Zambia

Family tradition has it we all meet for Christmas, and this year it's in Zambia. My sister just moved here a few months ago. I'm not sure if she actually invited us all to descend on her only 2 days after she and her husband moved into their new unfurnished home here, but with the way the Kenyan elections turned out, we're all quite glad we opted for Lusaka instead of our parents' place in Nairobi. I'm changing my return ticket to Nairobi today, since there were fresh dead bodies on the streets this morning and people are advised to stay indoors.

ANYWAY.. Zambia is interesting. People who lived in Zimbabwe before say that Zambia is the way Zim was 10-15 years ago, and Zim is the way Zambia was 10-15 years ago. With things actually working etc. Since I'm kind of nostalgic about the time I grew up in Zim, I kind of like Zambia.

Though what I actually know about the place is pretty limited:

1. My sister says she's seen more female drivers, including truck drivers and taxi drivers, here than any other African capital she's lived in. Interesting.


2. An economist from Lund university I met in Arusha says she's studying inequality and that Zambia is the most unequal society in Africa. Though I found that a bit strange at the time, and even stranger now that I'm here. On further investigation I found that at least 50 nations have been claimed to be the most unequal country in the world, and it all depends on how you calculate the Gini coefficient. Poverty seems pretty average by African standards, and it's hard to see who those super-rich people would be, compared to for example Namibia where people have private jets and all that. Intriguing.


3. Bars and Restaurants serve shandy. Rock Shandy and Malawi Shandy. Important.

Idd and other December events

December. Idd ul Hajj for Moslems, Christmas and confirmations for Christians. Increased expenditures for everyone. In this predominantly Christian region, it’s the month of Christmas, confirmations, and crime.

Just like for Idd, everyone needs new clothes for Christmas. But before Christmas come the Barikio – the confirmation season. I had no idea this was so big here. Like in Norway, protestant confirmations have very little to do with the original idea of confirmation - a child learning about the faith and then taking an independent decision to follow it – thus ‘confirming’ their adherence to the faith they were baptised into. Polls of Norwegian teenagers getting confirmed usually show that the main motivation is tradition plus the presents they get. Here it seems to be a kind of ‘rite of passage’ for both the family and the child. The child has become an ‘spiritual adult’ as it’s been said at the ceremonies I’ve attended, and the family is clearly happy to show that they have succeeded, that they've reached this far, that they can throw a party and serve up an entire goat, crates of soda and piles of rice, that their kid has turned out well and is going on to secondary school.

It is quite costly for ordinary people. I know because I’ve helped finance some. Including the one that these pictures are of, which was really quite a party. The confirmed boy was placed on a podium draped with shiny white satin and decorated with Fanta, Coke and ribbons, until the ‘goat cake’ ceremony when he descended to feed his godparents and parents in turn with the first carvings of roasted goat.

So they say there’s always more theft in December. Last week a thief in the area I live was killed by a mob. Mob killing are on the increase in the area according to human rights monitors, and I’ve heard quite a few stories recently. It used to be more of an urban thing, and the place I live is rural. But two weeks ago they tyred a guy at nearby town Usa River one evening – apparently he’d been caught by the police but got away and people were just fed up with him. The next morning his body was still burning. This time some people were shouting to get a tyre and some petrol, but then others shouted it was a waste of time and just hacked him to death with machetes instead. It’s one of the things I ask people about, what they think of these ‘mwizi!’ killings, and so I found it interesting.

Ethnocentrism

Afew days ago I spent some hours at a village school waiting for my respondents to turn up. I noticed this map painted on one of the walls outside, next to a diagram of the inner ear. I kind of liked the way for once it was the Africa part that was drawn in great detail, and the other continents that were neglected. Usually it's the other way round: Time and again while looking for soem African country in an atlas, I've had to flip through pages and pages on the internal states of certain Western countries, before finding that the country I was looking for had disappeared into the mid-page fold of the one page to which the entire continent of Africa had been relegated.

Christmas shopping!

A funeral cancelled my the afternoon's focus group yesterday, so I went into town to have lunch with a friend and spend the afternoon Christmas shopping. Kind of fun! We went to The Blue Heron, a leisurely cafe-boutique housed in an stately 1950s bungalow and pretty much overflowing with pretty things made locally.

