From Iowa to Hebron to Sweden and Back

From Iowa to Hebron to Sweden and Back
March 3 & March 16, 2002

Hi everyone!
Just a quick note to let you know I made it back to Hebron safely. My work is definitely cut out for me, not least because most of my 'neat' teammies are out on vacation. I'm headed to Sweden for a conference on international observers later this week.
peace, Le Anne

March 16, 2002

Hi everyone,
I got back from Sweden a day or so ago and am settling back into life in Hebron. Unfortunately, it's been heavy gunfire overhead for the past three days. And pretty tight curfew. I met a widow today whose water tanks and electricity were shot out last night and just as I came in the house she started bawling. She felt like she'd lost everything. All the families I meet here keep repeating, 'Please just write and tell America what you see here happening to us.' Well, at least they've figured out where all the money and weapons are coming from to fund this Occupation.
As we accompanied children to school this morning, the soldiers fired a tear gas canister into the school doorway. That was not pleasant at 7:30 in the morning. There are four small schools located within one block in Hebron. The soldiers told the teachers that the children had to be in class by 8 or there would be trouble. The boys' schoolteachers understood it to mean they had to leave by 8, so they shut down their school while the girls continued. We had kids running all over the place. By the time we checked again at 11, they'd gotten things straightened out somehow and everyone was in class.
It was pretty gruesome later in the day as we walked behind the block where all the schools were and began to realize some of the earlier tension. Only an hour before we arrived to do school patrol, soldiers shot a car and killed the driver. He was coming down a hill and seems to have slumped on the gas pedal after the shooting, which slammed his car into a nearby butcher shop. When we walked by, young boys pointed out the sawdust that was soaking up pools of blood from the man. It was hard to stomach. We had been up the road about a block that morning, not knowing what had happened, and had seen the dozens of M-16 (Israeli) bullet casings scattered on the ground.
A much brighter moment was due to our upstairs neighbors, who just celebrated the Muslim New Year, and had leftover food from the celebration. So they cooked us a huge pot of maklube ('upside down') rice and meat with spices and we are going to be eating it happily for days.
Around the house, my garden is recovering from no one watering itfrom the time Greg left to when I got back, and I have tried to restore some order to the kitchen. There are neat people and there are sloppy people who are on this team, and guess who all is here right now. I never considered myself a neat person until I moved here, actually.
I should tell you a bit about Sweden, for instance that it was warmer than both north Iowa and Hebron this year. Very strange. The next thing is that the most important word in the Swedish vocabulary is Fika. This means 'snacks'! Swedes have fika more times per day than I breathe. This explains why my hosts, the Church of Sweden, gave me sixty bucks for 'coffee'. I did not starve, and by the end of one day of visiting, I felt like I could have been rolled home. And yet I did not see any fat Swedes while there.
I was surprised I got to see much of anything in Stockholm, actually. We were programmed a solid week from wakeup to bedtime, mainly in speaking. I did manage to cram souvenir shopping and sightseeing into one action-packed 90 minutes, but it was at a near full run and oops almost got hit by a car. And you all wrote and said Sweden was a good safe place for me.
I'd love to tell you all about what I did there, only Kathy wants the computer. It's a large team right now and all eight people want to email at night. Seven are women and then there's poor Mark. At least he gets his shower to himself.
Talk to you soon,Le Anne