Men in Palestine

I’ve noticed some very beautiful things about men here. One thing is that they love kids. It is the norm to play with kids, to take care of them, to hold their hands, to carry them. They also take care of people. I missed the last bus to Ramallah one night so I had to take the bus to Qalandia and transfer to a servees (communal taxi). I’ve never done that before, and didn’t really know the system. I was asking questions about how to do it without making it seem obvious that I was a tiny bit nervous. (I’m always nervous when I do things for the first time, and it was late, and the bus was full of men, etc…) A couple of guys hung around to make sure I wasn’t going to stand in the street by myself. When they saw that another man was also going to wait for the servees, they told him to help me out. But the guy looked slightly shady, so they hung around and waited til the servees came. This in a place whose social fabric is slowly falling apart because of occupation, under- and unemployment, and rising food and gas prices. It says a lot about the people here, and it made me so happy to be Palestinian, and so happy to be home.