I don't know many shop-owners, so I get a small kick out of the fact that I know this one from school. Though I was pretty much constantly intimidated by her in those IB days, since she looked like Claudia Schiffer and was brilliant at everything I was not. I think we all knew someone like that in school! Anyway, it was fun to see this beautiful shop she's made. Also my old classmate N. helps out there when she's not busy partying or dealing her Tanzanites - she's this incredibly vivacious Goan girl and it was fun to see her with her smile just as wide and her nails as long as they were in school.

Jurassic park vs. Paradise

I live in an incredibly beautiful place.
Right next to a river with a thick forest of trees so big I'm in awe. My closest neighbours are a horde of colobus monkeys and at least 30 silvery-cheeked hornbills. A friend always tells me I live in Paradise. I sort of agree: it's beautiful! But not half as uneventful and predictable as Paradise.

You sort of think of paradisiac nature as quiet - but thses guys are noisy! Once in a while the colobus monkeys engage in some serious logging, felling whole branches at a time, making it difficult even to have a conversation. And the whirr of this crazy-looking bird's gigantic wings makes you think there's a flying dinosaur right above you, ready to swoop you up in his claws. Not to mention the absurd sound of his crow - lika an annoying old woman croaking into a megaphone and set to high speed. Incredible. And much more comical and invigorating than a peaceful, predictable paradise.

Incidentally, an elderly man told me the local fable about the hornbill. The moral of it is, he said, when you have something good, don't try to 'shape' it too much, or you will spoil it. The mother of the hornbill, or Hondohondo as it is in Swahili, wanted to get his bill just right, and then she 'overshaped' it.

Images of leadership

Whilst sitting in the Oldonyosapuk Village Office last week, where I was to interview people about their ideas about power and leadership, I couldn't help but notice the fabulous gender imagery of this calendar on the wall.

Great Christian Leaders, each with a - (whatsitcalled?) - microphone, looking determined and strong and zealous in their suits. And then women as well of course, one smiling affably (without a - um - microphone) , and then as a group, less than half the size of the men, singing. So I thought I'd post it here, just cos I found it funny.

Prudence.

Is it prudent to blog pre-coffee ruminations? You know, the slow-motion thoughts you have before your brain kicks in the morning? Well, here’s risking it:

Because the obvious irony of an issue I mentioned in the previous post – of giving in to the inhibiting ‘you shouldn’t walk here’ mantra – just dawned on me. That this is actually pretty much connected with the stuff I’m researching.

Not being able to walk that stretch is annoying: it inhibits my freedom of movement . Although I’m a woman of extraordinary economic means and can therefore call a taxi, having to organise transport or walking company every single %&dy time I need to leave my home is not as simple as just picking up the phone. Sometimes the network is down, sometimes my battery is out and there’s no power, sometimes I’ve run out of phone credit and no way to top up unless I get to a shop, which means calling a taxi, which I can’t because – you guessed it! – I have no credit. Not to mention when the taxi guy doesn’t answer because his battery is flat, or his network is down. So when any of the above happens, I feel like this ‘you’ll get mugged’ advice has me tied within a certain radius to the kitchen sink. How the heck is a single woman ever supposed to get out and DO things?!

So I’m reminded of the discussion the focus groups have had on rape. Rape is caused by women who go to places where they shouldn’t, according to all the focus groups. Not that the stretch I walk is a designated raping area (it’s more mugging) – but the effect is the same - restricted mobility. To tell the truth I’m not even that bothered about having my old freebie Allergan bag with a $3-5, a pen and a notebook stolen. It’s not the thought of that that’s scared me into taking taxis. Rather, what’s bullied me into this infuriating restriction of movement is the prospect of all these arrogant ‘I told you so’s if something should happen. There’s even a specific phrase for it in Kiswahili – ‘amekoma’ – ‘she’s learned her lesson’. A phrase I first heard on a friend’s great Bongo Flava CD; a discourse linguistics professor at UDSM told me it’s said by the more powerful to the less powerful, or as a means of asserting power.

