Day 7: International Student Confernece

Above: Laura and Mauro, just a-chillin.. just like hanging out in the Middle East ya know..


Above: Morning Practice

We get a well-appreciated lie-in and the morning is spent chilling out and some light circus practice. Wahid has given us his mobile number and it looks like he's going to be our designated regular taxi driver for our stay. He's a wicked dude and I suspect we might have had some great conversations. He doesn't speak a word of English and I don't speak a word of Arabic, but that doesn't stop us from having a good chit-chat, even if we're not talking about the same thing.

I realise by now that Susana is THE local person to know with regards to all-things to do with activism and action in the area - she has been organising a conference between international university students in the area and Palestinian students in a chance for them to forge links, make connections and brainstorm ideas for Pro-Palestinian opportunities and the like. And I'm her geek-bitch for the day - after showing her how top operate a laptop yesterday (she's quite a whizz with computers considering, but this particular one had a lock switch on it that she didn't spot so it wouldn't turn on), she's got me making sure the projector unit is working okay.



The conference is dull. So dull. Various students take turns to say a little bit about their lives - an Austrian girl opens with what she describes as being a little inspirational introduction to the proceedings but by the end of it, the only thing I'm inspired to do is to temporarily and suddenly convert to Islam because I feel the urge to leave the building and scream in an Easterly direction. (Or actually, any direction would do). For about an hour or two, they continue to take turns to describe their life stories - one who manages to bring in his views on alcohol and drugs being the scourge of the world and another who has a speech about how he was fiddled with by a priest when he was a kid but look at where he is now. (We all award him with a rather polite golf clap, which seemed to be the only appropriate response at the time)



Jo is blatantly getting restless and starts looking at the rest of us with her sarcastic face on. The rest of us do our best to suppress fits of giggles and laughter.



Jo is a good friend of Annie's from back in the UK - she's the boisterous, good-humoured and not afraid to speak her mind. She loves her food, she loves her beer, and will wise-crack til the cows come home. Totally not your typical foreigner-in-Palestine, she's totally along for the party which is a welcome relief sometimes when there's so much serious political chat. She hasn't even had much Circus training in comparison to the others, but she's spent many years under the influence of Special Brew falling over ungracefully and she's never afraid to make a fool of herself. She's the perfect clown - and the strong relationship between her and Annie shows up beautifully when they both take to the stage as a hilarious comic duo.





Getting out of the conference room and talking to Jo is a massive relief. She laughs as I make a long, loud mock-snoring voice and then I suddenly realise that everyone who just made an 'inspirational' speech is standing right behind me.

The students finally get a short amount of time to get to the crux of this whole convention - to chat and network with each other, before it's announced that they have to head off because they're hungry. There's a quick fire show from Jen and Ruth for them first. I'm not sure whether they thought they were performers brought in for their own pleasure (like frat-party entertainment or a free vodka shot on entry for showing student ID) so I volunteer to stand up and describe to the students what the Circus does, before fumbling the responsbility on to Ruth who I suddenly realise is even a worse public speaker than me. I think they got the gist of the CIrcus, but I didn't get round to what I really wanted to tell them.

You guys can sit around all day discussing how you've come from nothing to where you are today, and feel good that ooh you've actually spoken to a real-life Palestinian in the flesh - you can go back to your respective countries and tell your friends that you're backing the underdogs in this everlasting ongoing conflict and have late-night discussions about your role and feel superior to your peers who don't - but at the end of the day, this understated five-clown circus act is here because they are your example. They're an example of how to achieve tangible results in an area where there are so many viewpoints that you could easily get bogged down in way too much bullshit trying to understand suffering, rather than ever do anything about it.

The students certainly look entertained and a few kids teeter on the edge of a rooftop to check out the scene.





We head up to a section of the Israeli-Palestine wall nearby where Mauro (or rather, 'Mister Marrow' as he has become affectionately known) wants to get some scenes for his documentary. The wall is made up of 8m high concrete slabs, apparently twice as high as the Berlin wall. Jen aks if the construction is the same as the Berlin wall. "No, I think that's in Germany", I quip unfunnily, but then break into uncontrollable hysterics. It dawns on me that I may be going a little bit crazy.







We head back to Susana's for more wonderful Palestinian hospitality. In a controlled, deliberate, furious rant, Susana describes her disappointment about today's conference. She says how rude it was of them to leave quite suddenly just as things were happening. She is definitely a person you would not want to upset, but her weariness of looking after us begins to show as we manage to get away with washing the dishes.

After a short fart-on-each-others-heads competition with Jo (I won), I leave her to entertain Susana's children with her lack of juggling and plate-spinning skills. She's great with the kids, and there's hoots and laughter coming from the next room into the night. I'm back blogging until Omar comes through to talk to me, he can't sleep. He shows me some of his music collection which is dominated by Arab Sheikh music. He also likes Avril Lavigne which he found on the Internet and he's singing along for me until well-past 3am.


Above: Omar