Biography

I was born in Taiwan. My parents moved there to learn Chinese after they got married, then they were hired to teach at the American School in Taipei. When I was two, they moved with me and my brother to Japan, where they joined the start-up team for the international school in Osaka.


Japan was a great place to grow up.  

My mom taught English and my dad taught History and Drama, so they both put on theater productions at our school. I remember Antigone, and the King and I, and my first play, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

From the age of 7 to 17, I didn't eat red meat. I don't remember why.

We studied Japanese in school, but I've lost most of it over the years.   

I read like crazy. My favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie series and Matilda.

My first CD was Diana Ross's Greatest Hits.

I don't remember feeling particularly American growing up. I think I mostly identified as non-Japanese. The word for foreigner was gaijin.

In the summers we would go back to Washington State, where my grandparents had founded the Grunewald Guild as a retreat center for art and faith.  That Lutheran-based community was my constant, growing up. My parents built a house across the river, and that's where my baby brother was brought home in 1993. 

This is my grandfather, Richard Caemmerer, at his art exhibit in Leavenworth.

To the right is the Guild's new fiber arts studio, where my grandmother Liz weaves masterpieces.


The Guild was modeled after Holden Village, another Lutheran retreat center in the Cascades. That's where my parents met. 

After seven years in Japan, my parents accepted positions at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India. At first I assumed New Delhi was in the States, like New York or New Jersey. 

The American Embassy School was a lot more American than I expected. With our citizenship, my family had access to the Embassy compound, which had a American grocery store, pool, bowling alley, Baskin Robbins, baseball field, video store, restaurant and bar.

In Delhi I developed a stronger sense of nationality. More of the teachers and students were American, and a few of my friends were from military/diplomat families and had come directly from the States. I felt somewhere in between them and my non-American friends, but for the first time I had an ID card that gave me special privileges.

AES was an older, more established school that gave me the chance to collect extra-curriculars. In 5th grade I started learning Spanish and I joined track and field and sang in three choirs. In 8th grade I joined the swim team and played Emily in Our Town.

I got to see a lot of Northern India with my family and classmates. Our 6th grade trip took us to the Pushkar Camel Fair, the 7th grade trip took us to Camp Corbett, and the 8th grade trip took us rafting trip on the Ganges River.


High School

During my 8th grade year, my parents decided it was time to live in the States again. For my brothers and I, it was the first time living in our home country for longer than 3 months a year. We moved to Woodinville, Washington.

On my first day of junior high, my neighbor and her friends came over to sit with me in the cafeteria, and the first two questions I got were, “are there cars in India?” and “did you swing from trees to get to school?” I tried to picture myself as this jungle woman.

There was a busy street called Chandragupta Marg that I used to cross every morning, but I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t tell them about my 10th birthday when got to ride an elephant to school.

I just said “yes” and “no," and that's kind of how that year went. 

Two weeks into ninth grade, the Twin Towers fell, and the Pentagon was hit. I don’t remember what I felt other than shock, but I remember looking around and being very confused about American identity. It suddenly felt like something you had to put on display, with a flag outside your house, or a sign on your lawn that said I Support Our Troops. Our TV was always tuned into the shaky footage of the man in a turban in a cave. The terrorist. Then the president would talk about Islamic extremism, and the intolerance of Islam was the hot thing to read about. 

I didn't know much about Islam, just that my 7th grade class had gotten a stern talk when one student offered a chip to a Muslim student during Ramadan. Maybe it was a reaction to my new town of Woodinville, Washington or the post-9/11 atmosphere, but I wanted to get to the heart of this topic that was so controversial and misunderstood. I decided I wanted to study Arabic....someday.

For the rest of high school I took IB classes, and did swim team, and choir, and theater.

College

KKG at Whitman

In 2005 I started college at Whitman, a small liberal arts school in Walla Walla, Washington (the town so nice they named it twice!). Walla Walla is famous for onions and wheat and wine.

