Category: Journals - Page 99 - International Solidarity Movement

Latifah, A Mother of Seven Prisoners

Call from a Mother of Seven Prisoners
23 April 2007

Latifah Naji Abo Homeed, 61 years old, lives in Al Am’ary Refugee Camp in the city of Ramallah – Palestine.

Of her 10 children, one killed during 1994 by Israeli military & seven have been imprisoned by Israel. She longs to see them but has only their photos for comfort. She has asked to be taken to prison herself so that she can live with them.

Latifah remembers how her son Nasr loved to play with his first son; his wife delivered his second child while he was in prison. She misses Basil’s jokes, Naseir’s kindness, and Muhamed’s helpfulness. Her youngest, Jehad, was always missing his older brothers, and now he, too, is a prisoner, awaiting his own conviction. Sharif is engaged and dreams to be free and marry his bride. Islam was known for his beautiful eyes; many girls tried to win his attention by being nice to Latifah.

Latifah does not attend any weddings because she is afraid she will not be able to control her tears. She despairs that she will die before she can witness her own sons’ weddings.

Though Latifah has not given up hope that her sons and other Palestinian prisoners will be freed, she often feels that no one remembers them and no one is fighting for them. She prays, searching for the strength and patience to endure life under Occupation and the unending separation from her sons. The home Latifah shares with her husband has been demolished twice in the last ten years. She and her husband, 67 years old, have recently opened a small candy store in their home to try to earn money and fill their free time.

This is the story of countless Palestinian women, who hope for the freedom of their sons, husbands, and brothers with every breath.

Latifah Naji’s imprisoned sons:

Name, Age, Year imprisoned, Sentence
Naseir 36 years – single 2002, 7 lifers + 50 years
Nasr 34 years – married with 2 children 2002, 5 lifers
Sharif 30 years – engaged 2002, 4 lifers
Basil 29 years – single 2004, 4 years + 4 months + $2500
Muhamed 26 years – single 2002, 2 lifers + 30 years
Islam 22 years – single 2004, 5 years + 6 months + $2500
Jehad 19 years – single 2006, Not yet

PNN: From Palestine to Virginia Tech

From Palestine to Virginia Tech: We are with you in this Time of Pain
by Sami Awad, 20 April 2007

Two days ago a tragic event took place in Virginia Tech in the US that shocked not only the people of the United States but people all across the globe. A violent massacre took place there that resulted in thirty two killed, individuals who presented different cultures, religions and nationalities. In a sign of solidarity the people of Palestine in general and those from the Southern villages surrounding the Holy city of Bethlehem dedicated their weekly nonviolent activity against the building of Apartheid wall to the families of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Every Friday, Palestinians, internationals, and Israeli nonviolent activists gather in the Southern villages of Bethlehem to protest against the building of the Apartheid Wall that will eventually destroy the livelihood of these villages. This Friday, the protest began with a silent procession by the group of about fifty participants. We carried banners and leaflets with the Virginia Tech logo and statements supporting them in this time of pain. Thirty two olive trees were also carried in the procession to remember each person killed in the massacre. The olive tree is a global symbol of peace and hope.

Once we reached the path created by the by the bulldozers for the building of the Apartheid Wall we dug the earth and plated the thirty two olive trees in a row – instead of building an ugly wall that divides people, let us plant trees that bring people together. Several of the participants made statements condemning the violence that we all, as the human family are witnessing and condemning the building of the Apartheid wall and the killing of innocents. Over 150 Israeli soldiers came to dismantle our protest. Our commitment to nonviolence and to achieve our goal completely paralyzed their weapons and their goals and eventually our power made them withdrawal. The planting of the trees was followed by reciting the names of all those who were killed in the Virginian massacre followed by a fifteen minute period of silence before the group moved back to the villages.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “where there is an injustice somewhere … there is an injustice everywhere.” This also means that where there is violence somewhere there is violence everywhere… We need to work for peace somewhere so that peace can also spread every where.

V for Vacation

V for Vacation
By Omar in Jordan, 24 April 2007

Yesterday I drove for around an hour all the way to the Jordan River near the Dead Sea; I was going to King Hussein’s gateway to pick up my parents who were spending some time in our native city Nablus, my father’s been planning to move out to there since ever but only recently managed to put some real effort in the process.

