Habla

Aslah

In the light of the blood-bath that was taking place in Gaza, we had doubts whether  it would be appropriate, from the point of view of our partners in Aslah, for us to arrive in the village to teach the children. Yesterday we checked the matter with the person responsible and were told to come.

The way to the village was routine and quiet – almost surrealistic .  In Nabi Elias , the shops were operating normally; one or two settlers even came to buy in the shops lining route 55.  There were no military vehicles or soldiers at the entrance to the villages.

10.00  Aslah

We arrived at the village where the women came to meet us and children sprang-out from every direction.  We were received warmly after we hadn’t seen each other for two weeks..  Only 25 children arrived because the organizer hadn’t managed to advise all of them that lessons would take place today.  We sat down with the women and discussed the war, the killing of children, women and men, and the hundreds of buildings which had been shelled.  “ Why did they do that to them, just children who hadn’t harmed anyone ?”.  “ Why were buildings blown-up with their inhabitants inside ?”.

To our great sorrow we had no logical answer.  Some of them said that they were praying that the killing would end, and we could only join their prayers, encourage them, and express our sorrow at the killing of innocent people.

We started to teach groups of the older children, again practiced both their speaking and writing, the names of animals, colors and enlarged their vocabularies.

The girls were industrious; it was important for them to be accurate and to receive feed-back on their writing, and for their mistakes to be corrected .  Suzi exercised them on basic opening sentences, and family relations.  She repeated the lesson on colors and names of animals. The children received work sheets on writing and coloring.

Both lessons took place simultaneously and lasted an hour and a half. At the end of the lessons the children thanked us and parted from us with smiles.  We parted from our women-friends with hugs and kisses, with hopes of better days.

12.15 Habla

We arrived too early.  There were no Palestinians or soldiers there. Only the watchman  was sleeping on the floor of the pump-room.

At 12.30 we were on our way home