So there it is. What fieldwork does to you. Even trivial daily life frustrations like calling a taxi, you start fitting into big academic constructs like the patriarchal dividend. And I haven’t even gone into how the idea of these roads being dangerous, of people being potential muggers, threatens the way I’ve liked to see the country, the Tanzania of childhood photos where my sisters and I stand as tanned kids with impossibly windblown hair in cotton dresses in front of acacia trees and other wilderness, drinking warm sodas (because that was the time before duka fridges and bottled water….), and how I can sort of understand now why in academic contexts, anthropologists and other whiteys who’ve done their stints in Africa, can pounce on me tooth & claw, when I say I’m studying attitudes to gender-based violence, and tie themselves into illogical knots defending ‘their tribe’: the idea of violence sort of tarnishes those rosy pictures. Yup, I won’t even go into that – clearly blogging pre-coffee can get a bit serious!

Today's work

Several months later : so much for good intentions! And so much for easy fieldwork. I now have two weeks left of my Arusha fieldwork before heading off to Lusaka for Christmas and then to Kigoma, my other research site in Tanzania. And it's been anything but easy! Though with regards to my previous post, none of the discomfort has been in any way connected to self-sacrifice to help the natives / save my soul / subjecting myself to the endless suffering that is Africa.

Anyway. More on ups and downs later.

But here’s what I did today. Got up at 6:30 to light the little paraffin contraption behind my one-room house, for 10 seconds of tepid water 45 minutes later. Then at 0800 I followed the path through the forest to the main road, where I caught a dalla-dalla bus to Tengeru, the town where I was to meet my assistant.

Ok, I didn’t. I'm lying! No longer can I claim to be part of the dalla-dalla crowd! Last week I finally gave in to the 2 months’ hype about how dangerous that walk is, and started calling Max, my local taxi driver. So today I just crossed the river and walked over to the dirt road where he picked me up. Max is a skinny guy in stonewashed jeans, driving a cobweb-stickered dark-windows cab by day, and breaking hearts with his Bongo Flava crooning by night. And on Sundays he turns up in pastel suits, ready for his afternoon church service. I am his ‘sister’ and so he only charges me $5 for the 20-minute ride. Hrmph.

I met my assistant JK at our usual hang-out, a hedged-in dirt patch with some trees and plastic furniture in it. At one end there is a cement cubicle structure with a woman, a sink and a microwave in it, as well as a bougainvillea-covered shade roof over some soda fridges standing in the dirt. In other words, a fully equipped roadside café where the local middle class meets.

We met to go through some transcription issues and to plan next week’s focus groups. I’ve only covered one of my two topics so far, and we need to go back to the same places with my second one. Actually we should have done this last week, but then one of JK’s previous employers, an economic historian from Lund University, turned up, and asked to ‘borrow’ him for a few days. So now we have nine days for 17 focus groups in 8 villages. Should be ok though. We discussed a little whether we should use the same groups, or new ones. Some have been chosen by the Village Chairman, others were more random, some were, as JK puts it, trying to paint a rosy picture of their village, and others were looking for money. And then other groups seemed to just genuinely enjoy the opportunity of being able to discuss things. At one place, people kept trickling in to the discussion room and joining in with such spontaneity and apparent earnestness that we couldn’t ask them to leave – especially as they were all old men of 50+. Afterwards they didn’t ask for money but asked us to come back since they had more to say on the subject, and had never realised how important it was to discuss this. So we’ll be asking to speak with those men again, but in 3 instalments.

JK had a list of most of the ‘mwenyekiti’s and ‘mtendaji’s as the village officers are called, but the two most remote ones were missing. So we drove to the villages to make the arrangements in person. At the first village we met the chairman immediately – a skinny guy with a wide smile. At the next village, the office was closed, and no cellphone number posted on the door. The woman in the shop next door said they had gone to a district-level meeting, but the sub-village chairman would have the number. He was at a church further down the road.

