OXFORD
— The battle between Israeli and Palestinian forces hit a 30-year peak recently
and , although she left a week after the current round of fighting broke out,
an Oxford native was on hand to witness the divide.
Erin
Kate Morrison lost her SAD 17 teaching job to budget cuts in last year. With time on her hands, she spent part of
last summer hanging with counselors from Otisfield’s Seeds of Peace camp, where
she worked the year before.
Seeds
of Peace brings together youngsters from the Middle East and other parts of the
world in the hopes that by becoming friends as teens, they will resist the urge
to fight as adults.
It
was while at a teachers’ workshop for the camp that Morrison met up with a
colleague who found her a job in Israel.
Morrison
spent four months at Bridge Academy, an American school in on the Palestinian
side of the wall in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank area. Most of her students were born in America,
and hold duel citizenship. However,
except for Morrison, the school’s principal, Nabil Kayali, and one student, all
are Muslim.
Morrison
spent the first few weeks emulating the local woman who kept covered — the
weather, while mild for natives, struck Morrison as oppressively hot. Finally, a college advised Morrison that she
need not remain under cover. People, the
woman said, would understand that Morrison was not Muslim.
“Everybody
there loves American,” says Morrison.
“They absolutely despise and spit on American government. I was excited
that people were able to distinguish the two.”
Still,
it was a culture shock.
“I
was the only white person,” Morrison recalls.
“I was the only blonde. When I
walked down the street, I was stared at until I was out of their vision. It was horrible.”
Morrison
says she never felt threatened, even though some friends from Seeds of Peace
remained wary of going into East Jerusalem.
The eyes upon her seemed more intense curiosity than sinister leering,
she says.
The
hardest part was having students who, while some spoke beautiful English,
tended to converse in a separate language.
“I
was trying to adjust, teaching literature and poetry, even though my background
is history, and I couldn’t even begin to decipher the language,” says Morrison.
Worse,
she arrived just before the start of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holy
celebration marked by daily fasting.
While Morrison was not expected to sweat under scarves, covered
head-to-toe, she was mindful of respecting the high holy days.
“That
first month I was like, this is so hard, what am I doing here?” she
recalls. “I was like, I can’t
communicate. I’m so hungry. Everything is so different to me.”
But
questions of culture went both ways.
With an Irish Catholic background, Morrison often found Muslims as
ignorant to the subtle differences between Catholic and Christian as most
Americans are to the distinctions between Sunni and Shiite.
“Here
people will talk about a lot of things, but I think most shy away from talking
about religion,” says Morrison. “Over
there, that was the first thing. I was
seen as Christian and that became part of my identity, immediately.”
Morrison
says she was surprised just how great a part religion plays in the lives of
Israelis and Palestinians.
“They
talk about God in everything they say,” she recalled. “At Seeds of Peace, you have this notion of,
why can’t people live together, but then when you get here and it’s a lot
deeper. Everything is embedded in
religious belief to a degree that’s hard for Americans to understand.
“That
idea that how the government is going to run is based on religious thought —
that just doesn’t happen here,” Morrison points out.
Perceived,
she thinks, as a pushover by students for her sunny disposition, and
ever-present smile, Morrison soon had to lay the hammer down. The correct answer to a directive to pay
attention in class was not, she made clear, “Okay, God willing.”
“They
have this firm faith and belief that, if it’s God’s will, it’s going to
happen,” she says. “I was like, ‘No, you
control this, not God.”
Still,
Morrison says the school had the support of parents. In most cases, each child had at least one
American parent. However, families chose
to send their children to the Branch School, which teaches in English and uses
American text books, she says, because American schools, and American culture,
are seen as too permissive. Morrison and
her fellow teachers enjoyed an ability to simply dismiss unruly students
unknown in the States.
“They
value education a lot over there,” says Morrison, especially mindful of her
students who will live in Palestine once their education is complete. “There are not a lot of options over there. If they don’t have an education, they will be
doing absolutely nothing.”
Morrison
likes to joke that teacher-parent meetings were a breeze at her new job.
“I
had one where the father didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak his
language. So, we just sat there,” she
says, with a laugh.
However,
if the culture and the school atmosphere took some getting used to, other
aspects of life on the Arab side of the West Bank proved eerily easy to
assimilate.
When
the fighting broke out in Gaza, less than two hours away, local Palestinian
protests went virtually unnoticed.
Celebratory gunfire was common at a nearby stadium, says Morrison, while
protest fires tend not to look much different than the fires local build to
burn their trash.
A
security lockdown is no big thing, she says, considering that one has to pass
through checkpoints to go virtually anywhere.
“The
sad part is that, for my students, this is not new,” says Morrison. “For them it was not a big deal, whereas I
was like, ‘Am I in a movie?’
“There
were AK-47s everywhere, like it was an accessory,” recalls Morrison.
Morrison
says she truly bonded with her students in Ramallah and, not surprising, built
up a healthy respect for their world view.
“The
rockets and the killing was nothing new,” she says. “We just heard about it here because they
actually shot a missile into Israel and killed, like, one person. But the Israelis are the ones who control the
checkpoints, and they weren’t letting things in — even basics, like water,
flour and medicines. The Palestinian
people live behind this big cement wall that reminds them every day that they
live in a caged society.
“I’m
not justifying any actions, by any means,” Morrison stresses. “I just explain
it to people here by asking, ‘What would you do if your child had no food, or
no medicine?’
Despite
the impression Morrison feels is given by the one-sided reporting she sees in
Western news sources, the militant Hamas organization does not represent all
Palestinians, she says.
“I
think what people don’t understand is that, in America, it’s all about
networking and who you know, and if that doesn’t work, money talks,” explains
Morrison, “But there, that means nothing — absolutely nothing. It’s all about what I.D. you hold.
A
blue identification card can get one past the Israeli checkpoints. A green i.d. keeps one pretty well esconced
on the Palestinian side.
Morrison
says she met one Palestinian man who owned a grove of olive trees passed down
to him along family lines. However,
because those trees are on the Israeli said of the fence, he has to hire
someone else to tend to them. He can
only view his orchard from afar.
“I
don’t think they can live together in a society,” says Morrison. “I just don’t think that’s feasible, because
of the religious divide. I think the
solution has to be to give the Palestinians their own country. But where people are naturally going to want
to possess their ancestral lands, even that might not work. It’s just a big, big mess.”
Morrison
returned to the States in December, when her visa expired. The escalation in tensions made it tough, she
says, to get the visa renewed in time to return for the spring semester. Still, she keeps in touch with her former
students through Facebook, and hopes to return this spring to see some of them
graduate.
“Being
over there made me realize how much I love to learn about other cultures,” she
says. “Even if you think you have an
idea of what another culture is like, you really have no idea until you have
been immersed in it. If they told me
today you can go back, I’d split in a second.”
And
how does Morrison’s mom, Oxford Town Clerk Ellen Morrison feel about that?
“Even
though she was not right where the fighting was, I was still nervous, because
she was so isolated,” she says. “As a
mother, I guess it’s best that I don’t know every story about what it was like
for her over there.”
Still,
Ellen acknowledges that Erin came home a much different person than the one who
left the Oxford Hills four months earlier.
As is often the case, Morrison says she learned as much from her
students as she hopes to have taught them.
“I
learned a lot about myself,” she says.
“Once I was pulled away from my family, my language and my culture, it
made me really think about what’s important for me. For me, there was a lot of personal growth.
“And
I don’t feel like that learning is done,” she says, “so I really would like to
go back.”
