Monday, 16 July 2003. N A B L U S.
6:45 pm. A traveling companion and I arrive at a roadblock. As we try to walk through, we hear faint yells. Soldiers have occupied a house and refuse to allow us through.
7:15pm. While we wait to try again, a man calls us over. He wants to show us one of the only pools in Nablus. There's a junk yard close by and an old abandoned plane. We refuse. The man seems crazy.
7:50pm. We try again. Maybe the soldiers aren't looking. We were wrong. They were. They became even more angry.
8:15pm. The sun is fast fading. If we are to make it, we have to do something.
8:20pm. We speak to one of the locals with a home. He suggests we try to approach the occupied house.
8:25pm. We approach the occupied command house, which is a few hundred meters from the occupied sniper house. They ask about us. They discover I am a Muslim. They will not let me pass.
9:04pm. We arrive back in the Balata refugee camp. We stay in the El-Titi household. I first heard of this family back in London, Ontario, when Jaggi Singh described the life and death of Jihad Al-Titi.
9:52pm. I meet an old friend who is also staying in Nablus. We talk late into the night. [Related Journal Entry]
Tuesday, 17 July 2003. N A B L U S.
4:29am. I couldn't sleep. I walked into the room where my traveling companion is. He was already awake.
4:30am. His alarm goes off. It means it's time to go.
4:45am. We leave Balata. While asking about taxis, a service drives by. "You going to Jenin?" we are. They offer us a ride to the roadblock.
4:55am. We try to cross the road. There are no yells from the house with snipers, but two soldiers soon make themselves known.
5:30am. We have been trying to negotiate with the soldiers since they stopped us, but they absolutely refuse to let us through. "Nothing personal. Just orders." Right. They walk away. We sit on the spot and start watching a Simpsons episode on my laptop. It's the one where Becky comes to live with the Simpsons after Marge breaks up her wedding with Otto [Synopsis of this episode].
5:55am. The Simpsons episode is over. I'm full of dust from sitting on the ground.
6:03am. After some discussion, we try to talk to the soldiers again. We talk about women, Canada, marriage, and The Matrix: Reloaded. Peppered in the conversation are repeated attempts to get by these guys. One soldier repeatedly walks away upset. When his soldier friend is busy conversing with my traveling companion, he sincerely apologizes for not letting us through.
6:40am. We tell our plans in no uncertain terms to the soldiers, who still refuse to let us pass: "OK, so you know exactly what we're going to do, we're going to bypass this roadblock by walking through the mountains right behind you just like all of the other Palestinians. We want you to know so you realize how obscene it is that you won't let us through." They knew exactly, but wouldn't let us through.
8:20am. We call a coordinator from Nablus to tell him we've made it through. The call woke him up. We're still walking the bypass, trying to get to the closest village.
8:34am. We've walked over at least 10 earthen roadblocks. We stop to take a picture of one of them.
8:45am. After passing another four or five roadblocks, we finally reach a village. The whole village's water supply is by aquaduct, using water that runs down a hill on which the the village is built. We're invited into a restaurant with no people to have a cup of tea. The nineteen year old there tells us about the history of the restaurant.
9:20am. We excuse ourselves from the restaurant and get a taxi to a village nearby.
9:26am. The driver asks us for 50 shekels. We know the going rate is 15.
9:47am. We pay the driver 30 shekels. He said that was as much as his gas cost. I called him a liar to his face. Everybody around us got upset with him after we left. I was pissed.
11:03am. We arrive in Jenin. I ask what the distance between Nablus and Jenin is. It's less than 45 km "in better times".
tarek : )