The mundanity of poverty

What to expect of the West Bank? Unemployment is above 40% and movement across the border into Israel, where most of the jobs are, is difficult. I used to live in Loughborough Junction, South London, so I know what a shithole looks like. Here I expect to see scenes of a more stirring kind. Comic Relief stuff. Kids smeared in their own shit. Maybe a couple of desperate women eating the corpses of their husbands, killed by Israeli soldiers.

Evening in Al 'Ayzariyah, and we sit in the house of a lovely Palestinian family. When he finds out that I'm an English teacher, the father of the family tells me of a British sitcom about someone teaching English to foreigners that he saw before it was cancelled. "It was really disappointing, you know. Something really good, that I wanted to follow, and it disappeared after one episode." It's cruel living on the West Bank.

He digs out his VHS copy of the one episode shown, and we watch it. It's called 'Mind Your Language', and I soon see why I've never seen a repeat. The foreigners learning English are like children, and a lot of the humour is derived from crude racial stereotypes. It's curious to me that this show has stayed as such a touchstone in his memory, as if the world here were in stasis.

The family here live in a nice house near to Jerusalem, which was ten minutes in a car before the Wall was erected (it's now over an hour's journey). The father used to be an actor and performed often in Jordan. He's now retired because he can't leave the West Bank and has health problems. He tells me that he has written three films, that the scripts are sitting in a draw. The three children are polite, sweet and can all speak very good English, taught by their mother. She is a formidable woman whose entire energy supports women's projects in the area. The occupation is an obsession to her, and how could it not be? The first question she asks me is on my opinion of their situation. I feel like my answers can't satisfy her, and mutter something vague about it being "crazy". She is very aware of what they lack, and parades their wants openly to evoke pity.

We sit late into the evening and discuss the problems with Windows Vista (so much for stasis), along with the part we can play in the Palestinian struggle once we're back home. We drink lots of tea and eat lots of biscuits. I take a piss in their bathroom, but don't flush, because water is a problem. As we leave they cut each of us a pink rose from their garden.