As the New Year Approaches

Yikes!  My last post was on December 12th!  A ton has been going on here, and I've been a little caught up to report on it.  Just to give you a little taste, for my environmental education class I made a trip over to Aqaba one chilly morning to teach a high school class about sustainability.  I ended up being cajoled into staying all day and mostly chatting with the students, since they really just wanted an English speaker to come in and talk to them.  In the end, they offered me a job teaching Biology starting in September!  We had another intense trip over Christmas, this time to Jerusalem.  The trip included Gilo, a "settlement" within the green line, Efrat, a real contested settlement (where we spoke with Rabbi Riskin, a leader in the settlement community), a talk with Ir Amim, an Israeli social justice watchdog, including a trip through Arab East Jerusalem, and finally a trip into a refugee camp in the area.  Needless to say, tensions were a little high and the practice of "compassionate listening we've been working so hard on broke down not a few times.  This was all followed by a well-deserved weekend doing whatever we liked in Jerusalem, and many of us spent Christmas in Bethlehem (imagine!).  Right now I'm working on some projects, but I'll fill in the details as much as I can soon!