So we walked a few hundred metres until we heard the church. That is, we heard the praying. JK smiled. We walked down the path though the greenery, and a white-painted plank building with no windows and a closed door appeared on a green green lawn, surrounded by haphazard flowers. A man was shouting inside, loud and fast, with melodrama. We stood on the lawn. Ten minutes passed. JK excused himself and came back. Another ten minutes passed. I excused myself and came back. After half an hour I asked:
H-Is it common here, to have church services in the middle of a weekday?
JK (smiling) – This is a pentecostal church. They don’t like to follow fixed.. you know, procedures. They just do it anyhow.
So I start asking him about Pentecostalism. It’s growing here, he says, among the illiterate and the poor. And they don’t even teach them things to help themselves! Some young semi-literate men, they go to the US, they come back with some things to say, and after a while you see them with a big car, with money… And these people who go to the church, they are poor! I don’t even know if they believe.. but there is the funding, maybe they think if I start going to this church, I can get some clothes, some aid. But if they could learn how to work hard, they would not be depending on the pastor. Sometimes they call people to spend a whole day inside the church – how can you work if you are spending the days in there?
So that’s why Pentecostalism is spreading, he says. The Americans are trying to take over the world with their Amreican Christianity. Making people dependent. He tells of people who refused to go to the doctor with their malaria, but died in church instead. Yesterday, whilst walking along the river interviewing farmers for the Swedish researcher’s milk project, he asked a woman whose stock had dwindled where she took her cows for (free) veterinary service. She didn’t, she said: she just prayed instead. ‘Somehow these areas which have our European Christianity, they are doing ok – but where these new American churches come in – people don’t manage so well.’

The voice from the church showed no signs of abating so we walked back onto the road where we met some people and explained our situation. No point waiting if he’s in the church, they said, but we’ll send this kid with you to show the way to the chairman’s house. We took the car (a well-worn Peugeot belonging to JK’s relative) and this dusty, raggedy-clothed 7-year old had clearly never been in a car before – his eyes lit up and he smiled all the way there. That, and the weight of the mission he’d been entrusted with, made it difficult even to tell me his name when I asked. Solomon.

Anyway. We managed to make all the arrangements in the end. Then on the way back, a Danish woman I met at a ‘julefrokost’ party at a friend’s last week called and asked if she could interview me tomorrow. She’s a journalist with one of the big paper in Denmark. The interview is not about me, but about feminism – but still, I REALLY hope I don’t say anything stupid!

Mt Meru from the road in to Arusha

Fieldwork in Tanzania...

...seems to conjure up images of some self-sacrificing batik-clad shiny-faced me slaving away amidst the dirt and endless suffering that is Africa. All for the sake of this whitey tradition of helping the natives and saving one's own soul / karma / sense of perspective whilst at it.

Whilst I'm here in Tanzania doing my PhD fieldwork, I won't be trying to live up to that idea. Or down to it, for that matter.

Partly that's due to my current iconoclastic mood on the topic, but also the happy fact that I'm an incredibly spoiled researcher. For example: the trip from Nairobi to Arusha is usually made with the Impala Shuttle Service - an optimistic name for a ramshackle collection of secondhand Korean minibuses that cram passengers into the aisles for a half-day drive with no toilets. Me? I take Mom's Shuttle Service. When she had the car and she had the T-shirt, why should her daughter have to take anthing but Mom's personal Shuttle Service to her research site? Of course on the way she also picked up her other daughter from HER research site, so she could go home to the US and write up her thesis.

Israeli highways....

.... make me think of Namibia, with all the wide open spaces. With so little natural greenery obstructing the view, it's the best place to get a licence. (Namibia, that is. For me.) And like the apartheid-ruled Namibia, they're very keen BOTH on checkpoints and security, AND on highways where you can go superfast. So if you're in the strongmen's good books, you can zip around more carefree than most places. And if not, well you can end up like my friend J. who was doing fieldwork in the Palestinian territories, and spend an entire day at checkpoints trying to get from places as far apart as South and North London. She's also the one who told me that the colour of the sticker that airport security puts on your passport is a signal to all checkpoint staff what level of a risk you are. The friend I was travelling with had the colour of 'Grade II terrorist' since he works in Gaza. So we decided not even to try to enter Jericho, which is walled in as 'Palestinian territory'.

Caesarea

Caesarea is a place I only knew from brief mentions in early church history - I had no idea what magnificence it stood for at the time, or how beautiful even the ruins of it are. I feel no words or pictures I put here will do it justice, so click on the link for that.

