It has taken a few tries but we now seem to have our niches for volunteering.
Baird & Payne were supposed to help at a children's cancer center but the language difference prevented that.
Baird is set with an NGO named http://www.hope.org where she is translating grant information from Spanish to English and copy reading proposals written by people whose primary language is Arabic. She could take a bus (what the locals do) but chooses to hike up a hill as steep as anything in Ithaca!
Payne is working with PlaygroundsforPalestine.org .
I'm working with a network of women's groups, mostly in little villages on the outskirts of town. Several of them are in crisis knowing that they will soon be cut off from Bethlehem by the Wall construction. Daily subsistence is already a struggle for them. Many are widows or have husbands or sons in prison. My program is teaching more efficient home gardening,and skills to set up micro-credit businesses. The big problem for the micro-credits, such as beautiful embroidery, is finding a sales market. When the Wall is finished it will also be extremely difficult (or in some cases impossible) to get raw materials to work with or get the completed projects to the sites.
The desperation for some of these women is palpable. Yet still they feed me sweet tea and treats and smile hopefully at me.
And I remember that my tax dollars pay $3million per kilometer for the wall construction.
