As a part of my thesis research, I traveled to the West Bank, Palestine, and interviewed several organizations that are implementing sustainable development projects in the region. Was it a field research trip? Yes. Was it only that? Definitely not.
For my thesis, I asked people working for these organizations how certain conditions (the way power-sharing mechanisms work, obstacles to freedom of movement, etc.) impact their work and got, frankly, rather eye-opening answers to my inquiries. Yet what left an even bigger impression on me were the people I met during my trip, for non-academic purposes.
I was greeted with such hospitality that it makes me smile every time I remember it now. It is a taxi driver who, after having asked me whether I minded if he stopped for a coffee at his friend’s place, brought some coffee for me, too. It is a shop keeper who, after having seen me walking around with my huge backpack, invited me to his shop for a tea. It is an old Palestinian woman on a shuttle bus who shared some of her oriental sweets with me. It is a kind resident of East Jerusalem who stopped and picked me up while hitchhiking and brought me to Ramallah. Or an Israeli with whom I hitchhiked and crossed a great deal of Israel. Some examples escape my mind, but not the feeling, not the positive vibe I would feel during my whole trip.
In a place like Palestine, especially for a political science student, to my mind, there are just so many things to see. Yes, the landscapes are breath-taking (and so I’m even going to attempt to describe them in some futile words), the food is the best I’ve had in years, and an unexpected – and highly dangerous – drive through a desert taught me how visually appealing a place that sort of doesn’t have anything can be. At the same time, I am very glad – in the saddest sense of the word – to have seen some peculiar things for myself. Checkpoints, road blocks, partial road blocks, road gates, and, of course, the Barrier itself. Let me tell you this – the graffitis are way more powerful when you look at them live, only then realizing how huge the West Bank Wall actually is.
Looking back, I was very fortunate to have met a bunch of such interesting people: locals (both Palestinians and Israelis), NGO workers, journalists, fellow travelers, documentary filmmakers, and so forth. In a place like Palestine, you do want to talk to people, people from both sides of the Wall. One group a bit more privileged than the other, yet both equally warm and welcoming. That is why I am truly thankful for having gotten this incredible opportunity to enrich my academic and non-academic experience. I can’t stress how important I think it is to see for ourselves the things we analyze, measure, investigate, evaluate, and thus think we know. Now, I am even more strongly convinced that it is extremely important to visit places that are often described as producing polarizing political views and see what things should be indeed kept as opinions and what are too important and too universal to be given a title of an opinion.
Justina Poskeviciute , Lithuania,
Political Science
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