When I reached them they looked excessively exhausted, no doubt the trip (that technically should take an hour and a half!) is physically draining, not to mention humiliation, but they looked overly exhausted and I thought something’s wrong. When I asked my father about it and he answered very furiously:” Well, you can say I’ve been up for the last 48 hours! The Israelis thought Nablus citizens should watch some fireworks last night, and so they amused the inhabitants with some!” He was really pissed, and obviously loaded with much more to say. I waited until we reach home and they get some rest to set down and listen to what they got.

Later at night, they started telling me about the things they did, the people they met, and the places they went to, mostly people I already know and places I already had been to but I kept listening until my father started talking about the trip back to Amman, and to say the least, I never saw my father that disgusted and fed up in my entire life, he was about to blow up of anger while talking, he started talking about his last night in Nablus and how they spent it terrified counting the number of explosions caused by the Israeli Occupation Forces while trying to catch some 25-year-old suspect around the neighborhood, he said the Israeli army pounded a few houses with missiles and heavy weapons, not to mention a lot of gun fires all night long, it was a war zone he said, the only difference is that it was a one-sided war! They couldn’t sleep that night at all, they left very early in the next morning to avoid any unexpected traffic, of course, to those who don’t already know, the process of leaving any city in the occupied West Bank is very complicated, and may very easily fail! It all depends on the mood of the Israeli officer at each checkpoint, that is, every 10 to 20 kilometers! The first checkpoint you encounter when you leave Nablus is Huwara checkpoint, the infamous center of humiliation.

As I said, my parents reached there early inside a cab, they waited behind the long line of cars in front, after some time people are forced to leave the cars and walk on foot to take another cab waiting on the other side, that’s in case the Israeli officer said it’s ok to do so! People lining up were mostly women and old men, with a decent number of college and school students and teachers; my father was close to the office/barrack and could see the soldiers inside, and by soldiers I mean around 16-year-old kids holding M16’s taller than they are on their backs, the queue was stopped for a long time without one of the soldiers coming out to do some work as usual, my father had been there for around 2 hours now standing beside lots of older men only when they heard the soldiers kids laughing out loud inside their barrack and then started getting out of it playing in front of 300 people waiting for them to finish, one of the soldiers kids jumped on her soldier kid boyfriend’s back and started laughing and giggling while whispering to him and licking his ears and cheeks, my father describes the situation with genuine pain in his voice, he was furious to a point I cannot describe by words, after all, he was a man standing in line like a prisoner, right outside the city his family belonged to for thousands of years, waiting for a little girl, who he’s three times her age, to give him the permission to start searching through his stuff and then decides if he’s qualified enough to pass to the next checkpoint were he could be treated the same way. He then describes how the girl disgustingly orders old men to open their bags with the head of her machine gun, and then flips through their stuff with the same gun. I was pretty sure he intentionally cut some parts because if he didn’t he would’ve had a heart attack while repeating!

My mother took the story into another level, she bought me some very nice shirts and pullovers from there, they looked really expensive, and because I know that cloths are usually expensive in the West Bank, I asked her how much did all this cost? She said they were around $5 each! I couldn’t believe my ears; those shirts would have cost a small fortune in a normal situation, but that’s not even the point, she told me that she actually bought them out of pity! She entered a shop trying to find me a shirt or something, and the salesman literally begged her to buy anything! He was selling at 90% off the original prices; his family needs bread he said to my mother.

The situation inside the occupied West Bank is by all means miserable; the occupation is turning life there into a living hell; poverty, unemployment, lack of security, and desperation haunt the place, it’s unacceptable for human beings to continue living like this.

Traveling South to Hebron

by -bat.

Internationals in the west bank are busy – there is a lot of useful things to be done, and operating to a tight schedule is not easy in a world where unexpected restrictions may be imposed without warning, and a simple half hour journey can suddenly turn into four due to being detained at a checkpoint. By the time we were at Bil’in Katie had already traveled down to Hebron where she teaches art classes to children during the day, and I watched Martinez take a phone call from Al Jazeera lying flat to the ground sheltering behind a wall as the rest of us ran from the soldiers. The plan had been to travel down together later that day, but things finished so late with so much work left to do in the press office that he simply did not have time. He was already on another interview with the press as I left to find my way south. Busy people.

