The Best and Worst This Town Has to Offer

The Best
This AM we went back up to the Mount of Olives, so that Mark Brown of LWF could show us around. One thing we saw right away: LWF planted olive trees (appropriately enough!) up there in the 1970s, because if nothing is being done with a parcel of land (e.g., construction or agriculture), the Israeli government will seize it. So you will see pictures I took of someone tending the trees, keeping a small part East Jerusalem safe from being stolen.

Then we went over to Augusta Victoria Hospital, another LWF project. In the US, we talk about people not having access to health care, and we mean financial access. Here, people are denied access to health care because they apply for permission to travel to a hospital where they need care and are denied the right, physically, to leave their neighborhood.

Augusta Victoria Hospital is providing heath care to people who would otherwise just have to sit home and suffer and/or die from their illness.

We applaud the great humanitarian work this facility is doing. Makes me proud to be a Lutheran.

While there, we also toured the Lutheran Mount of Olives Church of the Ascension. Beautiful site. I'll let the pictures I took of this place speak for themselves.

The Worst
In the afternoon, a young Jewish Israeli man who works for ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against Housing Destructions) took us for a tour in and around Jerusalem. We saw properties that were destroyed with only a 30-minute notice to the families inside. The pretext? "Security."

We also saw "The Wall" built by the Israeli government. Those in favor of the wall call it "the Security Fence." Those opposed call it "The Separation Wall." Look at the pictures and decide for yourself: wall or fence?

Our Israeli guide says that his family is not happy about his overt criticism of their government. But he says that, as a good Jew, he simply cannot bear to see what his government is doing because, "It is illegal. It is wrong. It is mean."

I picked up a small shard of broken tile from the site of a smashed home to take back to the US with me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I felt I needed something tactile like that to hang onto.