Holy unfit!

The Bethlehem Bible College is an interdenominational Christian Bible College very close to our house. On Monday, we were invited to have lunch with the students and faculty and we were told about an international conference of theologians, organized by Sabeel, at the college from March 12-17th. This conference is called ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ so they thought it would be appropriate to invite the delegates to be with us in the checkpoint at 6 a.m. So for 4 days next week, we will take groups on the wonderful journey through Gilo CP. Many of the participants will arrive to the conference by bus or car and will never experience what Palestinians go through every day. What is the point of sitting through hours of academic lectures about Christ at the CP just steps away from the CP but not visit it? We’ll show ‘em.......

For some reason, village people like to dress me up! We visited the village of Nahalin this week and were treated to a feast of, you guessed it, Maqulba. We went at 4 p.m. to visit teachers, Hussein, Naim and Yousef, for what we thought was tea time. Of course, Yousef’s wife had been cooking all day and served the 3 men and the 4 of us a wonderful meal. The women later ate what was left after the men and guests had had their fill, a custom I find extremely uncomfortable. They did not want us to leave and even though my colleagues, Phil and Sabine, had been up since 4 am and were nearly falling asleep in their Maqulba, we couldn’t extract ourselves until after 9 p.m. Gunnar was playing volleyball (with a wire for a net) with the teenage guys and the women insisted on dressing me in one of their traditional Palestinian costumes. This happened to me in the village of Jubbet adh Dhib as well, I seem to appear to be some sort of toy doll to these folks!





There is a local women’s group in town who wanted some physical activity and a young German volunteer named Kevin offered to give them aerobics classes. A generous offer from someone who only knew how to train a soccer team! Some weeks back, I told him that I would assist him and this week he took me up on my offer. So I searched back in my mind about 20 years, put some music together and off I went. It turned out that the dozen or so women we not very fit and so my level of ‘unfittness’ went unnoticed. Kevin and I did a little tag-teaming because I felt he had made the offer and he should participate in the leadership. It actually would have worked better if I had done it myself because that led to a somewhat disjointed class. Sabine watched the spectacle and told me after that the women (and Kevin) were following me – we’ll see what happens next week.





The weather has been magnificent of late – 28C and sunny. This morning we had a delegation of 18 Germans, part of an Alternative Tour to the Middle East, to escort around the Wall, CP and refugee camp for 3 hours and it was a bit of a challenge to find shade for them to shelter under. We managed to keep them alive until their bus returned.

Group 34’s Handover Report has been written and sent to Group 35; the Handover Schedule has been planned and the invitations to the Handover Party have been delivered. Now we wait for Group 35 to arrive.