At Whitman I started off loving psychology, then moved to sociology. I swam for one more year, and joined an a capella group, and a sorority. 

New Orleans, Take 1

For spring break of 2007, my friend organized a trip to New Orleans to help with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. I knew absolutely nothing about New Orleans or the hurricane. When Katrina hit, I was in "Camp Whitman," the pre-freshmen year orientation and week-long party. I was happy about not having access to a TV that year, but I'm still baffled that it took me a year and a half to find out what happened to New Orleans.

Photo album: New Orleans Spring Break 2007

My first night in New Orleans was unforgettable. We drove from the airport to the ninth ward in the middle of the night, and the ninth ward was pitch dark. We were one of the first groups to arrive at an abandoned middle school that housed Common Ground Relief, so we were given our choice of classrooms to sleep in. We ended up in an empty, florescent-lit classroom with messages on the chalkboard from people who were trapped for days saying "they left us here to die," in an empty school, in the middle of a ghost town that I'd never seen in the daylight. I remember being really shaken when I called home.

But we made it through the night, and the rest was history....I fell in love with New Orleans. Along with a hundred other volunteers, our team put on suits and boots and gloves and masks and pounded down moldy walls for four days. Our neighbor across the street invited us in for beer and chicken. I loved the city's architecture and fried shrimp Po-Boy's and The Spot diner, where the owner Melvin welcomed us with amazing warmth and humor, as well as the best catfish and mac 'n cheese I've ever had.

But I couldn't believe the destruction I saw in New Orleans. I couldn't believe this had happened in my country, that there was a city in such a state. I realized that I was pretty sheltered in the Northwest. And I couldn't believe how in spite of all the tragedy, New Orleans was the happiest, most welcoming city I've ever seen.

When I went back to Whitman, I rented Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. I could barely get through an hour at a time without crying. I decided to give a lecture on New Orleans and its recovery. Only a handful of people showed up, but I'd never done anything like that before. I was starting to take an interest in politics and race in America...

Argentina
 

Vamos Al Sur! crew

I took Spanish classes for a decade and didn't feel like I was getting anywhere, so one day my sophomore year I tried the "mesa," the Spanish-speaking lunch table at Whitman. There I met a very lively Spanish professor who immediately tried to sell me on his annual summer trip to Buenos Aires called "Vamos al Sur!"

I signed up with eight other students, and for four weeks that summer, I lived in Buenos Aires. I lived with a few other internationals in the flat of a former nun who hosted students for a living and loved to party. She didn't speak a word of English. Her name was Muchy.

Every day I took classes with my group, all in Spanish, on topics like famous Argentine women, painting, theater, cooking, poetry...we managed to find a few tango classes too. I ate a lot of chicken milanesa and mashed potatoes and pizza and gelato. It also snowed for the first time in Buenos Aires in 90 years! Old folks were standing on their balconies in disbelief, and kids were so happy to be making little snowmen on top of cars, it was a sight to see.

Photo album : Vamos al Sur! 

My Spanish got pretty good, and I realized the key to proficiency isn't knowing every word in the dictionary, but having the confidence to explain something in the next best way, using the words in your arsenal. I found myself talking to people in bars about my feelings on the Bush administration then realizing I'd just conversed for an hour....in Spanish!

Something that really impacted me during that trip was learning about the Guerra Sucia, or Dirty War, when the military "disappeared" up to 30,000 people. It happened between 1976 and 1982, and the victims were mostly activists, unionists, journalists, students, leftists....They were mostly shot and buried in mass graves, or drugged and thrown out of helicopters into the ocean with weights....I couldn't even begin to comprehend it. I had always been interested in the Holocaust, which was a topic I'd studied all through school, and had a lot more exposure to. I had a similar morbid fascination with la Guerra Sucia, and the idea of people giving and following such monstrous orders. I did a lot of research, and went to see the Madres de la Plaza, the mothers and grandmothers who march every Thursday with pictures of their loved children and grandchildren, demanding accountability from the government. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of this. How could a government do this to its own people? I brought home posters of the Madres marching, and the International Declaration of Human Rights in Spanish.

there's actual proof

After the Vamos Al Sur program ended, I took a 20-hour bus ride to Iguazu falls with another trip-mate. By that time I was so exhausted and ready to go home, I just spent my last week eating gelato and reading the 7th Harry Potter. I never made it across the water to Montevideo, Uruguay, or South to Bariloche, the picturesque ski town, but I would love to return someday.