Catching a cab, Palestine style

I take a walk up to the centre of town. The economy of the west bank may be in ruins, but still the centre of Ramallah is bustling with people. It’s a lively place, and a casual glance wouldn’t show that you were anywhere unusual. There are cafes, and shops and people going about their daily lives as they would anywhere. Jeans, trainers and t-shirts are the seem to be the predominant dress code just as they are here in the UK, and it’s a typical street scene. The normality of large chunks of everyday life somehow just highlight the abnormality which you keep running up against. I don’t know what I imagined, but people browsing the latest DVD’s and shopping for cosmetics probably wasn’t it. It’s a glimpse of the way things would be if this was a normal independent country and I was here as a normal tourist.

The market area is where I am aiming for in order to catch what is known as a “service taxi”. These things are a wonderful idea, and make the whole process of moving about the country cheap and easy. The basic concept is to take the taxi idea and turn it on it’s head. Instead of finding a taxi and telling the driver where you are going, a service taxi is one which already knows where it is going and sets about soliciting passengers for that destination. You find a driver going to the place you want, agree the price (fixed for a given destination) and you get in. When the vehicle is full it leaves. My arabic is zero, and I cannot read the script, but by simply smiling and saying “Service Al Khalil?” (the arabic name for Hebron) to various drivers I soon find myself sitting in the back of a car awaiting other passengers.

Is crossing the occupied territories on your own speaking not a word of the language difficult? I’ve had more trouble getting back from south London after a night out!

The barrier and other decorative landscape features

We head down to Qalandia – I have not seen it in daylight before, but the presence of sunshine does not make it any less ugly. The wall is grey and grim, with our side covered in protest graffiti, including a Banksy. Strange to see something so familiar from London in this place. We take a left and skirt round the city tracking the line of the wall. I spend some time trying to work out how they decide which parts are to be the huge concrete prefabricated structures and which are to be the high fence. The change between the two does not seem to match built up areas on the far side. I am alter told that eventually it will be all concrete. Along the way we pass an Israeli army base on the inside of the wall, containing a compound filled with the infamous armored bulldozers and I can’t help thinking of Rachel Corrie.

This is, by any standards, a beautiful country. Blue skies, and rolling hills covered with terracing for olive groves and punctuated by small towns. If it wern’t for the latter then it would look somewhat like Greece, but the distinctive flat-roofed architecture is a dead giveaway that you are in the middle east. A direct drive from Ramallah to Hebron would be a short trip down to Jerusalem, and then south through the countryside. But this is, of course, not possible. The barrier encircles the Palestinian part of Jerusalem, “reuniting” the city, and cutting off a large chunk of land to the east. So all the traffic between the two halves of the west back must detour round it on a single route, passing through Container checkpoint. Although this area is completely Palestinian, the Israeli’s block the road here and check vehicles driving through, despite the fact that this is not checking anyone passing into, or out of, Israeli territory. It does, however, act as an effective throttle to communications between the two halves of the country.

We leave the barrier behind us and head deeper into the countryside. Even out here though you are never free of evidence of the occupation, most obviously from the block-like structures of the settlements which squat on the hilltops. There is an entire separate network of roads out here linking these, on which the Palestinians are forbidden to drive, and we pass under what I take to be one such road, a large well maintained highway on a bridge with a fence, unconnected to the narrow road we are using. To either side you can see where olive groves have been chopped down and trees burnt, and at one point we pass the densely packed concrete temporary structures of a refugee camp. They have been temporary for a very long time.

Riding in cars, with locals

All the previous service taxi’s I had taken were of the form of a people-mover style vehicle holding about eight passengers. Today’s, however, is simply a standard private car, and I find myself perched on the hump in the centre of the back seat, between two solidly built gentlemen and with an excellent view out of the front windscreen. This viewing position is not for the faint hearted given the enthusiastic traffic dodging that driver engages in, particularly as we descend the hillside beyond Container. Here the road drops away into the valley to one side, and I am very aware of our proximity to the edge as we speed down the wrong side of the road into the path of oncoming vehicles.

Only one of my fellow passengers speaks any english, the one in the front seat and he turns round to engage me in conversation at various points. We discuss London, the difficulty of getting permits for Palestinians to travel abroad, and he asks whether I went to University. I tell him about York and he tells me that he also went to University and has a degree in political science. I ask if he got that in Palestine.

“No” he replies, “Baghdad University”.

Errr, O.K. So lets ask the obvious question “When were you there?”

“1992. During the time of Saddam Hussein”. Then he grins at me and says.

