If Americans Were Arabs

I arrived from Peru a month ago, and already I’m in love with America. Or should I say, I’m in love with the American people.

The first night, after I dropped my things off in my new apartment (a nice first-floor flat with a lot of space but little furniture), I took a walk around the neighborhood that would be my home for the next year.

It’s a beautiful area. Not for its parks or fountains or manicured lawns – actually, the streets are full of garbage – but the people, oh! The people here stop you while you’re walking just to welcome you to America. They stand outside of their businesses and on their apartment stoops and smile as I walk by, trying to catch my eye. Some even yell out their car windows as they’re speeding along, “Welcome!” Very few of them are conversational in Spanish, but they all know enough to try out “Hola! Como estas?” or “Bienvenidos!” I’m sure Latinos aren’t very common in this part of America, and they act like my presence is a real treat for them. I’m more than happy to oblige their irrepressible desire to welcome foreigners to their country. I must have shaken a dozen hands just on that first walk around town.

I’m settling into my work, and I’m even starting to know Boston pretty well, but the Americans themselves always provide me with fresh experiences. One man that owns a store near my school always spots me walking by and waves me in. He hustles behind the counter and pours some thick coffee into a small paper cup for me to drink as I walk. It tastes like asphalt, so I just chug it quick and thank him with a smile and a phony “mmmm!” I make an effort to buy my necessities at his store, even if his coffee sucks.

My neighbors in the apartment building have beautiful children that mob me whenever I round the corner of the block. They hold my hand, pull on my clothing and talk way too quickly in English. I never understand a word they say, but we share enough smiles to fill in the gaps of a real conversation.

I’ve started to make real friends with some of the older children, though. The oldest, 17, speaks pretty decent Spanish, and he’s brought me tea a few times. We drink it on the floor of my apartment since there’s no furniture. I feel bad that I can’t reciprocate his hospitality with at least a box to sit on, but of course he never minds. “This is how we used to do it, back before. We always sat on the floor to talk,” he says.

I found out there’s a coffee shop a few floors up in a building on my block, and I’ve been heading there for coffee three or four nights a week. The second I walk in, ten chairs are pulled up around me. Every American knows how to give the most meaningful smile. Even if they just speak a little Spanish, I instantly understand “You are very welcome here. Your presence makes me happy. America is beautiful, and I want to share it with you. Aren’t we lucky to be here?” 

Some do speak pretty good Spanish, and since my English is still pathetic we mostly talk in my native language. It’s struck me as a little silly that I came all the way to America to work and we still have our conversations in Spanish, just to accommodate me. But they all seem very willing to inconvenience themselves if it means we get to build a relationship. 

Tonight I went and had dinner with yet another family. I could probably fill up every evening being hosted for dinner, or at least coffee and sweets. They were so excited to show me their property: garden, orchard, balcony.

Just this week I was invited to two different weddings. “Oh, my cousin’s getting married on Friday. Come!” Americans love weddings. Every Friday the whole city is filled with the small explosions of wedding fireworks, as well as the parade of cars plugging up the main road as all the attendees swerve and honk and wave flags and flowers. 

I don’t think I’m going to get tired of this people. They value community and relationship and hospitality far above efficiency and hard work, which has come to make total sense to me. These Americans, with their white eyes and pure affection, are drawing me into themselves, filling my days and nights with so much relationship that even if I moved now I’d feel like I was leaving family.

The Day of Catastrophe

Today is an important day in the history of Palestine, so I thought a quick, informative post might be in order.

Today is Yawm an-Nakbah, the Day of Catastrophe celebrated by Palestinians in concordance with the Israeli Independence Day (which came yesterday). This is the day Palestinians remember the beginning of their displacement.

Just as Christmas is symbolized by a tree and St. Patrick's by a shamrock, Nakbah Day's token is a key. This is in remembrance of the house keys Palestinians took with them as they closed their doors for the last time back in 1948.

Before 1948, the year Israel made the land theft official by declaring statehood, the Arabs used the word nakbah, or 'catastrophe,' to refer to the year 1920, when European powers dismantled the former Ottoman Empire by dividing it up into states as they wished, with no regard for linguistic or cultural affiliation. (That's also the reason why half of Afghanistan speaks Farsi and half Pashto, half of Pakistan speaks Pashto and half Hindi, and why the 30 million Kurds, instead of ending up with their own country, got distributed into the corners of a half dozen nations where they became an outcast minority, to this day remaining the largest people group without its own state).

The continuity if the word nakbah  isn't lost on me; for the last century it's been used with sadness and bitterness to refer to history-shaking acts of Western imperialism. When I put myself in the place of the Kurds, Pashtun, Berbers, and the handful of other people groups that got squashed by the former British protectorates, I start to understand a little of the violence. And especially when I put myself in the place of Arab Palestinians, who still live on the outskirts of their former homeland, looking in as illegal Israeli settlers eat up more and more of it.

This year's Nakbah Day has added significance. Hundreds of Palestinians taken prisoner by Israel, purportedly without cause, have been on a hunger strike for 76 days, and today is the day they break their fast. In support of the detainees, many Palestinians have changed their Facebook profile pictures to one of a nameless blindfolded prisoner (which I've posted at the top of this page).

There will be protests and marches and chanting. Some years, the IDF meets the protestors with tragic results.

So today, my prayers are for peace in Palestine. I'm praying for an end to acts of Arab violence against civilians, as well as an end to Israeli tyranny. I hope that Americans, among other Western countries, can begin to reconcile for the conflict we've helped cause by offering words of peace to God.