Photo album: Iguazu Falls


Middle East Studies

Junior year was the beginning of the Middle East phase that never really ended. Arabic was offered for the first time, and I jumped at the chance.

“Welcome to squiggles and dots,” said our professor, who was an American Egyptophile. Our class of twenty studied a mix of Modern Standard and Egyptian Colloquial, out of a book that most Arabic students know, al-Kitaab.

Two of our first words were United Nations, umum-al-mutahada. 

That fall I started looking for study abroad programs in the Middle East, and eventually landed on Jordan. At the time I could hardly find Jordan on a map. The other options were Morocco, where the dialect of Arabic is really different from what we studied, and Egypt, where I’d be studying at a large university and living on my own. Knowing myself, I probably wouldn’t have learned much in Cairo, though my Arabic prof insisted that Cairo was infinitely cooler than Amman. In the end, I wanted a small program and a host family, so I chose Jordan. At that time I didn’t consider “off-the-relatively-beaten-track” programs, which I would have been able to find in Syria, Lebanon, or even the West Bank. I certainly didn’t know what that was, but I think it was mentioned in the movie Clueless.

The semester before I embarked on my first Middle East trip, I was taking a class called Critical and Alternative Voices, the only required class for my Race and Ethnic Studies major.  I wasn’t excited initially, but I found out that I loved this subject. I was fascinated by power and identity and race. In that class, we read about law and Native American history, affirmative action and “color blindness,” immigration and assimilation, and the book that really set my wheels in motion, Edward Said’s Orientalism. We talked about how the West treated the East academically while it was being explored and exploited. It made so much sense in the context of everything we’d read: the weakness of “the other,” the feminine, exotic appeal of the Near East, the rationalization of colonial expansion. I felt like I was finally answering my post-9/11 questions. 

This is the ideology that fuels the war on terror. This is the frame that allows Westerners to feed their superiority complex, and see the worst in their enemy. This is why it’s so easy to make people afraid.

Studying abroad in Jordan

I didn’t recognize the impact that Said would have on me until I saw the Middle East for the first time, in a plane, flying over Amman. I felt strangely audacious to be coming here, and unsettled about who had come before me, and what I was representing. For our class we had to submit two journal entries, my first entry was on that descent into Amman.

Photo albums from Jordan: Al-Urdan, Badia Homestay and Yalla ya shebab!

I lived in Amman for three and a half months, with a well-to-do Muslim family in a nice apartment near the University of Jordan. I took Arabic classes and poli-sci lectures every day, and our group traveled every other weekend, to Northern village homestays, the Dead Sea, Aqaba, Wadi Rum, Petra, Cairo…in our free time my friends and I took trips to Roman ruins and hit up all-you-can-eat sushi night at hotel bars.

Our most important, and secret excursion was to Jerusalem. We weren’t allowed to leave the country by ourselves, but during our 30-day research period, five of us went anyway. We caught a taxi to Allenby Bridge and from there took a shuttle to Jerusalem. 

These were my immediate impressions of that trip:
-Barbed wire. So much of it. What was the Holy Land doing surrounded by barbed wire?
-The Security apparatus. It was so intense. It made me feel anxious.
-The Israeli visa-stamper girl (she looked about our age) asked my friend Will, “do you know anyone in Israel?”
“No.”
“Are you dating anyone in Israel?”
My friend and I started cracking up behind him and she abruptly stood up shouted, “this is funny?!” 

That's a story we still tell. That was my very first impression of Israel. 

