Of All the Ways

Above: details of a wall mural painted with a group of students from the UNRWA school at New Askar refugee camp, one of several art projects I had the good fortune to complete during my time with Project HOPE

This particular entry finds me struck with a particularly rigid affliction, one that often corrugates me at around this time of the annum, of what it is comprised it is not difficult to say but the results find one laden with a certain unwillingness to adapt to the intransigent nature of things. The crux of the mater seems to be that, having last week completed my final Project HOPE class, I must now recalibrate my sights so as to maintain a purposeful presence here in the West Bank.


Alas though, I find myself with ideological fires to fight, the first of which has long since taken off my eyebrows and was begun  - in malice - by my tinder dry finances, forcing upon me the cumbersome acquisition of a paying job at a local English academy. Bravo! I hear you cry, but the remuneration between the abstract currency of NGO work and the infinitely more crass motivation provided by the shekel is nothing short of a chasm, all the greater to bridge given that I am attempting to traverse it in the same community that - previously - thanked me for my unending charitable kindness. All of which raises the question, what on earth am I staying for? 


It would be a deception of epic proportions not to at least make mention of the fact that I may - in part - be hoping that my remainder here will serve to aid me in my ongoing quest to circumvent the dull inconveniences of 'real life'. Ultimately though, staying here can really only be validated by the notion that I am somehow helping, now, there are all sorts of debates raging as to whether I was ever doing so in the first place, given the wide range of views on the significance - and indeed need - for NGO's, I hope you will forgive me for working on the self aggrandising assumption here that I, and Project HOPE, was and continue respectively in some way benefiting others.


 Happily, there are still several options open to me on this front as my new servitude to the shekel leaves room enough in the middle of my working week to fill with the kind of activities which constitute 'helping'. The problem here comes from the credibility attached to the organisations offering such work. Members of the main organisation (which shall remain unnamed lest my mention of it make me an enemy of the state), themselves admit they lack purpose these days, and are struggling for direction since the end of the last intifada. One of the main tyrannies currently afflicting the West Bank population is the illegal land grabs and evictions being carried out by settlers supported by the IDF. usually they are unannounced and by the time the aforementioned and unnamed organisation knows about them it is too late for them to ply their trade. All of which leaves the weekly demonstrations in Bil'in (against the wall) and Jerusalem (against settlement building and ongoing mass evictions) as the main staple for the freelance 'helper', and whilst I support and encourage such direct action, I do wonder whether such a diet will leave me feeling Jaded and ineffectual.


As things currently stand, it is likely that I will remain in situ for at least the next four weeks (just in time for my next unbidden crisis of general purpose and direction), until then I must rest in the comfort and knowledge that , with three months of mixed fortunes under my belt, surely there can little I am not prepared for ?