Quality of Life

The other day I went to a friend's house who I've known for 4 months. This is the first time I've been to her house because until recently, it took 45 minutes to get to the village in which she lives which is about 15km from central Ramallah. Now, it only takes 20 minutes.

This friend is a Palestinian-American, in fact she was born and grew up exclusively in San Francisco. On a family trip back to Palestine she met her future husband, fell in love, and decided to marry and make her life here. In so many ways, she is way more American than even myself, and here she is living out in this small Palestinian village - I seriously admire her.

So back in 2002, the main road from the village to Ramallah was cut off for use by Palestinians in the name of security, as the village is surrounded by a few big settlements, and those roads are now for the exclusive use of the settlers. Since then, they've had to travel a small, rough back road that made the trip 45 minutes in length. Since both her and her husband work in Ramallah, they did this every day, twice a day. But since I met her she's been talking constantly about, "when the new road opens."

The road was permitted to be built by the Israelis, as what they call a "quality of life road." Ironically though it was not paid for by the Israelis - the international donor community paid for the road. My friend chuckles when she talks about the road, "heck,its true, I don't care about the fact that we were banned from using the main road for 6 years, now that I get to make a trip in 20 minutes that for 6 years took 45 minutes - my quality of life has improved dramatically!" But I wonder what they must feel when they look across their village hillside sometimes and see the settlements and imagine the qualityof life issues on the other side.

I went to the Jerusalem zoo this past weekend. I was standing in line behind two American Jewish families - one seemed to be visiting the other perhaps. One man turned to the other and said, "Whatever our complaints are about living in Israel, one good thing is that we can use our credit cards anywhere here." My mouth dropped open, my eyes rolled and I thought to myself, "is that the level of issues that most Israelis deal with?" One person's quality of life issues certainly is not another's.