"Yawm al'iijaza! Yawm al'iijaza!" The boys shout in the street. Two boys run in the streets holding each other hands. It means "Holiday! Holiday!" I guess they are around 10. Their clothes look brand new. Their laughing echoes through the little streets in the Arabic quarter, in Jeruzalem. They laugh so uncontrollable it makes the whole street shine. They probably have holiday from their schools. In this holiday the tradition is to visit a lot of your family. It is refreshing to see their uncontrollable behaviour, in such a controlled city. They have holiday the whole week. This picture is taken only a bit after the violence on the Temple Mount during Tisha B'Av, which coincides with Eid al-Adha.
They make me wonder how the education system is and has been here. The day before Abdullah tells me about the education in his area. I met Abdullah on the border between Jordan and Israel. He tells me that during the Ottoman empire (1517-1917) there were hardly schools. His grandfather was still illiterate. Illiterate people are easy to control. Illiteracy makes people fragile. "How could they do this?" He desperately says.
Abdullah used to teach on a primary school. At that time he was changing his clothes and haircut almost every week. The kids started copying them. They started to wear the same coloured clothes. One day he had his hair to the left, and yes the children would follow. The other day he has his hair to the right, and yes the children would follow him again. It became a serious game of copying. A serious game of imitating. The game shows a serious need of healthy role models in a fragile country.
At a certain day one of the parents came with his head hanging to Abdullah. He said to him "I'm sorry but can I ask you something teacher." Abdullah said yes, off course. They sat down and the father started to talk. You know my sun has been copying you. He asks me every other day if he can go to the hairdresser. If we can buy him specific clothes. The thing is that we can't, we don't have the money. We can't afford all these expensive trendy things. The father finally asked "can you stop changing your looks?". This made Abdullah realise what he has been doing. He stopped changing his clothes, and for 3 years he even wore the same blue jeans and the same blue type of T-shirts. He made himself a uniform. This gave peace to his surrounding, and to himself.
Also Sobhi, a Palestinian from Nazareth, says that the Ottomans didn't build any schools when they ruled Palestine. We're talking about 400 years of occupation! So most people didn't get any education. The exception were Christians as they had schools built and managed by the churches. This is reflected nowadays in the family names of Palestinian Christians as their family names are professions like blacksmith (Hadad), carpenter (Najar). This is why christians still have and control all private schools in Palestine, in the west bank and inside Israel. The other exception was rich Muslims. For example my grand grand father was the only person in the village who knew how to read and write. my grand father was the only person in my village among his peers who studied beyond elementary, and the only person who attended college for about 20 years.
So the majority were illeterates in villages and mostly the muslims. On the other hand the cities in Palestine had a very vibrant cultural life (until 1948 war there were 5 daily newspapers, 3 weekly newspapers, few publishing houses, art schools, etc). When the war of 1948 was about to start the people who had more education fled (the ones who could read and/or the one who had the money) and the ones stayed were mostly the illiterate farmers.
I will remember the laughing kids celebrating their holiday. Smiling now because of no school, and I hope smiling in the future because they have had a school.
Comments