West Bank children. Photo: Photo courtesy UNRWA.
Life in Bethany
Marigold Bentley describes a personal experience that resonates today
If you failed the 11+ in the area of Dorset in which I was born, school life ended for you at sixteen. Farming, apprenticeships, the army or early marriage were the options presented. I was interested in child-care, so I went to technical college to do a mainly placement-based course in residential care through which I gained experience in a number of institutional settings.
Thirty years ago, in 1981, I took that interest in residential care a stage further by responding to a request for volunteers to work in a children’s home in the village of El-Azariye. I intended to go for a few months but didn’t leave until the end of 1982.
El-Azariye is also known as Bethany and is the geographical location for the home of Lazarus. It is on the West Bank of the river Jordan, now the occupied Palestinian territories, which have been occupied by Israel since 1967, and lies a couple of miles outside Jerusalem. At that time, there were warning signs in Hebrew and English on the road leaving Jerusalem telling travellers that they were entering Judea and Samaria, which for Israelis was considered dangerous territory. Sometimes, at the place where those signs were, there were military checkpoints. I remember very clearly the soldiers trudging on and off the buses, asking for identity and passports to be shown. They always said ‘Shalom’.
I became familiar with bus routes in and out of Jerusalem. I could walk from the children’s home to the Mount of Olives and down into Jerusalem if I wanted to. The winters were bitterly cold, the spring was very short but spectacularly beautiful – when the desert bloomed – and the summers blisteringly hot.
My over-riding concern was for the children in my care. They were disadvantaged in what I can only describe as a multi-layered way. They were refugees from the West Bank – meaning they were children of refugees displaced in 1948 and some of them again displaced in 1967. Most were from refugee camps. A large number of these people were dependant on relief from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as displacement of farming communities invariably results in a loss of livelihood.
The children were again displaced by the social care services provided through local Palestinian authorities as a result of family breakdown, bereavement and mental illness. These things affect all our communities everywhere and there are differing cultural ways of dealing with them. On the whole, it was unacceptable to Palestinians to send children away to an institution. Therefore, those children who were in care in El-Azariye were social pariahs through no fault of their own. To add to their shame, internationals such as myself were in close contact with them, which disrupted their traditional values.
The home was funded by the Bible Lands Society, which had close ties with churches in Ramallah (at that time Ramallah was a largely Christian town). Only one of the children was from a Christian family and the others were all Muslim. Money was very tight and good nutrition was a problem. We bought two goats from the Bedouin for regular milk and grew cress outside when the weather would allow, which added vitamins to the starch based diet.
Meanwhile, the hills around us were being blasted out to build roads for settlements and the large settlement city of Maale Adumin was a frenzied building site. The water was unpredictably cut off by the Israeli building works. At night we could see the lights of the many settlements across the hills.
I came to realise that the Jerusalem that I had sung about so often at school was not the place that I went to on the bus. The place was, and is, awash with religiosity yet people were brutal to one another. There was something badly wrong.
What has become of those beautiful children after this passage of time?
It has been hard for me to find out but in 2008 I met with the former senior house-mother and I can speak of three of them. One child, who was disabled and could have been helped to walk had he had better treatment, is now homeless and lives on scraps in the Old City. I never found him on my short visit. One child who was always full of life and love, continues to carry his joy with him and is a cook in a hotel in Jerusalem. He can rarely visit the home he grew up in because of the security wall that separates El-Azariye from Jerusalem. One child, who was in the home with her brothers and sister, is imprisoned for life by the Israelis. She has four children who can rarely see her. She was convicted for allowing a young man who was a suicide bomber to stay in her house before he committed his crime.
Then, there is the lovely baby who came to stay with us but died from complications of measles. That death taught me so much about what was wrong there. Only five miles away in West Jerusalem there were well equipped hospitals, trained staff, clean water and appropriate food for sick children, which we had no access to for this poor child. This was because he was a Palestinian refugee and the facilities in West Jerusalem were for Israelis.
The experience all that time ago gave me a lot to reflect on and continues to inform and challenge me. It has taught me that change takes a very long time. It has taught me that even when you think things are really bad, they can get much worse. It has taught me that how we treat one another is far more important than religious doctrine. It has taught me that this region, this situation and the painful mistakes that are constantly made, run deep for us all. With all that, I haven’t given up hope for ‘peaceful change’.