“What do you think of Saddam Hussein? What is the opinion of him in your country? There was much less trouble in those days, yes ?”

Eeek! So much for avoiding tricky subjects! Actually I suspect I was being teased to a certain extent. He knows that I am unlikely to be particularly pro-Saddam, but also probably won’t want to start getting into a heated political disagreement on the subject in present company. So I opt for the diplomatic statement that there may have been less trouble, but that really doesn’t excuse what he did to the Kurds, and the conversation doesn’t go much further than that to my relief.

My conversational companion turns out to live in a small village outside Hebron, and we make a detour to drop him off. Past some small Israeli watchtowers, and eventually leave him beside a dirt track which has been roadblocked with concrete to prevent vehicles accessing it. He says he will walk from there, and then unexpectedly asks me to come with him! He wants me to come to his house, to meet his family and drink tea and talk. From his expression it is a genuine invite too. had it been earlier in the day I would have taken him up on it, but by this time it is sunset, and I need to meet up with Katie, so I have to say “no”.

Welcome to Hebron

It’s dark when I eventually get out of the car in the middle of Hebron. Again I have no map, but asking directions from a number of people I end up heading in the right direction, and have attracted a group of five or six children playing football. The children here always seem to find me fascinating, possibly due to the hair, and I kick the ball about with them briefly. They are, however, more interesting in asking me lots of questions about where I come from and what life is like in England.

This area is a fruit market during the day, but is now shut. A group of men are sitting round a fire drinking tea and listening to the radio. This is where I am supposed to loiter and wait for someone to collect me, but I don’t really get the opportunity. I am grabbed and propelled through into the middle of the group and sat down. Nobody here speaks english, and I try and explain that I have someone to see, but they won’t let me leave. Instead they start offering me fruit. I am wondering if they are trying to sell it to me, but they won’t take any coins for it. Explaining that I am unable to eat fruit is beyond me, and so I end up acquiring a banana and an apple, despite my protests. They are only being friendly I suppose, but their enthusiasm is somewhat intimidating, and I am rather relived when I am collected and can say goodbye.

Borders and birthdays

We head away from the market and up a dark street, to where I am confronted by what appears to be a portacabin wedged across the road, blocking it entirely. We get closer and it is indeed a portacabin. A sliding door opens and we go in – it is, of course, a checkpoint in miniature. Inside are two metal detectors, and behind a glass screen at the far end a soldier monitoring as we go through. Hebron is a city split in two, due to the presence of four settlements actually inside the city itself. Of which I shall write more tomorrow. This is the crossing point though, and under the watch of the guard we pass through the metal detectors. The road the far side is quiet and dark, with Israeli soldiers lurking at various points along it. They avoid catching our eye as we walk past them up the hill.

The ISM flat is a complete contrast, however, as it is Katie’s birthday and a surprise party has been arranged for her, complete with cake and balloons. I walk into the middle of this and am immediately called upon to sing. One quick round of “happy birthday” later (which everyone joins in on much to my relief) and I grab a juice and make myself comfortable. I did plan on bringing a present, but it is with the rest of my luggage still in the hands of El Al security. All I have is my free fruit, which seems a poor substitute somehow. It is a nice way to end a very intense day though, sitting drinking juice, eating cake and chatting with the others. Some normality is good, but I begin to realise that I am having trouble just processing the amount of stuff I have seen in the last 36 hours. I need to though, because I am sure there will be more in the morning.

Out here, there’s always more.

One sunny afternoon in Bil’in

by -bat.

I thought long and hard about how to write up this bit, because if I write it in the first person it becomes about me, and about one thing which happened to me once, but I want it to be about the people of this village who have this happen to them regularly, and have done so for a long while. But in the end the only way I know how to explain things is how I saw them.

Executive summary: last Friday I was on a peaceful demonstration which was tear gassed by Israeli troops before it had even reached the site of the intended protest. They then opened fire with rubberised steel bullets as people ran. I saw an ambulance worker shot in the stomach, I saw people gassed so badly they were stretched away, and I saw the troops firing on children. Israel may say that it doesn’t do these things. Israel is lying.

The village by the wall

If you wanted a suitably “biblical” looking postcard of the holy land then Bil’in would do nicely. Bathed in sunshine and sitting on a hilltop surrounded by olive-grove covered slopes it is a picturesque location, of maybe a thousand people I would guess. Whom, until recently, made their living from agriculture. Walking out to the west of the village, however, it becomes rapidly apparent that Bil’in has a problem.