At that point I was still in the dark about the conflict. I didn’t know that between Allenby Bridge and Jerusalem, we were driving through the West Bank. I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew was that over half of Jordanians are of Palestinian descent. It sounded perfectly natural to me, for a country to have different nationalities and ethnicities, it was just another question to ask a taxi driver, “so, are you Jordanian-Jordanian?” They would answer yes, of course!

But after I moved to the West Bank years later, I would come back to Jordan to renew my Israeli visas time after time, and when I told Jordanians I lived in Palestine, most of them would tell me which Palestinian city they were from, Nablus, Hebron, Jaffa, Haifa, and that sadly they weren’t allowed to go back there, and some would say, “take me with you!”

I slowly learned how much freedom I had. I wasn’t just lucky enough to fly back to “Amrika” any time I wanted, I also had full access to Palestine, the place where generations of Palestinians were not allowed to return to, because Israel controlled the borders, and their return would tip the demographic scale of the Jewish State. 

I didn’t know that until way later. All I knew in 2008 was that Jerusalem was beautiful and diverse and confusing, and I continued to see Orientalism everywhere: in my friends back home, within my Jordan group, even retrospectively in myself. The newsletters I sent home talked mostly about honor killings and anti-Semitism, even though I knew honor killings were extremely rare in Jordan and against the teachings of Islam, as was discriminating against Jews and Christians, whom the Qur'an calls the "people of the Book." There was something more modern at play, but I didn't know anything about politics then.

While I was living in Amman, I bought and watched a lot of pirated movies. One of the movies I picked was called "Imagining Argentina," starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson. I love Emma Thompson, and this was about the Dirty War, so I picked it up. It was a good movie, really sad, what I liked most about it was the theme song, a slow rendition of Milton Nascimento's "Maria, Maria" by Antonio Banderas.

Entre la piel y esas marcas, posee la extraña manía de creer en la vida...
Between the skin and these scars, she possesses the strange notion to believe in life....

When I got back to Whitman, I took more Middle East classes. I was especially fascinated by the history of Iraq, and a book called American Orientalism on the U.S. relationship to Arab states and oil and Israel. 

I graduated with a degree in Race and Ethnic Studies, with a Middle East concentration.

Back to New Orleans

After graduation I applied for a White House internship. I didn't get it. So I waited for a call from one of the many AmeriCorps programs I'd applied for. Again, no luck. I was getting anxious. Finally one day in August, I got a call from a program in New Orleans. There was an opening and they wanted me and a few others to apply right away. I called and asked what education program it was. The woman replied, "it's not education, it's home construction."

Oh! Well. Maybe that's...something I could do.

I turned in the app in half an hour and I was in. Two weeks later, I was in the Louisiana heat, moving into an apartment near Bayou St. John.

A few days after that, I was starting a year of construction work with Operation Helping Hands, a program of Catholic Charities-Archdioceses of New Orleans.

My first week of work I’ll never forget. It was 90-something degrees and humid. I was learning how to tile a kitchen floor. By end of day I was dripping with sweat, covered in thin-set, and sore as hell. Was I really going to do this for eleven months straight?

First kitchen floor

It got easier. The work, the weather...and it was an amazing year. I learned how to put a house together. I learned how to lead a building team. I embraced being sweaty and dirty. I became stronger. I was unspeakably grateful for every meal, every shower, and every good night’s sleep. 

And our group was all experiencing it together. We were mostly recent college graduates from out-of-state, doing this kind of work for the first time, living in this kind of city for the first time.

Our homeowners were mostly elderly and disabled, from the poorer parts of town, which flooded the most after the hurricane. Many of them had been robbed of their savings by contractors after the storm, and had nowhere else to go. The stories they told at Appreciation Dinners usually made our visiting volunteers cry.

While we worked, strangers and neighbors would drive by our work sites and honk hello or yell, “Bless y’all!”

Then my roommate's hair dresser asked her, "why are you helping those people? They're just lazy...."