Anyway, what I found interesting was the casual way Israelis seem to treat these historically significant artefacts . Luxembourg is an extreme in the other end, where they seem to spend a fortune on trying to renovate the insignificant into significance, but Norway isn't too far from that either: more money than sites (i.m.h.o.). Then there are other places that just have more sites than money, so they can't afford to maintain them all, like Turkey or Egypt. But at Caeasarea it seemed there'd been a decision to make Caesarea into a facility people use, even if it does chip away at the irreplaceable. So they'd made a picnic area / eating complex where kids played ball on parts of the ruins. Lively, at least.

More photos in the Caesarea photo album.

Michmoret Beach

Frolog and I always seem to gravitate to beaches when we're travelling. Given his Francophone difficulty in differentiating between 'beach' and ''b%#&ch', this is never boring. So this time we decided to go to a place on the Mediterranean coast, more low-key than the crowded resort towns. Kind of cute. Seemed very popular among middle-class Israeli families. At first we had some trouble ordering food, since nobody spoke English at the first 3 places we went. In fact they didn't speak any language at all other than Hebrew. Several places in Israel I found that quite puzzling: meeting young people who look outwardly very 'globalised' / 'modern', and who're reasonably well-educated, who've never learned any other language - not Arabic to speak with their neighbours within and outside the country, and not English to speak to anyone else either. What would they do if they ever wanted to go outside this little strip of land? Or just talk to someone from the neighbouring suburb? At the same time the Palestinians I met, who in outward appearance looked very different from 'us', all spoke English.

Anyway. When we finally found a place where we could communicate, I had the best Chicken Caesar salad I can remember eating. And I don't even like eating at beaches - that's Frolog's thing. I always feel the sand gets in my food - was overexposed to beach lunches as a child I guess.

So here I am, after 2 consecutive Chicken Caesar Salads al Michmoret, looking like that drawing in Le Petit Prince - you know, the one of the snake who'd just eaten an elephant:

Oops!

Ok, ok, so they do have a few things to teach me, my friends the effortless travelbloggers. Like:

Rule # 1: When travel-blogging, blog whilst travelling.

Otherwise life catches up on you, and before you know it, you're 6 months behind on several countries' worth of travelling.

But what the heck- time is an abstract concept, and I have a lifetime of experience with dealing with post-procrastination damage. And Rule # 1 there? Deny, deny, deny. I'll just keep blogging like no time ever passed, and I just got back from Israel yesterday.

next up

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a kind of nutshell for several Christian denominations, as each has staked their claim to it over the centuries. The current standoff is a religiocircus: you can walk though the Greek Orthodox section to the Roman Catholic to the Russian one and so on until you get dizzy. From what I saw, the Greek Orthodox had the snazziest videocams.

Fundamentalisms

It’s people and their lifestyles and mentalities that fascinate me the most when I travel. I have qualms about photographing them though, and often have to tell the story with no pictures to illustrate.

Usually I explain that I feel it’s disrespectful: to click at people like that is to relate to them like animals in a zoo. On closer self-scrutiny I realise it’s more, and not less, respect I need to feel comfortable clicking at them. After all, it’s after I’ve analysed and categorised them, that I want to take their picture, and my discomfort comes from my unacknowledged awareness that I’m not taking a picture of them: I’m just securing their image to illustrate the accuracy of my interpretation of them. Had my thoughts about the people I observe been more charitable, I wouldn’t feel such intense discomfort in taking photos of them. Respectful? Me? Hah.

Jerusalem is an eldorado for people-watchers. Fellow-people-watchers had told me this before I went: “a religious carnival” I was told. “Does that mean it’s like a San Francisco for fundamentalists?” a friend asked. I’ve never been to San Francisco, so I couldn’t say.

It didn’t come as a total surprise to me that Jerusalem is important to fundamentalists from several world religions. However, news on the Middle East conflict shows them all up against one another: seeing it all played out in people’s lives in Jerusalem made me think more about how much they all have in common. Starting form that very first drowsy morning in Holy City, after an all-nighter of cross-examinations, sleeping in sardine seats, more cross-examinations and a dreamy midnight drive from Tel Aviv. Sitting in the living room, I was drowsily nursing my still-sleepy soul back to life with a cup of coffee and some channel-surfing when I heard the familiar comfort of a morning sermon. The story of Jesus healing some guy by the Bethesda pool. Grace. Trust. Mercy. For me, definite soul-nursing...

