Hurried Post!

Just got 15 mins to rush writing down some anecdotes. Will do more later.

Crossed two checkpoints yesterday. Apparently these road blocks used to be a daily nightmare for people wanting to visit other relatives/travel to work in other cities. What at most should be 1-2 hours of travel to most places would turn into daily treks of more than 5 hours, most of it waiting for the horde of traffic, both human and motorised to ease. These days things have improved dramatically, with soldiers only stopping vehicles now and again, usually just asking a few questions for about a minute, before allowing people to pass.

Yesterday we drove to Jenin and back to visit a surgeon's wedding, and crossed two checkpoints on the way. Your experience as much as you would like to determine it, depends on the mood of the troops manning the station. The road there crosses a number of settlements. On the way there the soldiers just waved us through paying minimal attention, but perhaps cause they had a shift change or something, stopped us twice for questions on the way back.
The first soldier was alright actually...joked around a bit, asking us what we had in the glove compartment, 'desert eagle? M16?' with a smile on his face. After being satisfied, he let us go. My friend let me know thats the second time in 6 years that he's seen a nice one. However the second soldier, this time with three or four other buddies of his, got a bit pissed off as we didn't switch our lights completely off. But no incident.

Its strange, the interaction of languages here. All road signs across the main interlinking roads are in Hebrew Arabic and English, and often arabs and israeli's have to talk to each other in English as they don't know the language of the other. Some docs who have worked in Israel or some of my friends who did manual labor on settlements recently can speak more hebrew than the norm, buts its not that common. Israeli kids are also taught Arabic in school, but not all of them keep up with it.

THe doc who was driving told me that the second checkpoint we crossed, back in the intifada during his 6th year of medical school, actually turned him back towards Ramallah after he waited 5 hours to cross it and get to Nablus. They strip searched him to underwear during the winter in full view of the people waiting in line, and then determined he wasn't safe to travel. Whether it was just the stress of the situation for everyone during that time or just cause he had a really shitty day, he ended up in an RTA, and had to be kept in ICU for 7 days.
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Met another person who tried to scale the wall in the ER. (Yes Abdul Rahman, i'm putting this up on blogspot!) He had been trying to get across to see his kid and wife who he hadn't seen in 7 months, as he had initially gone to the OT to see his dad who wasn't well. An army jeep ran into the ladder he was on just as he was getting to the top. He fell straight down on his feet, and the impact caused a crush fracture of his vertebra, as one to his right foot. Not sure whats happened now, think he may have to go for surgery.


More later.