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recent entries "My take on Thanksgiving" "Belichick used results from dynamic programming!" "I know he's not to blame, but..." "In sickness and in health..." "Fall Beautiful"
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Oct 01, 2008 Adventures in MEETThis entry is about my second summer as an instructor for Middle East Education through Technology (MEET), an amazing MIT-affiliated conflict resolution program based in Jerusalem that brings together excelling Palestinian and Israeli high school students in an intense curriculum of computer science, entrepreneurship, and team building. You can learn more about MEET at http://meet.mit.edu, and send inquiries about the program to info@meet.mit.edu, or to me. Check out the pictures at the bottom of the post before you go! ————————————————- The air raid siren sounds ominously. Its voice is is one of unease, dissonance - a warning. “The time has come,” it says. It’s evening of Saturday, the 26th of July, 2008, and I am sitting in an apartment on Al Zahara St. in East Jerusalem, listening to the sounds of the Shabbat going out and the muezzin calling for prayers. I have taken a break from preparing the next day’s lessons, bracing myself for another tiring and inspiring week at MEET. These sounds pass over me, and through me. I am sure that they are significant - the fact that they come at me at once, together. But I am also sure that I interpret them very differently from the residents of this ancient, delightful, troubled, and beautiful city. I doubt I’ll ever understand what the twin sounds mean to the multitudes spread across East and West Jerusalem. The song finishes, and I return to my work. ————————————————- Two girls run up to me - they are distraught. “Ted!” they say as one. “How come there’s no pink?!” Their complaint carries equal measures of righteousness and humor. We are cramped in the Ross Lab, two to a computer, and to a seat in some cases. The computer labs Hebrew University normally donates during the summer are still in use by university students finishing a semester prolonged by the nationwide student union strike, and so we have been inhabiting other areas around campus. Meanwhile, our MEET students are working on a graphics assignment - my humble attempt at introducing the concepts of Computer Aided Design to them while reviewing this week’s lessons of using Java objects and basic operators. Around the room, triangles and circles and squares appear on the screens, each shape fitting in its precisely-defined location, each satisfying the geometric relations with the other shapes as specified in the laboratory guidelines, each with its required color. I am tired and bleary-eyed - it was a long night preparing the lab’s materials - and I find it hard to concentrate over the din of 40 teenagers working in pairs, with all the passion that comes from approaching a challenge for the first time, and from sharing the experience with someone who is equally excited. Shouting and moaning and laughter. And for a moment, I can’t even understand what the issue is. What? What’s the problem? No pink? Who cares! Pick another color! And then I awaken to the current reality: Aalaa and Aviv are before me and explaining, patiently but urgently, why it’s unfair that pink is unrepresented among the available colors. Clearly, immediate action is the only conceivable course. “Oh, why didn’t you say so before?” I finally reply. “Can I drive for a minute?” I sit before their console and find online a listing of RGB triplets with the associated colors displayed alongside. “Pick a pink,” I tell them. Excited by the prospect that their complaint made something happen, and that they could have an effect on the experience of the other students - that this important decision of the assignment had been awarded to the two of them - they eagerly scan the list of pinks before agreeing on the loudest, most in-your-face pink they can find. I encode the new color choice into the backend of the lab software. “Excuse me everyone!” shouts Aviv. “Aalaa and I - oh, and Ted - just added pink to the colors. It’s a really good pink so you should all use it!” “Pink! Yeah!” shouts Aalaa. And cheering erupts in the classroom. ——————— “Where are you?” the boy shouts into Nadia’s face. We are in the technical high school on the university campus. Our morning lesson is halfway through, and we are taking a break. The students are outside of the lecture hall, eating pastries and drinking chocolate milk, laughing with one another, and two strangers have infiltrated our ranks, largely unnoticed. We share the educational spaces with the high school’s summer session students. By and large, the high schoolers accept our presence without incident. But a few do not. They harass our students, and in particular, our Palestinian students, so that whenever we are in this bulding, we instructors don’t feel comfortable letting our kids go to the bathroom or get a drink of water by themselves. “Do you know where you are?” he shouts again. He wears a derisive grin, as does his friend, standing off to the right. Their objective is to force her to say, “Israel”. They do not succeed. “Jerusalem,” she replies calmly. I hurry over. I am enraged, and I do not have words. So I convey my meaning with my eyes. They return my gaze, considering me. One - the one who was shouting at Nadia - walks over to me. I have seen him before, coming by during breaks, trying to steal a pastry from the boxes set on tables outside the lecture hall. “Do you have a problem?” he says, grinning. I say nothing. I do not move. My restraint is stretched thin. But the authority of my age and the austerity of my expression make the boy uncertain. He walks off in a moment. His lacky feels uncomfortable, it seems. “He’s crazy!” he explains to me, apologizing for his companion before hurrying off after him. ———————————– “Can I make a phone