When Israel decided a few years ago that it was going to wall in the entirety of the west bank, it also made a decision that it would take the opportunity to grab some land. hence the barrier does not run along the boarder, but instead sweeps east at various point to encircle various settlements, and thus also cut off large swathes of the countryside, leaving them the Israel side of the barrier. One such settlement group lies a few kilometres to the west of Bil’in, and thus the barrier has been driven right through the countryside a few hundred yards from the village, cutting the population off from their land completely. A whole towns livelihood wiped out virtually overnight.

This was the first place I saw the rural form of the barrier – and it looked so horribly familiar. As a young teenager I was taken by my parents to see the “iron curtain” at the point where it ran along the border between east and west Germany. This is identical – a cleared strip of land running across the hilltops as far as the eye can see in ether direction, with a fence along the length of it, and an access road behind where soldiers drive up and down to guard the structure. Beyond in the distance are the clean modern blocks of the settlements, and the cranes of the construction work as they are expanded onto the newly appropriated land.

The Friday demonstration

Since the construction of the barrier began the villagers have been protesting it every Friday by marching out of town to the site of the work. Even though the barrier is complete, these protests continue. After mid-day prayers a crowd forms in the village square and the walk out to the barrier commences. It is an enthusiastic atmosphere – the locals are joined by internationals like myself, and the protests have become themed to co-incide with other events in the west bank. This week was “prisoners week”, and as such some of the protesters had loosely bound their wrists to represent handcuffs, with a makeshift cage at the front in which a number of people march to represent a prison.

We walked out of the village centre in the sunshine, along the track which used to lead out to the farmland before the barrier. People are carrying posters and waving flags – there are no weapons. The road leads down a hill into a small valley, and up the far side to where the barrier is. There we could see a line of soldiers, in riot gear, with a water canon truck, and a second set positioned half way down the hill. The soldiers were the Palestinian side of the barrier, which puzzled me slightly, but I didn’t think anything of it. There were, after all, a very long way away as yet.

Rules of engagement

If you look up on the internet what Israel states as it’s policy for using force against demonstrations you will find that tear gas and percussion grenades are only to be used in the case of rioting or when Israeli forces are being directly threatened. The use of steel bullets coated in rubber is only to be used if this fails to break up the riot, and then the rounds are only to be targeted at individuals directly identified as being involved in attacking the forces. They are never to be fired at women or children.

Bear all that in mind will you… because when we got to the bottom of the hill – still simply walking along the road, and a good half a mile from the actual barrier, they opened fire on us with a volley of tear gas.

The trick is to keep breathing

My initial reaction was one of disbelief – I had been warned to expect gas at some point, and given a crash course briefing in how to deal with it – but I wasn’t expecting it then. When a gas round is fired it sounds like a firework and curves up into the air. Everyone freezes and watches it to try and work out where it will fall, and when it lands there is a second of working out where the cloud of smoke is heading in which you make a decision which way to run. Along with many other people I cut right into the olive groves, scrambling over the rocks. More gas started raining around us and we beat a retreat back up the hill towards the road. I was retching, and becoming confused. I could head more shots being fired, but looking to the sky I couldn’t see any rounds arcing over my head. I didn’t really think what might be happening at that point though.

We regrouped on the road up the hill, and dealt with some of the people who had caught the worst of the gas. I felt sick and red-eyed, but basically O.K., as I had managed to head upwind and not caught too much of a dose. After a while the demonstration regrouped and collectively everyone picked themselves up and started heading back down the road again towards the barrier for a second time. This time we didn’t even get to the bottom of the hill before they started firing on us. Once again I watched as two landed near me, chose a direction and ran… but this time I was not so lucky and one landed right at my feet enveloping me and the people I was with in a thick cloud.

Do you want to know what tear gas feels like ? It’s mis-named, as it may well make you cry, but the initial feeling is that it is burning your lungs out and you can’t breathe. It isn’t really a gas, and it contaminates anything it touches – it gets on your clothes and when it gets on your skin it burns that too. Very soon you are reduced to trying not to vomit and believing that you can’t breathe no matter how hard you try to. It’s horrible stuff, but we had counter measures. Half a raw onion in my inside pocket. odd as it may seem, if you try and breathe the onion vapour, the stinging sensation from it starts to open up your lungs, and the smell reminds you that you *can* breathe after all. How much is a real effect and how much is psychological I do not know, but it worked. I came out of it O.K. and found myself sitting gasping by the roadside halfway back up the hill. Others weren’t so lucky and they were bringing in an ambulance and stretchers to move out the worst casualties.

