The Streets of Beit Hanina

By me...(to be taken a with a grain of salt, laughter and some Arabic Coffee)She puts on her helmet in the main street of Beit Hanina. It is around 8:00pm and people are going out to shops and restaurants with el madfa– the Muezzin call for iftar after a day of fasting during the month of Ramadan. The neighborhood is coming to life after a long day, waiting hungrily, with its empty streets to again be filled and nourished by the treading of purposeful feet.

Today is Yom Kippur and all of Jerusalem is closed, especially those roads leading to and from the Arab neighborhoods – security reasons. It is also her twenty second birthday and she is back in this land of contradictions, two nations, fasting on the same day, for different reasons, blocking the roads that might bring them together.It is her birthday, but celebrating with old friends, just ten minutes away, is impossible. Confined to her small neighborhood, she blew the candles at home. But she can meet Sama, a high school classmate who lives in the neighborhood.

Their time apart passes between them like a short movie: her female classmates, the society, the injustices here, the dreams lost on the streets of Rammallah, stopped at checkpoints. The stories of the young western Arabs, coming back, believing they could build their society and yet realizing they have undertaken the impossible. Other usual stories of East Jerusalem: she, she and she got married. She, she and she had children. She and she were working around here.

“I honestly believed things might have changed, or could change” she said to Sama, sitting on the second floor at Izhiman café, looking out the window at her yellow motorbike. She had to know what it was like to be back, and for some time she was back, back to the Arab poetry and songs, to the stories of people here, her old classmates, believing she belonged. But she did not belong, not without a husband, not in half a city with limited resources, imposed curfews, blocked roads. It is her twenty second birthday and she is back to the place she vouched to leave ten years ago. She is twelve years old again, thinking it is time to leave, soon. “I was crazy to have come back to Beit Hanina.”

She is most comfortable now, only when she rides her small motorbike. Still, she had to say goodbye to the rugged, sewage filled roads, the new shiny shops opened next to the old ones covered with graffiti. She had to see the ghost city of East Jerusalem, one more time, sadder, emptier, not as busy with the hustling and bustling of the falaheen, selling their produce, bargaining with shoppers coming from Rammallah or Bethlehem or Nablus, shoppers now blocked behind walls, and the fallahat behind the walls of the Old City, unable to sell their produce. She also feels herself behind walls of some kind, blocking her from her homeland, unsure on which side she belongs.

The waiter, in his early twenties, places two Turkish coffees on their table. He looks familiar. Did she volunteer with him at one of the summer camps when she would return on summer breaks? She cannot remember. “Here in East Jerusalem,” she turns back to Sama, “a woman will not have her pap smear until she is married, so you don’t discuss a woman’s reproductive health with her until then. In America, I have to take a patient’s sexual history and discuss reproductive health. You become a physician of two cultures,” she explained to her friend, “while still unsettled in either.” “You become a physician who has to write an Arab woman a paper testifying that you have examined her. The result: not that she is healthy or has Candida, but that her hymen is still intact. I would think it is ridiculous, but the woman’s life and marriage would depend on the results of that examination. I don’t agree with it, but it saves her life,” she seemed to search Sama for answers.

Sama is quiet as she takes the last sip of her Turkish coffee. The café is filled and she cannot differentiate the sound of Sama’s cup as she sets it back on its saucer from all of the other clatter of cups and plates. She pivots her own cup, watching the swirl of the remaining sips and listening closely for its distinct tone against the saucer.“And, in another society,” she continues, “I am faced with a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl. You are a physician of different cultures- walled in, walled out of both.”Her chair gates against the café’s piled floor as she stands and says goodbye to Sama, kissing her cheeks.

Now here, she longs to be away again from curfews, expected marriages, children and husbands. She unlocks her motorbike and places the heavy yellow helmet on her head. She has to condense this entire place into something she can carry with her, beyond the walls, through the checkpoints