GlobalShift

Return to the Middle East

In the same moment, the sound of ringing church bells harmonizes with the muezzin’s call from the needled peak of a minaret as Orthodox Jews scuttle in tight huddles to pray at the Western Wall. This is Jerusalem, and this is its beauty and its tension.

I spent the month of March in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, making my fourth trip to the Middle East. I joined my dad, a physician with John Peter Smith Hospital in Ft. Worth, as well as two senior residents and one medical student on an elective rotation that took us from the first-class technology of Be’er Sheva, to a trauma hospital in Ramallah, and to impoverished clinics in the Jordan Valley. Our journey was the inaugural trip of what will hopefully become an annual mission. For the last several years, my dad has been preparing and shaping and pushing this dream into reality. The possibility to accompany this group was too good not to accept. One of my reasons for going on this trip was documentation, and another was because, being unemployed, I had nothing better to do. The job market is not presently conducive to recent university graduates with BAs in English Literature (at least not in Searcy, Arkansas, where I live at the moment). And since my practical knowledge of professional healthcare is limited to band-aids and Tylenol, I had very little to do with the medical aspect of the journey.

A major reason I went was to explore a possible job opportunity with an organization called Musalaha (“reconciliation” in Arabic), which is committed to uniting Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians, as they dismantle barriers and deconstruct worldviews. Volunteering this past summer as a journalist was an incredible learning experience, but I need to do something different, something more rooted in bringing people together. I met with Musalaha’s director and I will now be returning to Palestine in late August to work with them for at least six months, as well as helping some close friends with a facility for developmentally disabled children located outside of Bethlehem.

But I had another reason for going: a part of my heart is there. I know the cobbled, labyrinthine streets of the Old City of Jerusalem. I know the buses I need to take to get to Ramallah and Bethlehem. I can find my way through the shattered pieces of the West Bank. I can see people’s faces, I know their names, and I can hear their stories. I feel like my family members are fighting when I read the news about a recent escalation in violence. And when I am there I feel more alive and more inspired, like I am literally being “breathed into.” The pulse of that land beats more strongly in some way because life is in struggle. Ideas and emotions that too often float around as abstractions here become embodied and tangible there: hope, joy, and peace are more real because they exist side by side, and hold hands, with despair, sorrow, and discord.  Love is more real because your enemy lives next door.

Certainly other places are like this as well, even places in the U.S. You don’t always have to walk very far (and you shouldn’t have to walk very far if your eyes are open) to find both the chaotic and creative elements of life dancing together. I have such feelings in other places of the world too, but in that speck of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River I am forced to confront them and live with them. The air, the wind, moves differently like the spirit of the place has a rhythm of breathing more in tune with reality. Maybe I can’t help myself from returning because I feel that spirit’s presence and absence so intensely in the same moment. Another reason I continue to go is because I have to.