Khan Al Ahmar – E1 Plan

Hussem looks at the life surrounding him: who is speaking vivaciously, who is playing cards, who is dancing, who is drinking tea, who is speaking in front of a camera, answering to journalist and reporters. There is an endless stream of people day and night to not let uncovered the preside at the entrance of the village near the “Rubber Tyre School”, which became Khan al Ahmar symbol after its construction.
Now is nearly evening, and the day passed calmly: no bulldozers, no police, no army, no arrests. Maybe the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) decided to grant a day of truce to let Khan al Ahmar licks its wounds after yesterday, or maybe they have other things to do.
Hussem gets up from the chair full of sore. He moves under the artificial light of a lamp and pull on the shirt. The bruise on the right hip is becoming bigger, purple and more painful, so that it’s becoming difficult to raise up the arm.

Umm Al Khair – Dangerous neighbors

There is a thud in the middle of the night.
Then another.
Another one.
Some children start to cry. Suddenly we wake up. One by one, adults run outside the house, looking each other still sleepy.
In the meanwhile, shots become stronger, rocks thrown become bigger and reach the first houses and sheepfolds. The village is asleep, scared and tired from nights without sleeping caused by the continuous attacks. At 2 o’clock it starts raining rocks coming from the near settlement. Since weeks.
People are running to the international volunteers’ tent, near the fence which divides the village from the settlement. They run around looking for an answer with tired faces. Someone screams to call the police. A rock nearly strikes an old man. We start to look for the settler, but we enter another time the tent when another rock has been thrown near us. The thuds stop for a while.

I am grateful for the moment of “grace” in which the veils of prejudices, judgments and misunderstanding over the persons are lifted up and they show parts of the latter that were unknown and concealed until that moment.  

This has happened with her.

The veil has been lifted up thanks to a dinner invitation, a little bit unexpected and taken from my side with some malice for a sort of facade. This is how we get to know H., a woman who looks after four children (the fifth one is already married although she is a minor) and who saw the Syrian soldiers taking her husband away; she remained alone, displaced among the displaced ones from Homs.

Her son, the only “man” of the family, tells us that, when he was seven years old, he entered his aunt’s house and found everyone dead.

His sister, who at that time was a bit older than him, tells us that she walked over many dead bodies after a bombing, while they were fleeing from the umpteenth shelter they had found. Few meters far, the son saw a rocket falling over a pregnant woman with a stroller who literally exploded in front of his eyes… the child in her womb died immediately after.

Sarura - Sumud Freedom Camp

Hammoudi comes out from the cave and looks at the panorama around him: the sunset paints the hills in purplish color, the wind blows gently spreading the scent of narghile. It seems a magical moment if it were not for the Israeli outpost that arrogantly breaks the harmony of the landscape. The outpost is right in front of Sarura, as if it wanted to make impossible for the Palestinian communities of the area to forget to live under occupation.
Hammoudi’s gaze moves to the cave next door and to what is left of the bathroom built just a bit further, after the Israeli bulldozers demolished it. That’s the third time they’ve put it back together. In the next days they will rebuild it, and probably in a few days, weeks or months, the bulldozers will come back. From the cave next door he hears his uncle’s voice telling the stories about the old village of Sarura, when it was still inhabited by families of shepherds, the same stories that in turn his father told him. The cave was uninhabited for years, the work to settle it up has been long.

They will call me subversive: and I will tell them: “I am. For my struggling people, I live. With my people on the march, I walk”. (Father Casaldàliga)

For several days, thousands of Colombian citizens have been taking to the streets in the main cities of the country to march peacefully and express their dissent over the tax reform. The reform represents a real guillotine for many families who are already paying, on one hand, the economic consequences of the pandemic and, on the other, the violence against social and environmental leaders perpetrated by neo-paramilitary units, the dissidence of the former FARC-EP and the ELN guerrillas which control many areas of the country thus hindering the possibility to live in peace.
From the beginning, the protests seemed the continuation of that cry for social justice and rule of law that had begun just a few months before the pandemic in Chile as well as in Colombia.