As I’ve said in earlier posts, I am not one that is “in the know” of every detail as it happens in the Middle East. Hopefully, post college, this will change. This morning I was lead into checking news items from the inbox of my Yahoo account. For those with that familiar old mailbox setting, it would give you headlines from Yahoo news upon logging in. Well, I saw a headline reading: Israeli Cabinet Approves Muslim Minister. Immeadiately, I was lost in a tidal wave of reflection of all the images and moments in my mind that are still being processed from my trip there in December. After reading the article, I thought of visiting the Al Jazeera site to try and see what was the current situation over in that part of the world. Just the front page was enough to bring forth the tension of our visit into Gaza City days after 3 children of a Fateh intelligence official were shot in a car. After reading an article about a recent suicide bombing, the first to occur since last April (2006), there was a sidebar link to a reporter who had interviewed both Fateh and Hammas soldiers to gain insight into their motivations for being involved with either side. It is not suprising that each side had accounts of the other being the aggressor and feelings of tit-for-tat until one can be truly dominant. The photographs of the young men decked out in flac vests and guns was just as unnerving to me as it had been while I was there. Never did I get acclimated in a sense of seeing young men walking around in many of the towns we visited with M-16s. At the bottom of the article, a brief description of the reporter brought me to a most promising blog.

I have had time to briefly page through some of Laila El-Haddad’s entries and already feel as if I am beginning to have a better understanding of what it was I witnessed in Gaza City. I can equate my confusion of occurrences there to her son’s, Yousef, questions at only two-and-a-half years. It is my hope that through some close readings of Laila’s entries and maybe a few more of her articles that I may begin to understand my own experience in Gaza City. Enjoy the links provided, as I hope this maybe can bring more of us to a closer understanding of ground conditions in Gaza then maybe the press can have time to educate us on.

As to my footage that I shot, I am still at a loss of time and proper equipment to edit it for your viewing pleasure. There is hope that sometime after St. Paddy’s that I will be done with my master’s paper and be able to devote some more time to getting a few choice segments up on the blog. In the more near future, my friend Chloe, whom I met on the trip, sent me here digital images of our travels. So, I will try and pick a few to describe in more detail our visits to the cities on our tour.

So, after all this reading of new headlines and blogs, I went off to my GIS class to learn about map projections. At the end of class, our professor had us pick a map at random to scrutinize for missing details. The image of Africa and its Muslim populace was my “random” pick! Quite a day for not having thought of my trip during each moment of the day in so long.

In hope of peace, continue to bring about positive change fellow Sietchers!