Local teacher lives Mideast history

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.”