VOOM!! Some schmarmy American voice comes on! Loud strutting claims fill the room. The People of Israel Are Seeing the Light. Unwarranted assumptions, covert political agendas and ignorance-dependent emotionalism are all mixed together with conveniently uninformed interpretations of biblical texts to form one big “Give Us Your Money”. Wow. I’m awake. Welcome to the Holy Land.

So the Evangelical branch of the Fundamentalist Family are here. We finish our coffees and get out to meet the rest.

Wearing all black doesn’t necessarily mean blending in with the crowd. It’s clear to me that Hasidic Jews are dressing to make a point, but this is the only point I get from their appearance at first. I guess male Hasidic Jews and female hijab-wearing-Muslims have that in common: excellent fashon lessons in How To Get Noticed in Black.

And also fascination from a religious perspective, ie how a sacred text is applied in daily life. I played a little bit of mental Spot the Verse whilst gawking at them, but the only verse that came to my mind was the one about God saying ‘tie these words of mine to you this and that part of your body’. Frolog, whom I'm visiting, however had a more straightforward take on this religious branch. Firstly, they’re annoying because if you drive through their area on a Saturday they throw stones at you (apparently driving a car is work but throwing a stone at you is sheer pleasure and therefore not a breach of Shabat). Secondly, as Frolog says, it’s so mych easier to dress like your great grandfather than to treat other people consistently with kindness and integrity. Your clothes are so much easier to control than your own behaviour towards others. A pretty good paraphrase of Jesus if you ask me.

I wonder if this focus on controlling things and people around you is the common element to religious extremists. Although I don’t at all buy into the ‘all paths lead to God’ spiel, ie that all religions are the same, it seems to me that people within each religion have certain human traits in common. And fundamentalism in particular is more a function of human flaws than divine inspiration, ie more of the human element in it than other strains, so I’m thinking fundamentalisms has more in common across religious divides than other strains of those religions. IMHO of course.

Although most fundamentalists I know of have an above-average interest in controlling outward appearance and controlling other people, in The Holy Land the thing seems to be more about territoriality. Searching for sites to see in the Holy City in particular was disappointing. The Mount of Olives? Sure, we can go see the place where Jesus wept. Which church do you want? Because of course there’s nothing left of it now, it’s covered with churches, each with a claim more ludicrous than the other. This one has Jesus’ toenail in it, that one Peter’s chopped-off ear. (Actually I’m making that up – I can’t remember the exact anatomical parts involved, but something incredibly holy and surprisingly tangible.) Same thing for all the holy sites, with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre forming an all-in-one plethora of relics, a microcosm of geopolitical rivalries as each of the self-proclaimed Cristian powers staked their claim to this particular holy site, each building an extra part to the church. And then of course, there are the ruins of the Jewish Temple, with the Al Aqsa Mosque now built so solidly on top.

In short, like peeing dogs, men have staked out their territorial claims all over the Holy Land (… that is, if something so soaked in urine can still be called ‘holy’…. can it?)

And these were the thoughts I was having when I was actually trying to be DEVOUT. Imagine. Anyway, when I tried to chase them away for the nth time, I was reminded of Jesus’ criticisms of the religious power-mongers of his own day. His words were even more vulgar, and a lot of it was about how hung up they were on outward appearances and control, as well as religious monuments. And then that repetitive anti-territoriality: "My kingdom is not of this world…"

Anyway it’d probably be unfair of me to brand Orthodox Judaism as territorial fundamentalism. Firstly because, beyond the haircurlers, I know nothing about them. Secondly because they’re not particularly Zionist from what I hear.

As usual, no-one does Fundamentalism as well as the Americans. Strolling through the Old City we meet two versions. The Christian type came in a herd that almost trampled us down as we turned a corner. I had to turn around and look back to make sure I'd really seen what I thought I'd seen. No, the surprise was no that they were Americans and that we still hadn’t heard them coming. They had guns with them. Bermuda shorts, white trainers, the whole casual look going on, and then - guns. Three body guards for a tourist group of 7. And no, they weren’t VIPs, they were regular tourists, there to walk in Jesus’ footsteps. True men and women of faith. Halleluyah.