Freedom of the press

I didn’t mention at the start, but the demonstration also had a number of press people in attendance to record what was going on. A press reporter in Bil’in is easy to spot. There are giveaways – the dark blue flak jacket, the helmet and the gas mask for example. Whilst we run around facing the troops in t-shirts armed only with half a raw onion, these guys stand well back in body armour and gas masks making notes and taking pictures. It is quite surreal – but the press are there to observe, not take part, so you can’t begrudge them the protection. It does feel odd though.

I found myself next to a press man after the second encounter. He was trying to grab his cameraman and was chattering away in alarm on his mobile phone to someone, a conversation I was trying to overhear but couldn’t really understand. When he had finished I asked him what was going on. It turns out that the soldiers had arrested and taken away a journalist who had got too close to them in order to see what they were doing. To the best of my knowledge that journalist was the only person the Israeli’s detained that day on the demonstration. He was not taking part in the demonstration, he was merely there to report the facts. You can draw your own conclusions from that I guess.

Under fire

I mentioned earlier that I had been puzzled by the sound of weapons firing but no visible tear gas projectile overhead. By now I had realised what these were – rubber bullets. A rubber bullet is not actually made of rubber, it is made of steel and coated in rubber. People have been killed by them, and they can cause significant injuries. Martinez, Katie’s flatmate who took me to Bil’in, showed me the scar on the back of his leg from where he had been shot by one. Unpleasant things. The official line is that they are only ever fired at the legs of people, and only people actively involved in violent activity such as rioting or stone throwing.

By this point the demonstration had been broken up into a scattered mess of people spread across the hillside. Small pockets tried to get close to the fence at various points, and were repelled by the soldiers. I was at my limit for the amount of gas I could take, and had moved back up the hill to the village edge. This was where I started to realise quite how many casualties there were. People being moved past on stretchers, blood from wounds caused by the bullets, and ambulances from the Red Crescent moving in and out. These workers were highly distinctive, in the normal white red cross top with the red logo on them. They could not be mistaken for demonstrators in any way shape or form.

Which makes it all the more upsetting that around this time one of them was shot in the stomach. I am going to assume that even the Israeli’s would not deliberately fire at medical workers, but that leaves the only real explanation that they were firing indiscriminately into the crowd. The guy went down and was brought behind a ruined building to get him out of the line of fire.

Actually, I am not so sure that they wouldn’t fire on medical staff, as I did see them tear gas a group of medical personnel attending to a casualty on a stretcher on the ground. At least we could run when the gas comes in, but with a patient on the ground they couldn’t.

Heard enough yet? One more thing

I could go on, give you more details, talk about some of the stuff I saw, but it’s all more of the same. People getting gassed, people getting shot in various places (including Martinez, who managed to jump and deflect a bullet with his heel). At one point I came across a soldier I hadn’t seen just across the valley from me. Close enough for him to shout “hey you” at me in english, and then shoot. I’ve had a number of loaded weapons pointed at me over the years by members of authority. This is the only time anyone has ever pulled the trigger. It was “only” tear gas though, and with my onion clutched to my face like a magic talisman, I ran.

But there’s one more thing I need to say. There were a number of children from the village who would run past the adults and get far closer to the soldiers than anyone else and start flinging stones at them. Foolhardy or brave, up to you to decide, but we are talking small children here, not teenagers. Towards the end of the day when the demonstration had all but dissipated the kids were still running in and out of the olive trees, long after the adults had given up and gone to attend to the wounded.

I was sitting on a rock at this point, maybe five in the evening by this time, looking down at the scene, talking to one of the internationals and listening to the sound of the firing. I had got used to it by then, and it was a while before I began to wonder why they were still firing. Or, more to the point, what they were firing at. Looking down the slope gave me the answer, as far as I could make out they were firing at the children. I was watching a battle between fully equipped soldiers and nine year olds armed with stones, and the soldiers were firing back.

Like I said at the top, this was one afternoon for me, but for them it’s every week.

I think I’m done.