First day blah

Saturdays are theoretically the start of my work week. Talk about messing with my time perception. Today was my first day here, and so far I've just spent it on the internet (as you can see here) or reading up on some background material about my specific project.

During the Arab Israeli war a lot of Palestinians fled to neighboring Arab countries including Iraq where during the Saddam Hussein reigm they were favored by the government (given a lot of free housing at the expense of locals, no required military service, etc.) creating a lot of hostilities towards them by the local Iraqi population. This blatent discrimination didn't result in a backlash until 2003 when the US occupying forces entered into Iraq and the country disintegrated into lawlessness. Without getting into the gory details (http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/iraq0706/) a lot of Palestinians once again became refugees, who were refused entry into Jordan or Syria, and moreso back into their original Palestine (Gaza nor the West Bank). Needless to say, this is a huge problem considering that now there are more than 34,000 refugees with minimul food, shelter nor anywhere to turn.

Not to cut my history lesson short, but this is essentially the background for my project here. There are many organizations who have begun to work towards a solution, and somewhere in the midst of it, my 'team' (yes, i get to supervise palestinian law students hahaha) will be trying to formulate a plan of attack. To be honest, I don't know what else to say about it. It's all really up in the air at this point, and that's as official as I can make it sound.

Tomorrow will be the second attempt to meet with my team, and get this project off the ground. Besides these past few hours at work, I've been battling this silly cold I got stuck with within two days of arriving in Ramallah. It makes me ears hurt a lot when we're on our way to school bc the road is this intense ride up and down the hills of Palestine. Tomorrow I'll bring some pictures and upload them for your viewing pleasure :-)