Seekers' thoughts

It is not everyday that someone decides to visit Palestine with everything you hear about and see in the news – especially the West Bank. It is even less likely that someone decides to go there and stay for an entire year to teach at a school.

I had several reasons for travelling to Palestine. I first went for a summer, as part of an Arabic learning programme. I had the option to go to either Amman, Jordan, or go to Nablus, Palestine. I chose Nablus in a heartbeat. Palestine?! The land of the Prophets, the Holy Land – it was a no-brainer for me.

So off I went all alone without fear or concern. Just a strong desire to see the Holy Lands. My love for this land of Palestine, before even truly knowing it, would give me more than I could have dreamed of. I am speaking as if the land is alive – and indeed it is. That Holy Land knows who walks upon it, and it knows who deserves to receive its blessings. In-fact, after my initial 2 month stay over a summer, I was able to go back the following year and stay for a further 10 months to teach at the high school (which I talked about in the previous post). And you can imagine that these 10 months only allowed me to gain more and more of these blessings. I, a humble visitor not deserving of anything, left with everything I could have wanted – including strong ties that will bring me back to Palestine again.

While this may be a metaphor, for me the reality is that Allah saw the value and love I had for His Holy Land and the people of it, and allowed me to receive almost every possible big blessing you can think of during my time there. Improving my Arabic was just one of them. One of the biggest blessings was the amazing people I met – Palestinians and otherwise. I didn’t expect to make friends, for I had been of the mindset that I had fulfilled my quota for friendships. I had been blessed with amazing friends already, and I was only visiting for a short time (2 months initially and then 10 months the following year). Yet I came to and left Palestine with friendships as close and as pure as the ones I spent over a decade already enjoying. We are people of different backgrounds, different faiths sometimes, and different experiences, yet what united us was a love and recognition of that amazing place, and how completely unserious we were – we were, to be honest, a bunch of clowns lool. And I miss and pray for those clowns at every opportunity.

While not everyone can be as fortunate as me to visit Palestine, or spend as long as I did there, I think we can all access the goodness of it. How? By loving it and loving its people. Honour it and it shall honour you – through God’s will and permission.

Below are some pictures with the friends I made in Palestine (our faces are covered by emojis 🙂 ). The first two pictures are in Jerusalem – one in Masjid al Aqsa during Eid ul Fitr, and one taken at the Mount of Olives. The third picture is taken in Bethlehem at the Milk Grotto Chapel.