Discovering Oslo 2 Diary
14 December 1996
Making it to the University, part II
At Birzeit Village
We stop off at Birzeit village to visit Mustafa, an English major like Kifah. Kifah, by the way, is supposed to live here but was turned back at the checkpoint and is currently staying with me as he can’t get home. The view from his house of the surrounding hills (left) is beautiful but it’s 10:00am and Mustafa is still asleep as there’s not a whole lot to do when you are one of only a few hundred who can make it to the university.
We wake Mustafa and plug a cigarette into him, as demonstrated above. “How’s Kifah?” he asks, grinning. We borrow a CD player for a get-together tonight in Ramallah that he was invited to go to but isn’t going to be able to come to. Everyone is cursing the situation. A couple of people attack a settler car and a whole community of several tens of thousands of people is held hostage in an attempt to convince them it was their fault. For the fifth time this year. On to the university to try to get some work done. The phone lines are crap, and putting the first few pages and images from these diary entries takes ages.
Relax..?
The get-together still goes ahead, as it was planned before the closure and it’s too late to cancel it. It's subdued and the fifteen people that turned up, as opposed to the forty or fifty that would have turned up, pass the time quietly. Topics of discussion range from the obvious situation outside, to the songs of Ziad Rahbani. The music varies from this to Tracey Chapman, to Fairuz’s Lil Beirut to Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. Ahmed turns up, just out of a brief Palestinian Authority detention. A mistake. He's okay, smiling and sitting next to Kifah (left). A cultural studies lecturer jokes about how no one understands the language used by Palestinian academic Edward Said. Some of the shebab from the student communist party start practicing a sketch in the living room which gets our attention. We also have Fatah supporters, independents, disinteresteds and Jerusalem Kit Kats with us. No factionalism here. One international describes the stomach bug he caught during a work trip to Bangkok. Marwan Tarazi, director of the Computer Center, and I talk about the Web, a different kind of disease. Kim mentions how the international students have exams and she has been put in the middle of an organisational nightmare. It’s impossible not to think of the closure and return to discussing it time and time again. In other words, it is impossible to relax. We're living in a prison.
Digital photos © Nigel Parry.