That was a wake-up call. We weren't just building houses. We were actually advocating for our homeowners too. I still remember the mission on the back of our business cards that we handed out to inquiring neighbors: It began: "Respecting the dignity and potential of every human person...."

I thought a lot about the worth of a home, partly because I was piecing them together, hanging dry wall and laying tiles every day, partly because construction just gives you a lot of time to think, but mostly because of that hairdresser. What did he know about our homeowners? Had he lost his home and all his savings? What did he understand about dignity? The right to return home? 

Around that time, I started this blog. I started to notice more similarities between New Orleans and Palestine.

After the hurricane, thousands of New Orleanians found themselves outside their city, without the resources to return home and rebuild their lives. Many of these homes were threatened by corporate and political opportunists who saw a profit in the abandonment of poor, predominantly African-American neighborhoods. As one congressman put it, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." ( excerpt from Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine).

Racial stereotypes. "Dangerous" places. Warm people. Hospitality.The Right of Return. Mass incarceration. Segregation. The right to education. An incredible ignorance as to where these problems stem from. Lack of freedom, lack of equality, lack of dignity. Dignity in...resistance?


My first protest (School of Americas, Fort Benning, GA)

One weekend my friend Dan (who was starting a new Catholic Worker House) explained to me that there's a U.S. military school that trains Central and South American military units in "security work." Essentially it's a school that teaches how to sequester, interrogate, torture and control civilians. I was curious to know more about this part of my country's history, so a week later I hopped in a car with Dan and Sister Kitty, a local nun, and headed to Fort Benning, Georgia for the annual School of Americas protest.

It was an experience I'll never forget. I learned that the protest was a commemoration of the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, by militia men trained in Fort Benning. That's why so many Jesuits and Catholics participated in the protest, including a large contingent from the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. On the first day, there was a sort of human rights fair outside the gates of Fort Benning. Whether it was abolishing the death penalty, or workers rights, or veganism, or sustainable development, or the siege on Gaza, there was a cause for everyone. Something that really struck me about the Gaza flier was the boy in the picture. He looked like my host brother in Jordan, whose name was Karim. That's the first time I felt a personal connection with the Palestinian people.

I made it to three events that night, and all three blew me away. The first was a performance by a man who had been abducted by SOA-trained soldiers in Columbia. He enacted his arrest, and torture, and release, and loss of family, and everyone was spellbound, because it was sad and comedic and heart wrenching all at once. This was a truly beautiful and talented man with an important story to tell. The second event I went to was Skip Shiel's presentation of photos from Gaza. He announced the March to Gaza on New Years, and I was so inspired by the outpouring of support I saw for that venture to break the siege in Gaza. The third event was about legal counsel, should anyone get arrested at the protest the next morning. That was a little unnerving for me. It was the first time I'd ever contemplated doing something that might get me in trouble with the law. Of course I'd studied Martin Luther King Jr. and civil disobedience, but I'd never really contemplated that that was something I would want to do.

Towards the end of the Q and A, one older women shot up her hand and asked, "what if you're on parole in Washington D.C.?" I don't remember the answer to that, but that was the first moment I thought, "wow. that's a badass nun."

The day of the protest blew my mind all over again. Thousands of people were marching slowly towards the highway, where there was no marching permit, with gigantic 30-feet high puppets representing the six Jesuit martyrs towering over us...a woman was singing out names and ages like "Antonio Alvarez, twenty-two years o-old!" and everyone would respond in a minor key: "Pre-sen-te!" They are present.

That was my first foray into activism.

Activism in New Orleans

Back in New Orleans, I started going to symposiums, and town meetings, and demonstrations. When the New Orleans sheriff proposed a larger Orleans Parish Prison, I saw the Central City community rally against it. 

I learned about the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and Louisiana's prison system, which has an incarceration rate nearly five times Iran's, 13 times China's and 20 times Germany's.