Bethlehem

I’d wondered if Bethlehem was going to be a spiritual experience for me, just like the Wailing Wall is for Jews and Mecca is for Muslims. I certainly don’t believe that one particular place on earth can elevate a man nearer to the face of God, that one mountain or temple or city can bring his ear closer to my lips. Still, this was the city that God picked as the birthplace of Jesus, and that was cool.

I did have a spiritual experience, but not the one shared by most pilgrims. What I felt was sadness. Or more than that, maybe. It felt like heartbreak.

Our entrance to the Church of the Nativity was through a four-foot stone door called the Door of Humility; every visitor through this door is forced to bow as they enter the oldest continuously operating church in the world, theoretically paying respect to God as they pass through. But, as Simon commented, “there’s not a lot of humility on the other side.”

The church is a large dusky room of thick stone pillars and a dark wood ceiling, with Byzantine murals high up on the walls, faded gold lanterns strung from gold chains in the ceiling, and a long line of Westerners packed down one side of the altar. They were waiting to see where Jesus was born.

We had a Palestinian with us, so we got to skip past the guards at the exit of the grotto and meet the line as it funneled out.

Inside the small, hot, richly decorated grotto the tourists took their 15 seconds each with the spot on the floor designated as Jesus’ birthplace. Hundreds of thousands of kisses have worn the silver and stone around the site. Some visitors bent into the hearth-like shrine and performed the ritual good-naturedly for a camera behind them. Other picture seekers knelt and gave two thumbs up with a big smile. Most people just glanced and moved down the line.

I felt constricted all of a sudden, burdened, like dozens of thick blankets had been piled on top of me. I wanted to get out of the gold and candles and marble and paintings and red fabric and wood. I needed to stand under the perfect Bethlehem sky and send a prayer to God that wouldn’t be obstructed by all of the religious trappings.

Outside I found the sky, but every direction toward the horizon was obstructed by someone’s holy castle. At this religious crossroads everyone wants their tower to be taller, their symbol to be seen from farther away. But who is lifted up when a cross or a crescent moon is placed on a tower? Does God need stones to raise him higher?

No. It’s pride that is exalted. Pride is the religion of Bethlehem. It’s ironic that the sight of the most humble act in history, the birth of the God-man into a barn, is now the sight of so much banner waving, so much picture taking, so much façade and pomp in the name of religion and at the expense of worship. From what I’ve read, there’s no place in Christianity for veneration of artifacts, holy sites, or sanctified idols. The Book says that God’s earthly temple is the human heart, and the only sanctification happens in a soul that’s been forgiven. Millions of people across the world have become a mobile monument set on Christ, not on soil.

My first trip to Bethlehem has answered one of the questions I had before I left the States: the lack of humility in American Christianity is only partly a problem of culture. Mostly, I think that every human heart wants to honor itself. My struggle now is to take this broadening of vision and apply it to my own heart: to let my friendship be free and my love for Jesus grow.

I even realize that my opinions of Bethlehem are sweeping generalizations from someone who grew up thousands of miles away and has only been to the city for a few hours. That sounds pretty prideful. I guess I’m human, too. Allah akbar.

The International Community

On a trip to Montreal some friends and I went looking for a bar one afternoon (It was a little early to drink, but we were tourists; no helping it). Not too far off a main street was a worn building with B-A-R written vertically down the front, the big window filled with some potted plants that were getting a little out of control. We were tired of walking, so we decided it looked worth a few beers. Inside was one big room with fake wood paneled walls and linoleum floors. There wasn't much to look at besides a bar and some seating, and one coffee table surrounded by couches, which at the moment were filled with four or five hipsters watching a game and speaking French over coffee and open homework.

One noticed us after we’d sat down and came over smiling to see if we needed anything.

“Do you have any whiskey?”

“Nah, we just have beer, and it’s real bad.”

“Oh…we’ll take that, I guess. You have Guinness?”

“Nah man, we just got like four kinds. Wanna come see?”

We walked over with him to a small refrigerator full of 40s of cheap Canadian beer. He explained the quality of each one to us, reminding us that none of it was good. We grabbed one of each.

He sat down and chatted with us while we rotated turns with the bottles. Apparently the bar was run and staffed by a small group of college students who pretty much used it as their own hangout, using the income from working there to sponsor their homework time. It was a little rundown, almost empty, and classic. Not a family business, but a community business.

That’s where I’m working in Palestine, except it’s an English school instead of a bar, and there’s hookah instead of cheap beer. The entire staff of the school is under 25, including the director. Work ends at five but nobody leaves; we go on walks, buy food and cook it, and smoke hookah on the roof, and the school pays for most of it. Four Americans, two Danes, and a Palestinian, all living in community.

We took a walk with one of the other Americans today to a high point in Hebron (or Khalil, as they call the city in Arabic). At the top of a steep hill we heard some boys yelling to us from the top of an old concrete structure, maybe the failed construction of an apartment building. They came down and led us up two flights of stairs to the flat roof. On top the entire valley was beneath us, covered in the blocky buildings with red roofs that are the norm in Palestine. Several mosques, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and the Old City were all in sight. We could also see the only church in Hebron, a Russian Orthodox church that was built next to a "really old tree," a tree surrounded in stories (the oldest tree in the world, a tree Abraham camped under, etc.).
 

 While taking in the view I let the kids have my camera, guessing correctly that it would be grabbed and hoarded and dropped, but I figured it was about as safe in their hands as they were playing on a roof with no ledge and exposed rebar.

When we got to the street they gave us a friendly goodbye by throwing stones down at our heads. It wasn’t malicious, though, because as our coworker explained, “It’s just what Palestinian kids do; they throw rocks.” I made sure to grab one as a souvenir.