Camera shyness

I'm trying to get people willing to appear on-camera briefly to talk about how they imagine/understand/picture Jerusalem and the people who live there.

But most of the people I have asked don't want to appear on-camera--mainly because, they say, they don't know anything about Jerusalem.

So I'm putting out an all-points bulletin; I need help. If you know anyone who would be willing to talk on-camera about Jerusalem for 60 seconds or so (and, importantly, have never been to Jerusalem themselves), please refer them to me or give me their contact info. We can do it on or near campus just about any weekday.

I'm even contemplating bribing... er, compensating people with food.

Tamkeen

quick links about Tamkeen--which is a USAID-funded initiative spanning several Middle Eastern countries, with the goal of fostering democratic institutions, civil society, and youth leadership and empowerment.

More information from the principal contractor, Chemonics
A view of some of Tamkeen on the ground, from The Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art
One of the products of Tamkeen

Saba'h, Shabbat, Sabbath

The three monotheisms might converge on belief in the same God, but they don't agree on which day to set aside for worship. The seventh day of the Islamic week is Friday; most businesses are closed for the day--certainly after noon--although some will open in the evening to entice weekend shoppers. The Jewish sabbath starts at sundown on Friday and runs until sunset Saturday--trying to get anywhere on a Friday night in Jerusalem is tricky, because the Israeli buses don't run again until Saturday evening, and so your best bet is to find a Palestinian taxi driver who won't gouge you too much. In Christian areas, Sunday is the day of worship. While this doesn't effect too many shops, and travel not at all, it does produce some headaches.

As a result, it's hard to get anything done in Palestine from Friday to Sunday. The NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and municipal offices I'm trying to work with basically all have 4-day work weeks. Throw Ramadan into this tangled mess of religious observance, and it gets harder to get any work done--Muslims get up before dawn to have breakfast, and then often go back to bed to sleep part of the day away, and things s l o w d o w n q u i t e a b i t . . .

So while I'm waiting for my contacts to get back to me, I've been walking around town, taking pictures of stuff. There are lots of buildings and projects with signs on them, attributing the construction, addition, or renovation to some international donor. It is in this context that USAID is marketing its projects quite heavily--as you can see below.


First off, a "typical" street view just east of the center of Ram'allah. This is looking west along An-Nahda Street. The radio station you see advertised on the billboard runs programming partially funded by USAID.

This is facing the other direction from the previous shot--looking east. In the distance, you can see another billboard advertising a USAID program.

A bit closer, you can see it's the same program from the billboard I photographed earlier, over to the northeast near where I'm living--it's advertising USAID-funded programs to train health care workers.

A bit further east, towards the wealthier part of town, this billboard advertises another program. The caption reads:
Step by step
We rebuild and develop
Empowering more than 2000 youth leaders
From the American people (United States Agency for International Development)


There are two interesting things about this particular advertisement. First, the word for "empowering" (or "empowerment") is tamkeen--which is also the name of a specific aid project that aims to inculcate Arabs to Western norms of secular, civil society--through programs like coloring books for children, radio and television programs with strong women characters, education, etc. Second, this billboard seems to indicate that "empowering young leaders" has something to do with the media. In case you were wondering, the Tamkeen project is one of the "fall-back" programs in my research (meaning, it's big and widespread and ongoing, and is a bit too big for me to take on at the moment--but if I can't get any traction on my main project, this is what I'll dig into).

Useful phrases

'induka khareeTeh ram'allah? Do you have a map of Ram'allah?

sishtarayu mobile phone; wayn dukan mobile? I will be buying a mobile phone--where is the mobile store?

la, uhibb batla ma'ee kabeer. No, I would like the big bottle of water.

mahaaratuka al-lughat ul-inklizieh akbar min mahaaratee al-lughat ul-arabieh. Your English is better than my Arabic.


I remembered that I'm a geographer, and we use maps--so I found a bookstore and bought a map of Ram'allah. Unfortunately, the road I'm looking for isn't on the map.

I broke down and bought a cell phone for use over here. It was more than I wanted (my grant) to spend, but I have to face reality that phone calls get more responses than e-mails.

After not being able to find the NGO office I'm looking for, I stopped at maTa'm meester beetsa (Mr. Pizza's Restaurant) for... well, even though the pizza looked good, it was way too much food for me to eat in one sitting, and I didn't want to carry a pizza box 2 miles back to the guest house, so I got a hamburger instead. It wasn't all that bad, and the guy working the counter came out and started talking with me in English--turns out he lived in Florida and Chicago. As he was talking to me, a friend of his walked up, his hands filthy with dirt and grease, and he started complaining (in English) about having a flat tire. Not only did I get lunch, but the (restaurant) guy gave me his business card and offered to help me with my work.

Some photos of Ram'allah:

This is a ~120-degree panorama from the roof of the guesthouse, looking west-southwest right after sunset. I stitched four photos together to get the panorama, and messed up one of the joins (laptop monitor is too small to see one issue until it was too late). The center of Ram'allah is off to the east-southeast, so almost directly left from this view.

This billboard is about 100 yards from the guest house. This side says:
Step by step
We rebuild and we develop
Training 12,000 health service providers
From the American people (United States Agency for International Development)


This side says:
Step by step
We rebuild and we develop
Build and repair more than 6100 classrooms
From the American people (United States Agency for International Development)

There's another one of these billboards over on the other side of town, over by a school with USAID logos all over it--the school has an astroturf soccer field, too.

