Day 8: more walls!
This will be the last day of building. We continue much as
the day before, building walls. The difference is that it is FREEZING cold with
a lot of wind. Maryam appears as usual, and Marwan decides we cannot ask her to
sit in this cold weather, so she comes down to the ‘house’ (it’s beginning to
look like one!), and we all find pieces of scrap wood to make a fire. It’s a lovely idea, the makeshift fireplace
acts as a focus for talks and tea breaks all day. Marwan suddenly tells us a lot
about his times in prison. His stories are very hard-hitting, but he tells them
as part of any conversation, suddenly he will just switch to a prison story.
The treatment from the Israeli soldiers at times was very harsh indeed and he
was tortured, but Marwan did not give in. He cannot have been an easy prisoner
to handle!
I graduate to ‘bricklayers assistant’. I work with Mohammed
and have lots of fun, handing him bricks and new buckets of cement and so on.
It’s a great job. But we are both very cold….. You can see what it was like in
the video and pictures below.
The next two days we will not be at Battir, as there is work
to be done here where the 23 extra pairs of hands will not be of much help. So
instead we will go to the Tent of Nations (to be told in the next post).
In the evening we have a lovely dinner in Bethlehem with all
our friends from the Holy Land Trust. They have been great in supporting us,
not just Marwan who has been the lynchpin of the whole project, but also many
of the others, helping out whenever we needed a bus, lunch, a place to rest etc.
Lia as a bricklayers assistant:
Marwan making a fire
No comments:
Post a Comment