I started to pay closer attention to the people on the ground working for change, and met a lot of courageous journalists, students, lawyers, and activists. Read my friend's article Five Years After Katrina and Still not Home

And I started to make more connections. The idea of separating societies to keep the dominant society safe. The safety part never quite made sense to me. I wrote a post called War, Levees and the Dutch.

 One friend asked me, "isn't New Orleans a really sad city?" I replied that actually, it’s the happiest place I’ve ever seen. 

And why? I thought maybe you have to go through hell and back to really know what you have. New Orleanians celebrate with a passion that I’d never seen, and there’s a spirit of struggle and survival in it.

Winning the Superbowl doesn't hurt.


That was also the year that I got in contact with Palestinian activists and went to my first demonstrations. The one to the left was in protest of the Gaza seige and the IDF raid on the Mavi Marmara boat in 2010.




After my first year of AmeriCorps, I really wanted to move to Palestine and volunteer. But I loved New Orleans too much. I decided to sign on for a second year of AmeriCorps, this time as a teacher. I spent the 2010-11 school year at KIPP Believe College Prep in uptown New Orleans.

This is my first video, made for our annual mid-year AmeriCorps conference....

2010 Christmas in Palestine

One Friday night in New Orleans, my flatmate and I were hosting a party, and I had a conversation with my friend Nick while pumping the keg. He was going to grad school next year, what was I going to do? Something about the Middle East and politics and Arabic..."you know what I could do? I could just take a tour of the West Bank....just find some contacts, and go around....by myself." Nick raised his eyebrows and said, "that's....ambitious!"

So there, in the hallway, over a keg, I decided to go to Palestine.

I was excited for this blog to become a travel diary. After a year of re-posting other peoples' articles, I would finally be writing about my own experiences.

Photo Album: First Trip to Palestine

That December, I joined my brother (who was on a spiritual delegation) in Beersheva, and my first experience with an Israeli community was Shabbat dinner at the Center of Light. A few days later, we headed to Jerusalem, then into the West Bank.

We went to Deir Jareer and stayed with the family of my friend in New Orleans. We went to Taybeh, a Christian village and watched a choir concert at the Latin Patriarch Church. We went to the village of Al Aqaba in "Area C," which sounded like a scary place but was actually really beautiful and peaceful.  

Mondoweiss article: My First Trip to Palestine

The sun was setting on the hills above the Jordan valley, and I stopped to watch the three boys and Haj Sami as he steered his wheelchair up the road and talked about his plan for the village land. This is a beautiful place, I thought, and its resistance is beautiful. 

We went to Nablus and ate knafe. We spent Christmas in Bethlehem. Then, as my brother and I parted ways, my experience changed significantly.

Funeral of Jawaher Abu Rahma

The best word I can use to describe it is snowball. Because one person in New Orleans had handed me a piece of paper with an e-mail address on it, I met an activist in Bethlehem who got me on a bus with 80 French activists who took me to Bil'in and after I missed my plane out of Tel Aviv, I found myself back in that village in the middle of a martyr funeral surrounded by hundreds of men screaming "Allahu akbar!" I was a blonde, American girl in the middle of this scene that I'd been conditioned to fear, and not only was I perfectly safe, not only were there other internationals around me, but I was a guest of the family who had just lost their niece. She had suffocated on tear gas at a demonstration against the settlements and wall that stole the village's land. It was the second protest-related death in the village, and the first was her brother. The army responded that she probably had asthma.

I couldn't believe the power of that allegation--that the family was exploiting their daughter's death. That was the first time I wanted to become a journalist.

Back to New Orleans...again

It was hard going back to my routine in New Orleans. My mind was in Palestine. I was reading headlines constantly and finding names of places and people I knew. The house I'd stayed at in Bil'in was raided, and I wrote another reflection for Mondoweiss, A Night in Bilin.

But life still went on in Nola.  I worked at KIPP for another seven months.