"the lost post"

Well, isn't this odd? I found this post sitting in the "saved" area, where it must've went went Blogpost crashed. I'll post it, not because it's anything novel, but just so it looks like I'm posting more often. It's a little bit different than the other political rant I posted.

I've fallen a bit behind, partly due to having walked about 30 miles over the past two days, partly due to having shot almost 300 photos over the past two days, but mainly because my Firefox browser is acting up and wasn't letting me do much of anything online. So I've switched back to Evil Empire™ Internet Explorer, and I think that this will work until I figure out what Firefox was doing wrong and how to fix it.

It's too bad, really, because I was fired up to do a big political post based on some casual observations I made yesterday. Well, the rage has cooled, but I still want to relate the glimpses of Palestinian life under Israeli rule that I saw yesterday:

In the bustling David St. Market in the Old City, a Palestinian merchant was getting hassled by two IDF soldiers and an Israeli police officer; from what I gleaned from the conversation and the gesticulation, the merchant had left stuff (probably trash?) out in front of his shuttered store when he went to afternoon prayers. When he came back, the Israelis--armed with automatic weapons and dressed in body armor, by the way--made sure he knew the price for violating the law.

• Later, in a nearby and similar market area, another trio of armed Israelis (two IDF, backing up a Israeli police commander) were hassling another Palestinian merchant because the scarves he had hanging out in front of his stall were dangling too low--a tall man would have to duck his head to avoid the scarves brushing against his hair.


• Earlier in the day, I took a bus tour of greater Jerusalem. On the bus, you get a pair of headphones you can plug in to get a pre-recorded narration (in your choice of eight languages) of all the sights the bus passes on its route. Time and time again, the narrator mentioned where brave Israeli soldiers "took" locations in combat--never mentioning that they "took" these locations from the Palestinians who owned the land--or where ruthless Arabs (Jordanians, most typically) mercilessly slaughtered innocent Jews/Israelis. There's that saying about how history is written by conquerors; it's not just history--it's tour guide narration, too. Palestinians do not exist on that tour; they were the previous occupants, who somehow left no forwarding address. I was half-tempted to switch to the Arabic language version, in hopes that the Palestinians would exist there, but listening to the English narrative was like watching faceplant videos on Youtube: you're horrified by it, but you can't stop.


• Later on, I was walking through another market area, and in a bigger stall that looked like some sort of tailored-goods store, an altercation had started up between several IDF soldiers and one of the merchants. Again, the IDF soldiers are armed, and an older guy--some sort of officer--had intervened and things weren't looking very promising for the merchant. I have no clue what was going on, or why, but for the third time in the day, I wondered what it would be like to scrape by as a lower-class merchant at the whim of guys with guns who can cause you all sorts of problems if they don't like the way you dispose of your trash, or how you display your merchandise, etc.


• Finally, I was walking back to the hotel past the Damascus Gate--which is the entrance to the Old City that butts up against Arab East Jerusalem. There is a taxi stand there, and then a whole bunch of signs that I interpret as "no parking" or "no stopping" signs, and as I was walking past, a Palestinian teenager runs up and yells to another guy in front of me (all I caught was "yulla! yulla!" = "go! go!"). The guy runs to a cab--parked in what must be the no parking area--and fires up the engine to make a quick getaway... too late. A pickup truck with three Israeli police screeched to a stop, boxing in the cab. The Palestinian driver tried to sneak past the truck, whereupon one of the Israeli police jumped out and angrily started shouting and pointing at the Palestinian, one hand on his gun. The incident ended with the cops pulling the guy out of his cab and writing up some sort of documentation--a ticket, or a court summons, or something. Like the tailor incident, I surreptitiously took some pictures, but another touristy-looking guy wasn't so circumspect--he was blatantly photographing the whole incident. The cops didn't seem to care.

So there you have it; in a day when I wasn't looking for evidence of the grinding oppression that Palestinians experience on a day-to-day basis, I had it thrown in front of me, several times. The Israelis have the guns, and the power, and if they don't like something a Palestinian is doing, they intervene. And they don't care who sees it.

If you have any questions why I do what I do, hopefully this post will be something of an answer.
And so you have something to look at after reading all that politically-charged observation, here are some pretty (and a couple not-so-pretty) pictures:


(well, blogspot has a pretty awkward way of adding & moving around pictures in posts, and I just lost one of the ones I had posted. I'm not going to mess with trying to fix it now, so here's the rest)

I call this one "This is not your land"--this was the police intervention on the illegal parking

This is the Western Wall plaza. All the cleared ground in this area was, before the 1967 Six-Days War, a Palestinian neighborhood. That neighborhood was bulldozed to make the plaza. I'm sure the Palestinians got over it--hey, Israel even built a nice, wooden ramp so all the non-Muslims who want to visit the Temple Mount can do so!


The order of these pictures got messed up, as I wanted this picture to be before the previous one. Anyway, this is a HDR-composite photo of the Western Wall. The people look ghostly not because they're ghosts, but because I put three exposures together in order to get the dramatic sky and saturated color tones.

The entrance to the David St. Market, just east of the Jaffa Gate into the Old City.

Zion Gate, on the southeast side of the city. The only post-processing I did on this picture was to correct some perspective distortion--I did nothing to the woman sitting; she was stock-still long enough so that her image is razor-sharp, while the woman walking past is merely a blur. Pretty cool of her to model like that for me.