Thursday, June 19, 2003

Daylight was streaming in a 5:00 AM, and it was no more sleep for me, so it was up and at 'em, or carpe diem as the Romans used to say when they were the occupying power here. Yesterday when I talked with Rashid (the brother with the tractor), I thought he was going out into his field to work early this morning, so I went down after my ablutions and coffee to his house. His pretty wife answered the door, and I asked for Yassir (I got mixed up!), and Rashid came to the door and said, "I am Rashid." He invited me in for coffee--the thick sweet Turkish type coffee served in little cups. Rashid speaks minimal English, but he tries and with some arm waving I find out that it is 5:00 PM, not 5:00 AM that he is going out to the field. I will go with him.

Then I got some great pictures of his wife milking goats and ewes by hand. She makes cheese with it. I marveled at the beautiful garment she was wearing to milk those ewes and nannies, but Rashid told me it is washable. Then he showed me how he milks their one dairy cow, a big Holstein-with a power milker run by a little gas engine compressor. That cow never gets out to pasture. Both roughage and grain are fed in the stall. I expect to get some yogurt from Mrs. Fehmdi one of these days.

Rashid and his brother Yassir look very much alike, so it was easy for me to get them mixed up. Someone should draw an interconnection diagram for Yanoun. Rashid's wife is the sister of the mayor, Abdel Latif, and the sister of Yassir's wife. So brothers married sisters.

About 10:00 AM I started out walking to the north and east of Upper Yanoun, then down to the cultivated land toward Lower Yanoun. I just kept going and walked down the road to the cluster of buildings known as Lower Yanoun.

I asked for Adnan since I had been told he speaks English. But first I met up with brothers Khader and Khassan. The latter showed me the bullet wounds in his leg from being beaten and shot by settlers last year while tending his flock of sheep. Khassan has 70 sheep, and his brother Khader has 60.

I was offered the usual tea at the first house and introduced to Khassan's wife. Later I was taken over to a nearby house and introduced to his second wife, younger than the first. The Koran allows four wives, but I did not think that polygamy was still practiced. Wrong.

Finally I was shown to adnan's house, and sure enough he speaks English very well. He has an engineering degree from Jordan, and looking as some of he books in his bookshelf, I could tell he has a good foundation in mathematics, besides chemistry. He lives there as near as I could make out with his brother Khader. Sitting around drinking coffee, the conversation turned to sheep. There was a cousin also there who has 100 sheep, as does Khader. He told me that 100 sheep brings an income of $15,000 in a year from selling lambs and ewes for slaughter and milk to make cheese to sell. That's a lot of money here, but of course there are some costs too. Khader also grows tobacco and makes a good income from it, although he does not smoke himself because it is unhealthy. His brother Adnan is a chain smoker.

From the left: Rashid, Abdel-Latif, Adnan and Leah, an Israeli woman who visits Yanoun and is well liked by the children. The boys are from the 9 or 10 families still in Upper Yanoun.

Adnan has a job with the Palestinian Ministry of Industry in Nablus. Lately he has not even tried to get to work because of the hassle at checkpoints He can stand in line for hours and then be refused passage. Before the settlers came, there was a road leading directly to Nablus from Yanoun, about 15 km, or the distance from our farm to the town of Athabasca. It was no more that a 15-minute drive from home to office. Now it can literally take days if one really persisted in trying.

Adnan was adamant, though that the biggest threat to future of Palestine is the separation wall that is going up. Maybe the original idea was to put a barrier on the green line, the 1967 boundary of the state of Israel. This has changed to a wall that is plunging deep into the West Bank, stealing most of the best agricultural land and water resources. Another 300,000 Palestinians will be left without livelihood so that the big settlements can be included into Israel, and the rest remain connected by the superhighway Jew-only roads.

I asked Adnan to drive me back home, and we took his little Peugeot and started up the road. On the way he showed me some land that the settlers have recently confiscated. The brown strip of ploughed land in the distance is the most fertile land of the village, but that too has now been stolen. Yanoun, upper and lower, is like being inside a giant set of pliers. There is one way in from the south, no way out except the same way you enter. As near as I can determine, there were about 200 people here before the settler harassment started. There are now about 100, including children, counting both upper and lower Yanoun.

Back at the house, Rashid was there, and he and Adnan took up a lively conversation, but in Arabic, which left me out. I went upstairs to cook and eat something. I fixed the same thing again: onions and garlic sautéed in olive oil, and lots of delicious whole grain flat bread freshly baked by our neighbor ladies.

At about 4:00 PM Effie arrived to be the second international at the house. She is an Israeli, but lives in Scotland, married to a Scot. She has been in the "occupied territories" for about two weeks, first with the ISM, then IWPS. She also has done time with Machsom Watch, a group of Israelis who monitor checkpoints for abuses. In fact she had been at the big Huwarra checkpoint outside Nablus today when several hundred armed settlers marched down the street in opposition to the Israeli Army closing a settlement outpost of three trailers. Effie spent about a week with me and I came to like and admire her.

Effie with the neighbor ladies.From the left: Rashid's sister, Effie, Rashid's cousin, Rashid's mother. Effie is a pharmacist who studied in England and practices in Scotland. Rashid's cousin is a Pharmacy student at the university in Nablus.

At 5:00 PM I joined Rashid on his MF 165 with the water tank hooked up. The tank holds 3000 thousand litres. It was already full having been filled the day before. This may be to let the sun warm the cold water that comes from the well. What he has laid out is a large garden plot, one to two acres maybe, into which he has installed a drip irrigation system of plastic pipes. Each plant gets its own drip point, slightly below the soil surface. There is a main feeder pipe of, say, 2" diameter with lateral lines of maybe ½ inch diameter. He hooks the pump on his tank to the input of the main feeder and fires up the little British made gas engine/pump to pressure up the line, and then waits until the tank is empty.

He grows Cusa (summer squash), Filfil (small long green sweet peppers), Bamyeh (???), Bandura (tomato), Clial (cucumber), Fatcus (???), Bactrix ( water melon), Fasoli (peppers). Only the Filfil is taken to market. The rest of the produce is for use by the (extended) family.

On the way back I asked to stop and see the crop of grain, which from the road I took to be barley, but it is bearded wheat. The kernels are very hard, and the crop is due to be combined tomorrow, Friday, June 20, 2003. The combine is due to arrive at 9 AM, but there is some question about that since it has to move at night sometimes due to attacks from the Army. They might mistake it for one of the (non-existent) Palestinian tanks. Or the settlers might try to sabotage the harvest. In any case the mayor wants us to be on hand when it starts. I am curious.

Effie and I had a real meal. Finally the mayor had organized some food for the house, and instead of another meal of rice and onions, we had locally baked flat bread from locally produced wheat locally milled. Effie fried in Yanoun olive oil some of the locally produced ewe's milk cheese, chopped up tomatoes and cucumbers, together with some of the remnants of my noon rice and onion fry up. Excellent food in good company.