decended upon by our charges who trickled to our muster point from beyond the parched nowhere of the rock strewn crossroads over which the community centre presided. As we waited in the shaded refuge of the doorway one girl sidestepped playfully across the top step of the building's entrance as if on some precipitous ledge. With her back pressed firmly against the locked doorway she reached back through the bars across the window gripping both them, and the broken edge of the glass therein in order that she may hold her fragile sway and thus avoid plummeting to her imaginary doom, Tom demonstrated the significant peril her small fingers were in, a danger by which she was happily unmoved and she dismounted only under the gentile guidance of his hand.

As we entered the building it was with the omission of the four or five boys who had been present outside, when Tom later asked our guide why they had not joined us his reply was that they had simply been disinterested, as it was they preferred to play football in the road and when that no longer amused them, to beat at the classroom windows with plastic cable sleeving and sticks, perhaps it was they in their boisterous way who had holed the windows but it was not for this reason alone that we felt bad for their exclusion. 

The class itself was an overwhelming success, due entirely to the absolute enthusiasm of the students whose desire to comprehend was worn on the ripples of raised brows and in the brights of their attentive eyes. Tom Ali and I will return to Zawata on Wednesday and already the class promises to be a highlight of my timetable. 

As we made for the doorway of the community centre in Zawata ten to twelve fingers of evening sunlight pierced its aluminium skin, highlighting ruptures therein that had not been visible in the shadows outside, and pointed accusingly across the hall to the holed stud wall adjacent. They - and the broken glass - had not - it seems - resulted (*directly) from the actions of boisterous boys but something altogether more sinister.

 That the destruction wrought by shells had previously proved integral to the games of a young girl may seem an extrenuous observation to make at this point but none the less, leaves my mind still oscillating uncomfortably between two readings of its undeniable symbolism: had their presence somehow corrupted her childhood or had her unharmed and innocent proximity to such bullet hewn destruction rendered it somehow ridiculous and weak? Perhaps the answer lays - as often it does - somewhere in between the two.

*I later learned that the attack on the community centre had, in fact been carried out as collective retribution by the Israeli army for the stoning of settlers cars by some local children.