Letters from Palestine by Pamela Olson Page A

from back home. Those of us born
in the States tend to fuse our cultures, even down to the language,
saying things like “shork,” a mixture of the Arabic word shokea and the English word fork . I guess you can
call our language “Arabish.” Even when we travel back to the Middle
East there’s a certain tone of voice reserved for us kids from
America, a certain way they treat us, trying to find other
Arab-Americans we can play with. What my dad was threatening me
with, though, was a purer form of the Arab culture. In his mind, I
hadn’t yet seen the primary source, and he was absolutely
right.
    Eighteen came and went, and for some reason
or other I was never sent back to Birzeit to rough it out on my
own. When I turned twenty, in the summer of 2006, it was time to
take matters into my own hands. My heritage is such an integral
part of my life and a large part of my own identity. I wanted to be
able to, in some way, make it my own and to be free of the excuse
that I just didn’t get the Arab culture fully. My parents, at
first, thought it was a nice idea, but when they saw I was serious,
they didn’t think it was so nice anymore. The whole going on your
own threat was never really to be brought to fruition. But I was
determined, probably more than I’d ever been determined to do
something before.
    I bought my ticket on a credit card so I
couldn’t back down while trying to raise the money. To pay the
credit card off, I picked up a second job while going to school
full-time and saved anything that didn’t go to my ticket for
souvenir buying. I would cut costs while in Birzeit by staying with
my aunt, so I wouldn’t need to pay for a hotel (in my parents’
defense, they did arrange this detail for me). I knew that much of
my trip was going to be one of self-discovery. For me, it would be
that passage from childhood to adulthood, the kind you see in
National Geographic where an indigenous boy’s arm in some reclusive
African village is covered in biting ants, and he has to withstand
the pain in order to be a man, except my version would be slightly
less physically painful. In order to up the intensity a bit and
make the trip worthwhile for me, I made arrangements to spend time
volunteering in the Jalazone refugee camp, about a ten-minute taxi
ride from Birzeit. Along with international students at Birzeit
University, I would be helping teach classes at the U.N. school in
Jalazone on such subjects as art and music.
    Although I was excited about making this
trip alone, I was also very apprehensive. When I arrived at the Tel
Aviv airport, I was interrogated for seven hours because my
name was Arabic. I sat in an enclosure with other Arab families
that were being interrogated. Some had been there for over nine
hours. During interrogation, the question I found most difficult to
answer was, “Why are you traveling alone.” Of course, this was an
uncertainty that had nothing to do with being interrogated by an
Israeli security officer who called my parents in the States and
every relative I have in the Middle East and still wouldn’t tell me
if I was going to be allowed through or not. The uncertainty rather
stemmed from not knowing exactly what it was I was trying to prove
to myself
    The first couple of days in Birzeit I spent
getting adjusted, since no real work needed to be done. It didn’t
take me long, though, to get enmeshed in the culture. By the third
day, I was using my Arabic like a real pro, going down the street
to get hummus and falafel for breakfast (and sometimes for lunch
and dinner too). I was traveling to Ramallah on my own, to
Jerusalem, and even to Bethlehem. It really was a different world
without my parents guiding me the whole time. I can say with
certainty that I did not get out of this trip what my parents had
hoped for me to get out of it. I learned so much more about the
culture, about my culture, yes. And it was every bit as my parents
had related it to me, but I learned so much more about