The second version were the rich Jewish American housewives. The same voices, but with no denim and hardly any skin showing. But here, what speaks louder even than their them is their cover-that-sinful-skin clothes and hi-tech baby carriages: everything about them screams money, money money. Money spent righteously on me and mine. Something about their lifestyle, and even more their CHOICE of it, gives me the creeps. Literally. My arms were covered in goosebumps every time I passed by a group.

And I couldn't quite explain it. Nothing to do with Judaism, everything to do with a sense of their hardness towards people weaker than them, so beautifully coupled with an ostentatious subservience to their self-chosen authorities. A shock of recognition. That's what made my hair stand on end. I knew these people, I'd seen them before - my church in the UK, for example, belonged to them. And here it was again, following me all the way here : this drawing God down from the sky to ease one's own self-serving complacency. As effortlessly as you can draw down a blind. No wonder something inside me recoiled.

And all these insightful observations from someone who barely spoke with any of these people. Speaking of fundamentalism, what's the definition of 'prejudice' again ... ?

Israeli security

"WHY ARE YOU GOING TO ISRAEL??!!"
For a while I thought I'd never make it to Israel or Palestine. And I hadn't even worked out which one I was heading for. Already at Schiphol the cross-examinations started. Visiting a friend? What's his name? Where did you meet? What is your relationship? What were you doing when you met? Gosh. I was prepared to walk around with my mascara and eyeliner on constant display in a scant plastic bag, even to strip off my boots to the embarassment of my mismatched socks, but this??? Don't these control freaks ever get enough? It seems every little inch of intimate space they invade just leaves these security officers thirsting for more.

Stunned into honesty, I broke all dealing-with-nazis etiquette and told them the truth. My friend is working in Gaza helping The Enemy, we met in a muslim country, I have lived and worked in Muslim countries, yes I intend to visit Palestinian territories. After about an hour like this, the officer still hadn't told me the names of her friends, and she didn't look like she was about to share her curriculum vita with me. But she let me get on the plane.

So that's how the fun started. The Israeli Security officers, it seems, are one big happy family, and so once you get friendly with one of them, they all want to meet you. At the Tel Aviv Airport, at the motorway checkpoints, at the Wailing Wall - everywhere. However the x-ray machines at the wailing wall entrance are nothing to worry about. In fact they're totally kosher. Rabbi Rabbinowitz has deduced from Scripture that you will not harm your mojo by going through them on the Shabat - a reassurance the Security Family thoughtfully informed me of.

Ok, enough about the security. The first few days we spent wandering around in the old city. Fascinating. I hadn't read up on anything, so it was all new and interesting. Like , erm, that the wailing wall is actually the remains of the temple, and that the Al Aqsa mosque is built on top of it.... yeah... maybe I should stop here before my shameless ignorance so disgusts you that you read no further? I'll take a break to formulate the few thoughts I have before going on.

So Americans with guns, Shabat elevators, howling Nigerians, unexpected encounters in the Dead Sea, stunning Caesarea, Godsend beaches and the myth-spun Masada...... that will all have to come later!!!!

Watch this space and thanks for reading!

Travel blog

Welcome!

I plan for this blog to be about my travels. Why? Well, in mourning the slow and painful death of previous well-intentioned blogs, and noticing friends who keep going with such enviable ease, I've decided that the secret of their success is just following this pretty simple recipe. When on holiday, eat good food. Before shovelling in, point the camera at your plate, click and post. Blog entries: 1. When on holiday, go look at something pretty or old or famous - or in my case, totally bizarre. Look at it through your camera. Click. Post. Blog entries: 2. And so on. Then you can get home and sit on your butt for 5 months, and from the look of your blog, nobody would ever guess.

Good plan, huh? So in two days' time I'm heading to Israel. Or is it Palestine? I'm flying in to Israel, but going to see Palestine. And Israel. Yesterday I offended someone by saying I was going to Palestine. I guess if you don't believe it exists as a state, it's offensive to be told that someone is going there, I mean by saying that they're going there, they're implying that it exists. On the other hand if I said I'm going to Israel, I know certain people would understand that as meaning I'm going on a pilgrimage. And I'm not. Wouldn't that be offensive, isn't misrepresentation offensive?

Ok! I'll be sticking to the food photos then! When a plateful of olive oil fills your screen, you'll know I'm there! Whatever it's called.