On the Monday we taught workshops to three groups at the school, a fun challenge to activate a large classroom of kids in theater/clowning games with very little language, 100 kids total. At-tuwani has a good school attended by children from several nearby even smaller villages. In the evenings after that, kids hanging out would ask to play the theater games with us and we would along with jump rope and a cat/mouse tag game we taught them. Plus music and stories around the campfire into the night led by the Palestinian actors, Dabdoub, Habib, Hussan, both Fidaa’s, what a fun group.
Tuesday we drove up the road past the city of Hebron to Aroub refugee camp. Like the other camps we visited it was a crowded urban ghetto, 11,000 live there. We performed at a school for 700 girls who screamed and laughed so loud that we could not hear ourselves think. After the obligatory coffee with the headmaster and teachers, we headed back to At-Tuwani and headed to the remote village of Tuba. At-Tuwani is at a transition from the fertile Hebron valley to the barren Negev desert. Tuba is on a hilltop, fully in the desert. There is a tiny grove of hand irrigated olive trees, a big flock of sheep, a small herd of camels, donated sacks of wheat flour, and nothing else except a view of miles of barren desert. Some years back the Israeli army drove all the Palestinians out of this area, bulldozing their houses, killing their livestock. Afterwards the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Army had no right to do that so the Palestinians came back. However, a common West Bank problem, they still have no permission to build anything, so the people of Tuba, though they are not Bedouins, live in Bedouin style tents and a cave. We performed for 25 people. Afterward coffee in the cave, and the best flat bread ever, cooked on hot stones.
