Arriving in Hebron

The driver I met in Jerusalem wasn't as friendly as the one I had in London, but at this point I was ready to just get to Hebron and wasn't worried about making small talk. I had no idea were I was going so my fate was in this cabbie's hands, but I figured that if he was going to take me out into the middle of no where and kill me (salute to Sherlock) at least I was going out in one of the places that I loved being.  Obviously, that didn't happen, but the thought crossed my mind for I millisecond. :) The cabbie asked me where I was going in Hebron and all I could do was tell him was I had a number. 

He called one of my bosses and Mutaz and Mutaz told him where to take me. We met him at the edge of town. That was my first "real" look at Hebron. I have been here once before, but only once and that was as a tourist and I only saw the old city. The history here is complicated as is the history of the conflict. What I see is two people trying to exist in a space, but one group views the other as sub-human slowly taking the rights away of the other because they don't believe them to be human, but I will talk about that in a later post.



Mutaz gave me a quick run down pointing out important places. The EC is directly across from the Hebron FBC (soccer team) for those that aren't in the know. The team just won the Asian Cup. Which those that like football here are happy about. 

He then took me to my host family. In Palestine, they don't really have addresses persay, you tell them a location or a last name, or a description or the name of something and that's how you find the place. And that's how we found my host family. Now all I knew about my host family was that they were conservative Muslim and there were five in the family and someone spoke English. I didn't know what that meant, but hey positive I wasn't living on the street and I was going to have a roof over my
After stopping at three other houses and stopping to ask three or four people Mutaz finally found the house. I wasn't quite sure where we were. There were goats bleating but yet we were still in the city. I was introduced to the the Ashour family. I'm still trying to figure out the whole family dynamics, but the introduction went something like this. "This is Rania Ashour she is the one in the household that speaks English." I was then introduced to her father and her and her sister. After some teaMutaz left me to get to know the family, unpack, and sleep since I was tired. Rania introduced me to the rest of her family I'm still learning names, but she has 7 brothers and 7 sisters and a mother and a second wife is also included in that bunch; however, only 2 sisters, a brother, Rania, and father and two wives actually live in the house, but it always seems like more because her sisters and their children are always over. Like I said I need some sort of diagram to figure out who they all are and how they are related.

Before I could lay down and get some rest I had to unpack. My host sister helped me unpack. Every item I had that was new she asked me about it. Her whole family is taking care of me :)