On This Land, There is Something Worth Living For

By Eyal and Eileil Shani

This week there was a heavy rainfall. A lot of water came down from the heavens and it felt like it came to wash the world clean. The day after the rain, there were flying ants everywhere on their nuptial flight and there was a sense of renewal. As soon as the sun started heating the air we went out into the field.

We arrived together with Assi and Boaz at one of the further out villages, the pick-up finding its way through the mud the rain had left behind. But we didn’t give up . . . we knew that the distant villages we were visiting today desperately needed the food we had stacked on the pick-up. We arrived and unpacked some of the provisions for the family there. We sat outside the family cave with our hosts and looked at the scenery around us, while a pot of tea boiled on the fire. Not far from us a young man ploughed the field with a hand plough hitched to a donkey. We thought, where else in this country do they plough a field like this? It’s a world that’s disappearing. Maybe we should preserve this culture, which has such a past, such a history? A culture that reminds us of where we came from? And maybe this is what frightens the neighbors, the settlers that harass the Palestinians that live here, just as they have lived for so many years. The memory, the nostalgia?

We spoke with our hosts about the fact that they’re not giving up on their land, despite all the difficulties: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to move to the large village of Yata and be done with it?” It’s a question that has come up a number of times in the past weeks, “There are people who have given up and moved there”. “True, there are those that have left. But not us. Our home is here, our land, our flocks. What would we do in Yata? What would we live off? We don’t have much here, but what little there is, it’s all we have”. It’s sad, we thought. They have so little and even what they have, their neighbors the settlers, plunder. We heard again of the nightly searches, about the overturning of what little food there is, about the destruction of the one dirt road that leads here. When we left and started to move on, there were lots of large stones on the path, which had been place there maliciously. We got down from the pick-up and moved the stones aside so we could continue on our way.

We got to the next village and there we saw two boys and a girl standing by an old caravan. We had already seen this temporary structure in the past, but there was nobody in it and it looked abandoned, so we had never stopped here. The children immediately came up to us and greeted us happily, and now a man whom we had not met before came out of the caravan. He introduced himself as the village teacher and invited us into the “classroom”. We went into the caravan and, indeed, with a lot of imagination one could see this as a classroom. There were three old tables, with a chair beside each one, and opposite them was a whiteboard with two marker pens next to it. There were schoolbooks open on the tables. It seems we had arrived in the middle of an Arabic lesson. The teacher introduced himself, told us how he arrived each day from Yata, an hour and a half away, in order to teach the few children who came to the school. The head teacher now joined in the conversation and told us that he too taught here, in another classroom, with just a few children, in a temporary building nearby. The classroom didn’t even have a door and we asked the teachers how they teach, under these conditions? “We make do with what there is, the important thing is that the children can learn a little” was the answer. “There are no teaching materials, all we have are a few books and this whiteboard”. Later in the conversation, it transpired that for the past two months the teachers in the area haven’t been paid (and their alary is a pittance, at best). “Smotrich hasn’t released the money that was supposed to pay the teachers’ salaries” said one of them, with a wry grin. We took a few of the blank notebooks we had out of the pick-up and some crayons. The teacher smiled, “OK, in the breaks they can draw a little”. We decided that next time we come we’ll bring some teaching materials.

As we continued on our way, we talked about education, which is considered so essential for mobility, for getting a job other than watching sheep and agriculture. We talked about there being no chance, under present circumstances, for a proper education, even at the most basic level: teachers without pay, without materials, who travel three hours over dirt roads just to teach two or three hours in remote villages. No wonder there is so little school time and so many days without school at all.

In the next village we met Kaid, whom we have already written about. As we were talking about the difficult situation, he suddenly said,

“The road is shrouded in fog now, but that doesn’t mean there is no road”.

And indeed, there is a heavy fog sitting on all the South Hebron hills, hiding the traditional way of life which the local people continue to follow. They do so with difficulty, barely surviving, without seeing the way. But maybe, out their belief in Allah, they stick to their conviction that there is a road, with hope that it will be revealed once again. On one of the houses there was a sign in Arabic, “On this land there is something worth living for”.

We had never met that expression and only in the evening, when we discussed it with the teacher who had taught us Arabic, in the course at Givat Haviva, did we understand its meaning. He translated for us a poem by the well-known poet, Machmud Darwish. Here are some lines from the poem:

On this land there is something worth living for,

The smell of bread in the morning, moss on the stone, the first stirrings of love,

And the occupiers’ fear of the memories.

On this land there is something worth living for,

A cloud imitating a flock of birds in the sky, the hour of the setting sun,

A woman entering, with all her glory, into her fortieth year

And the tyrants’ fear of the melodies

And I deserve to live. Yes, I deserve to live on this land.

So, we carry on with our field work, meeting the community that continues down the traditional road of life, even though the road is, for now, shrouded in a thick fog. Our hope is that the little help we can bring, some food; wood for heating; diapers; medicine; and a willingness to listen carefully and with admiration to the pain of those that live here, will help them continue their life on this land and that everyone who lives here will recognize the right to live – on this land!

Thank you for reading and for your support,

Eyal and Eileil Shani

Tr. Yonathan (Jon) Anson