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 Voices
from JeninPhotographs
I didn’t takeWater
The name of the river is Almuqtua`a, Non ContinuousOld
Maps and New Borders
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Water Not everybody wanted to leave; many women stayed, and they had to cook with the little water we still had. They baked the bread which we traditionally eat, made with flour and chickpeas. The women were the heroes here, though they didn't have any weapons, but they shared their bread and dried fruits with us. With children on their backs they climbed up and down the mountainside to fetch foreign journalists and photographers who wanted to come to the camp. Many American journalists sat on the roofs of houses near the camp and took pictures with telephoto lenses. They were willing to pay hundreds of dollars per day to have access to people's roofs, and were surprised when no one accepted their money. By the way, we had some water thanks to an American woman; she lives near here since many years. She is a missionary of some kind. She got a truck and loaded it with hundreds of cans of water. She drove slowly and calmly up to the tanks and said she intended to drive into the camp. The soldiers said it was impossible, it was a military zone now. But she kept driving and told them: 'I am going in with the water, if you want to stop me you must shoot me.' They were so astonished they let her pass; it was the first water that reached the camp for ten days. The women have suffered the most, we men are always prepared, but the women cried when they saw the soldiers use their pots and pans as chamber pots and smeared faeces in plates and glasses. The women rule the homes and it was the homes that were desecrated. Almost all the bedrooms were smeared with blood and urine, a woman brings with her many sheets when she gets married and she keeps embroidering sheets for the dowry of her daughters. The Israeli soldiers wrote graffiti on the walls, 'We don't want you to have more children'. A Palestinian couple have an average of five children, an Israeli couple only two. We live in two different demographic worlds. We believe in children, they are our guarantee for a happy old age, the Israelis believe in the State and they believe it is the duty of the State to care for them when they become old. We believe and trust in our family; that's why they don't want us to marry and have children. That's why they take our young boys, from twelve years up, they are potential terrorists, they are potential fathers to new Palestinians. They want erase us as a nation, as a people. Abu Michel and his wife Sared have studied in the former Soviet Union. He became a journalist in Moscow, she an agronomist in Kiev. When they came home she got a job in the new Ministry of Agriculture, with the responsibility of modernising the cultivation methods on the farms and to find new water sources for the city. Jenin, which in Arabic means 'the beautiful garden', has always taken its water from a river which ends in Haifa, the place the most refugees come from. The water of the river has been appropriated by the Israelis since the war in 1967, and is now used to water the farms of the settlers around Jenin. The inhabitants of Jenin have very little water left and the beautiful gardens are dry. The facts is that the Israelis control more than seventy percent of all the water sources of the region, and the subterranean sources of water are off limits for the Palestinians. The children teach me some elementary Arabic. I practise the accent and the intonation. 'I am only a tourist, I live in Sweden', 'I need a car', 'Where is the next checkpoint?' 'We are artists, we are not activists' 'We are here as ordinary people only'. When we travel over the bridges in Jenin we see only a dried-up riverbed. Ana L. Valdés, Writer Cecilia Parsberg, Visual Artist |
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