Blog Authors: Anne Ryan and Tony Walsh
I’m from the sound of tanks
I’m from a hot place
I grew up with the suffering and cruelty of occupation that still plagues my daily life
I’m from an unjust world
I really want to make peace with myself (first) then with others and with the world,
But every time I try to do that I fail. I don’t know why, but maybe that’s my bad luck
I grew up with the tears of my mom that make me very sad
One day I walked up and saw a very strong man building the bad wall. I didn’t know what to do, cry or be happy
Then my father told me that I had to accept that idea
because we can’t do anything
Rana Sameeh Gabbash[1]
[1] From the ‘Book of Poems’ Summer School Program, Al-Quds University Community Action Centre, (c2008)
While this poem encapsulates the overt and covert violence of the Palestine we encountered more than a decade ago it also speaks to what we see nightly on our televisions these days.
Between 2008-12 the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University was involved in an EU funded project in partnership with 4 Palestinian Universities – Al-Quds, Bethlehem, Birzeit, and the Islamic University of Gaza[2]. The project known as LLIPS, focused on identifying existing lifelong learning provisions on the part of our partner universities with a view to enhancing it to even better meet the needs of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza.
During the project we were fortunate to meet and work with many academics in the partner universities. We also met with members of community groups and local NGOs – all engaged with different sectors of the population. We learned a great deal about life in the country; the most striking reality being that – every day – Palestinians lived in an environment where they faced issues of social, economic, political and educational marginalization. They lived in a society where their very way of being, their culture and history were silenced and subverted by the hegemony of the Israeli state. We were particularly struck by the restrictions imposed upon colleagues in our partner universities and by the complex strategies in which they had to engage in order to maintain their programmes. One such example was movement. At a local level for example it was difficult for Al-Quds University in Jerusalem to maintain contact with its Adult Education Centres. The problem was the Wall. The main campus was outside the wall and the Centres were inside. Crossing the Wall was no easy task. At a national level movement was also difficult. The LLIPS project found it impossible to bring all the partner universities together within Palestine because those from Gaza could not travel to the West Bank and visa versa. Instead, we all met in Jordan. Many Palestinians spoke of how restrictions on movement effect their everyday lives. They also regretted the negative impacts these have on other staff, on their students and indeed on their own families and friends. They had lost contact with many of the latter over the years.
As the LLIPS project progressed we were increasingly aware of the subtle, as well as the overt issues of power which constructed the identity and lived reality of those we encountered.
We found that the nature of the oppression and resistance across Palestine was multi-layered. Although we saw the Wall, the settlements choking the little towns and villages, the checkpoints, the guns, and the multiplicity of minor indignities casually doled out, as outsiders we could barely begin to imagine what it felt like to live there and what it took to sustain one’s self, one’s family and one’s sense of identity and nationhood in the face of unmitigated hostility.
The emotional and psychic toll on the individuals working there, as well as the community members was very evident. Even back then the need for support, solidarity, respite and resilience-building was clear. How much more the needs must be now and will be in the future.
One picture remains strongly, symbolically evocative.
We were being driven from Jerusalem to Jericho- the iconic path the ‘Good Samaritan’ of old had traversed. We were to lead a seminar for academic colleagues there. A black cassocked priest expertly drove, negotiating the multi-laned motorway. A seeming anomaly speaking of wealth and modernity, it wound its way seamlessly through ancient, barren hills, through an arid, desert landscape. Only the occasional Beduin, hazardously perched upon a donkey and following a small flock of sheep or goats up precarious hillsides broke the dun-coloured monotony. And then I noticed that here and there the dusty countryside was dotted with black tree trunks. Evidence of earlier habitation, perhaps of olive-farms?
‘Was this land cultivated not so long ago, Father’ I asked our driver.
The reply was swift. “Yes there were lots of Palestinian olive farms here. Olive tress can cope with the most arid conditions. And the trees provided shade and vegetation. They’d been there – like the farmers – for generations. Since Jesus’ time. But the Israeli Government confiscated the farms and chopped the trees. They said they were a threat to security. Hammas fighters could hide among the foliage and threaten the army….or settlers.’
The lifeless trunks bore silent witness to dispossession…and more.
[1] From the ‘Book of Poems’ Summer School Program, Al-Quds University Community Action Centre, (c2008)
[2] The project was entitled Lifelong Learning in Palestine (LLIPs). The Maynooth University Team were Josephine Finn, Bernie Grummell, Tony Walsh, Shauna Busto-Gilligan and Anne Ryan
Anne Ryan is Emeritus Professor at Maynooth University. She was chair of the Department of Adult and Community Education from 2005 to 2018. Anne has worked in developing countries that experience extreme poverty (such as Bangladesh and Central Africa) and those that are war-torn (such as Afghanistan) and she has worked with disadvantaged communities in Australia and Ireland. These experiences convince her of the potential of adult and community education to empower communities to respond to the critical challenges facing twenty-first century societies in ways that ensure their voice is heard by decision-makers.
See previous blog by Anne Transformative Engagement Network: working together to create a sustainable future
Tony Walsh was, until recent retirement from Maynooth University, lecturer and sometime Head of the Department of Adult and Community Education; he continues as Director of the Centre for the Study of Irish Protestantism and is a Fellow of the Young Centre for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania,. A licensed systemic constructivist psychotherapist he is engaged in writing, consultancy and research inquiry engagements in the US, the UK, Palestine and Ireland (including Northern Ireland). Current research emphases include i) the experience and culture of the Irish Protestant minority; ii) narrative study of the Old German Baptist Brethren, (an Amish-like Plain church in the US); iii) the role of reflexivity in radical adult education iv) narrative and autoethnograpic inquiry.
Department of Adult and Community Education Maynooth 