Civil Rights Tour

Sitting in on 7th grade History was one of my favorite things to do at KIPP. I did "inclusion," which meant assisting special-needs students in their core classes. It also meant re-taking U.S. history, and I love having that opportunity. Connecting Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death!" to our modern-day views on martyrdom, reading the Declaration of Independence and thinking about where a nation's "breaking point" is, and the dispossession of Native Americans, of course. I didn't know that some American settlers protested Jackson's Indian Removal Act. It made me wonder, if I'd been alive then, would I have been among them? Am I part of an American tradition of anti-displacement activism, rather than a hypocrite settler? These thoughts are still swimming, but suffice to say, I found the maps of Native American displacement and the story of the Trail of Tears much more powerful after having studied the parallel stories from Palestine.

In May 2011, I chaperoned the 7th grade end-of-year Civil Rights Tour. It was forty-four 7th graders on two buses, going around to see Selma, Birmingham, and Atlanta.

Before the trip we had a two-week history unit on the Civil Rights Movement. I had studied it in a mostly white suburban school, and now I was in a class that was almost entirely black. We learned about the murder of Emmit Till, which happened two hours from New Orleans. He was my students' age, he was a sassy kid, a jokester. The looks on their faces when they saw the footage of his body....I was so upset leaving that class.

How do you explain that kind of hatred to a kid?

Here are some reflections on our classes on Emmitt Till and Ruby Bridges

When it came time to go on the trip, we were all given journals. This was my first entry:

Journey Through the South: Entry 1

The marchers were told by the police, "This is an illegal march" and "you have to two minutes to go back." OR ELSE. Between the slavery museum and the bridge, the students were asked to relate to the marchers. What would you march for? Can you think of anything today?

Civil Right Tour Photo Album: I wish that I could have this moment for life....

I remember walking through the museum in Birmingham, across the street from the Baptist church that was bombed, and the singer over the speakers sang,

I'm taking a trip on the Greyhound Bus Line,
I'm riding the front seat to Jackson this time!
Hallelujah, I'm travelin, Hallelujah, ain't it fine?
Hallelujah, I'm travelin down freedom's main line...

I was buzzing with energy. Everything is connected. There have been struggles before, and we shall always overcome.

Plaque in the rose garden at the MLK Museum in Atlanta

As a kid I was fascinated with racism because I found racists so intriguing. Like, how do you hate so much? They often sounded like movie characters, and I understood why so many blockbuster films were centered around resistance to racism and colonialism. Pocahontas, Remember the Titans, Hairspray, Avatar-on the ride back to New Orleans we watched Avatar and my student Rachel asked me, "wait, Ms. Morgan...is this supposed to be about America?"

The trip reminded me a lot of a documentary by an Israeli filmmaker named Yoav Shamir, called Defamation. Yoav follows a group of Israeli high schoolers on their trip to Poland to learn about the Holocaust and see the concentration camps. The lesson they come away with is "we've always been hated, and we're still hated." It was heartbreaking for me to see that young people were actually being taught this. 

On our Civil Rights Tour, my students (and me and all of the teachers) underwent a simulation at a slavery museum where everyone was inspected, yelled at, divided by physical characteristics, and called ni#*ers and coons. I couldn't put myself in my students' shoes at that moment. It was really awful, but I trusted there was a reason we were there, having that experience. It was in the discussions, when we reflected on our country at a different time, when we wouldn't have all been there in Selma, Alabama together. There was no Devin or Rachel. There was only a color. So we reflected on our responsibility, and our education, and empowered each other to think about our role in shaping the future. I think we all got off the bus in New Orleans feeling stronger than the week before.

By summertime, I knew I was going to move to the West Bank.  I had my sights set on Al Aqaba, the little village in the Jordan Valley.

Thanks to Rebuilding Alliance and their "Teaching in a Village Under Demolition Order" campaign, I was given a travel stipend that allowed me to travel to Al Aqaba.

Living in Palestine

The majority of this blog is about those eight months I spent in Palestine. 

A lot of it can be summed up with the Popular Posts, the videos (many more to come), and the following photo album:

8 months in Palestine

A lot of it I still haven't got around to yet. Explaining that experience might take the rest of my life...