Peacemaking

"I want you to build me an ark!"

Sunday 2 April 2006. 
Chicken Market. 
Old City. 
Hebron.

Sunday is a day off for the team.  Many of us go into Jerusalem for church. To get there on time, we allow an hour and a half.  This Sunday it took a bit over two hours.

I awoke to pouring rain, fog, and wind, and a banging metal door at street level below my window.  Four of us left the apartment at 7:00 am.  When we rounded the corner, the shopkeeper yelled at us not to go further.  We turned the corner, and I felt as if all the water in the world was running down the main street of the Old City towards us.  It swirled around trash and cardboard boxes, dirt and sand, the ubiquitous black plastic bags, and bones from the butchers. The drains were clogged with debris.  The water was running so fast the drains probably wouldn't have drained anyway.

Naturally, we kept going.  I had read in team updates about rain like this.  The Old City sits in a bowl with the heights of Haret iSheik on one side and Abu Sneineh on the other.  The water swirled down and around and over our feet as we wove from one side of the street to the other, trying to walk where the water was the most shallow. We were walking against the flow, which made it even more challenging.

By the time we got to the El Khader shared van, my shoes were soaked through and my socks felt really squelchy.  Everything but my feet dried out by the time we got to El Khader.  The fog was so dense all the vehicles had their hazard lights on.  If I had had to drive that road, I would have had at least fifty nervous breakdowns.   It was a blessing, actually, not to be able to see the Israeli settlement blocks along the way, or to see the road drop off to the wadi below.  The rain let up and the fog thinned.  When we got out of the shared van, there was no #21 bus.  The wind and the rain picked up and slashed at us, soaking us again.  We hardly dried out before we got to Jerusalem, got off at the foot of the Jaffa Gate and walked in to the Church of the Redeemer.

The sun came out during lunch.  By the time we got back to Hebron we could hardly tell the water had plowed through the Old City in the way we had witnessed.

The point of all this is this:  A newspaper report last week said the US was cutting off all infrastructure aid to the Hamas government in Palestine.  One of the projects was for a new sewerage system for Hebron.  If I remember correctly, a sewerage system includes storm drainage.  The US would, however, continue providing humanitarian aid.  Now, it seems to me that a sewerage system is a public health issue.  Public health is humanitarian aid.  Hello out there!

In Bill Cosby's Noah routine, God proposes letting it rain for one hundred days, or some such number.  Noah suggests letting it rain for forty days and forty nights and waiting for the sewers to back up.

Right!

4 April 2006

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