call?” asks Aviv. It is a brilliantly sunny day in a summer of brilliantly sunny summer days, a bright blue cloudless sky overhead. We are walking toward Silberman on the other side of campus, where the biology department is housed, and where we have been given access to an air conditioned basement computer lab. It is larger than the makeshift lab in Ross but still uncomfortably cramped. Along with the three other year one instructors, I am trying to hurry our forty students to our destination to salvage as much time in the computer room as possible. They are wont to walk slowly in the afternoon heat. “Walk with purpose!” I shout, before turning to Aviv. “No!” I respond with a smile. It is a MEET policy that students are not allowed to use cell phones during the day. “Why not?” asks Dor. He has been standing next to Aviv; they had been chatting anxiously with one another before, likely breaking our English rule in the process. “It’s important.” “It can wait!” I say, waving on a few students strolling nearby. “I don’t know how I can say it…” Aviv begins, turning to Dor. “There’s been a shooting in the city, at a bus stop. My mom’s supposed to be there - I just want to to see if she’s all right.” “I want to check, too,” says Dor. I am dumbfounded. The brilliant summer day is shattered for a moment as I take in the situation. Nothing like this happened last summer. I don’t know how to react. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, of course, you can make a phone call.” Aviv and Dor and a few more students around us start dialing numbers into the cell phones already gripped tightly in their hands. A group of Palestinian students nearby notices. “How come they get to make phone calls?” they say with every ounce of honest teenage injustice. “Let’s just give them a little bit of privacy right now,” I say, delaying the inevitable spread of the news, too afraid to take it head-on. Later that day, I find out the incident is Jerusalem’s second bulldozer attack in a matter of weeks - a Palestinian construction worker has driven his machine through a busy area in the city, chasing cars and pedestrians and wreaking havoc before he is shot, first by an Israeli civilian - a settler - then by a policeman. This time, he is the only fatality. He is within a stone’s throw of the iconic old YMCA tower, where we house many of our students during weeknights, before he is stopped. I think to myself: how will our students handle this? What will the next day be like? How will they look at one another? ———————————– “I have to ask you,” says Or. “Why do you wear that?” She points to Lamia’s white hijab atop her head. It is lunch time and I am sitting beside Shahira and Lamia, two of my students from last summer, and Or has just joined us. I am a little surprised by the question. Lamia is, too. She turns and answers simply, “It’s my religion.” My thoughts are racing. What if Or offends Lamia? What if Lamia doesn’t feel like explaining these basic tenets of her culture to this outsider? I panic - I feel the urge to say something. “Just like my hat,” I offer, pointing to my sun bleached blue cap with the orange and white lettering, an object with which I have shared the entirety of my MEET experience. “It’s a tradition.” This seems to make sense to Or - she has, for some reason, decided that my old, beaten up hat is special - even asked to borrow it for a day, putting aside her new standard issue MEET hat for the year-old edition. And I was wrong, of course, to worry. Or follows Shahira and Lamia around during almost all of the free periods; the two second-years have adopted their younger friend, caring for her, it seems to me, as a kind of shared responsibility. They laugh together, sit and talk together, hug at the close of the day. I desperately wanted these students to be friends. And it happened so naturally. Was I any use at all? Did my being there help to catalyze the formation of this friendship? Is that what makes MEET work - having a reason to be there, all of us, together? ———————————- It is October 1st, 2008, around 4:30 AM, and I am trying to finish my long-due writing on my summer. I am still thinking about the experience of hearing the dual wail of the muezzin and of the siren marker for Shabbat - the eerie beauty of it, the way it made the hairs on my neck and arms stand on end. And I still doubt I’ll ever understand what Jerusalem as it is right now, at this very instant in its long history, means to its residents. But a new thought strikes me. I may not understand what Jerusalem means to its people - all its people - but I hope all its people can understand what hearing these two voices as one means to me. -Ted Golfinopoulos
Aalaa, left, and Aviv, right, after their triumph in the Ross Lab.
Nadia smiling - close to Science Building at Hebrew University.
Dor (right) and Noura (left) working on a lab in Silberman.
MEET’s Angels - Subset of Team Monday, a Year One final project group. Right to left: Or, Yarden, Nadine, and Ala’a. Shahira (right), Lamia (center), and me (left) gazing off into the future. More pictures to come… You can also check out the more-dutifully-administered blogs of my Year One instructor colleagues, Sally Peach (jerusally.blogspot.com) and Froylan Sifuentes (elblogdefroy.blogspot.com, in Spanish).
2 Responses To This Entry:Post A Response
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Great reading, Ted. I love the way each vignette captures the same question of conflict and resolution that also resounds in the twin calls to religion- in each case a disonance closing into harmony, and with that, all our hopes for world peace.
Posted by: Sara on October 9th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
You know, I had this image in my head of what Jerusalem looks like. But looking at the photos you posted, I have to really reconsider my preconceptions.
Great post Ted!
Posted by: Junko on September 27th, 2009 at 2:56 am