Snow Days in the Holy City

 

(Snow)storm Huda has hit the Holy Land. 

One day of storm wasn't bad at all -- the roads were clear and there were even some buses running -- but most people didn't even go outside and thus were safely allowed to assume that the outside world was a paralyzed wintry chaos. (They're really not ready for snow here.) 

A lot of it is the cold too, not even the snow. Below zero (Celsius) temperatures here are an excuse to stay home and do nothing (which I took advantage of for a bit). 

Even the muezzin singing out the Muslim call-to-prayer from one of the local mosques seemed to rush through it, like he just wanted to get back home before his toes fell off. (I'm pretty sure most of those are pre-recorded, but still. Fastest call-to-prayer I've ever heard. Moved through the words like a massive clump of snow abruptly dropping off a roof that was not built with precipitation in mind.)

The worst part was the two days before storm-time, in which the roads were constantly swamped by endless amounts of cars and people rushing here and there, sometimes to get a week's supply of groceries and sometimes to get home before anything started, and sometimes I think people were just driving back-and-forth panicking about everything because it seemed like the right thing to do. (A surprising amount of these behaviors are exactly what I'm used to in North Carolina.) 

Then in another half-day of clear roads I took a ride across town to Beit Safafa to meet up with other volunteers! Then we dropped back below zero and the city turned white. 

The most striking thing: In the two days before the storm the city seemed to come alive -- a usually subdued but active Jerusalem was suddenly full of energy and action -- a frenzied panic that was also sort of a relief because it was related to only the most apolitical part of the daily news broadcast. Then the city turned into a silent, white wasteland.

Pictures!

I select this caption to be the obligatory political part of this post. You see that very uniform-looking townish thing there? That's Har Homa, an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem. One of many in East Jerusalem, but -- what's worse -- is it's many twins throughout the West Bank. Looks very innocent, densely suburbish, heavily subsidized housing, but that seemingly bland and offenseless exterior masks the fact that it's illegal according to international law (and according to every country besides Israel), and it serves as a reminder of a broader Israeli governmental campaign of splitting up the West Bank with scattered outposts of illegally established neighborhoods so as to make a potential future Palestinian state less and less contiguous and less and less viable. And as carefree and fun as snow currently feels in Jerusalem, I feel obliged to keep at the back of my mind the hundreds of thousands in Gaza displaced by the conflict this summer, now struggling to find shelter and warmth. But as I see it, if we (Michael, Palestinians, Israelis, humans) can't find moments of joy and light in even the darkest of times, then we'll never be able to muster the hope and initiative to de-demoralize ourselves and really do anything. Thus snow. Which somehow makes even the darkest night seem eerily cheerily bright through the miracle of refraction.

Snow-capped cacti!

Later that night we headed back out to really see what Jerusalem had to offer as far as snow quality/quantity is concerned. And just as we were getting started on a small snow creature, we were ambushed by al-shabab! 

("al-shabab" in Arabic means "the youth," or "the boys," and is generally used to refer to trouble-making sheniganeering younger males. But it can also be a neutral term, or even a term of affection -- all of that seems to be mixed up in there.)

What followed started as a playful snowball fight, gradually escalated to something partially unpleasant (largely because one shab was about 10 years older and threw twice as hard as the other shabab), and then coasted clumsily into something more ridiculous and mutual for about 20 minutes (i.e., my hands were frozen so instead of throwing snowballs I just jumped and dodged around -- pretty soon the kids stopped throwing too and we just slid around and charged each other repeatedly like blind penguins trying to body check a defenseman in a Hurricane's game. Glorious.)

Then a dad insisted that the kids leave well enough alone, which was probably pretty good timing because I couldn't feel my feet anymore.

 

Sorry I don't have any pictures of myself, I'll work on that.