We don’t have any appointments today but this afternoon I’m going to measure the playground site for the TYO (Tomorrow’s Youth Org.) here at their headquarters where I’m staying. I’m going to have some kids help with the tape measure and drawing the plan with Suhad, the psychologist and enforcer general around here, as interpreter. The plan is to use this site as a pilot project as this would be the easiest to implement. This is all getting scarily real very fast.

Tomorrow we meet with someone from a friendly architectural firm in Ramallah – RIWAQ – to see if they can supply some technical assistance and a foreman type to supervise construction. The owner is a woman who’s a friend of PfP  and they do historical restoration and preservation o Pfalestinian traditional architecture.

Yesterday we met with the Mayor and council of Jenin, a city that was severely damaged during a conflict with the Israeli army 6 years ago and had to rebuild. The city architect showed us a site in a beautiful hilltop wooded park overlooking the city where a bunch of kids were playing on dilapidated equipment. When asked where they lived they pointed to houses adjacent to the park. The oldest added that they were from Haifa where their grandparents lived before 1948.I then asked them where their favorite place was through Suhad, The TYO psychologist and our translator for the day. They pointed to a far corner of the park in the shadow of a concrete wall surrounding an Israeli military installation. (They occupy all of the heights above the cities.) We followed them, with me and the head kid in the lead, to a spot where they had strung up ropes and canvas belts high up in some trees and then gleefully demonstrated how they swung around the trunks like living tether balls.

We then posed for the required group portrait after hearing loud requests for a swimming pool in their park