Week Two-Feedback (Alice)

I was raking my brains for an idea for the feedback... and I saw Fion's feedback, so I am doing a review on the conference, too.

The Cypress Students Summit conference at Mulgrave had a tremendous impact on me. The first workshop I attended was called "Peace-It-Together", conducted by Omar. (I have his business card! If you are interested in this, just ask me for it.) This workshop introduced the program, "Peace-It-Together", which brings ten Palestinians, ten Israeli, and ten Canadians to Bowen Island, where they interact with each other and make films about the conflict in the Middle East. Omar, one of the participants in Peace-It-Together 2008, showed the produced films and shared his experiences. It was quite interesting; I saw the much-hated seperation wall (a wall that divides Palestinians from Israelis; a tremendous nuisance for the former) and got to hear stories of average, yet extraordinary young men and women, who are no different from us. It truely touched my heart.

When they all went shopping during the camp, one Palestinian guy bought a pair of shoes. It cost around $60, and he was so happy to get them. He treated them in a manner that we would treat a 60 carat diamond, shining it and doing everything in his power to keep it clean. When other people asked him why those shoes were so precious to him, his answer was that it was because he had to run away fast when the bombs were dropped nearby. He needed strong, decent pair of sneakers, not because it matched his cool jeans, but because his life depended on it.

It was like a punch right on my face. Staring at the screen in awe, the fact that I took EVERYTHING for granted sunk in. These people bought shoes in order to survive. I bought shoes because my runners were too "old". They waited for three hours to get into another city 30 minutes away--the Palestinians had to pass stations called "check points", guarded by Israeli soldiers, to get out of or into a village. Many of them never left their tiny community. I had the freedom to travel across the country and back if I wanted to. They had to carry blue or green cards--which Israeli soldiers checked at every check point-- to pass through their country. I had a passport that could take me virtually everywhere in the world. I realized that I was truely spoiled. I didn't have to worry about soldiers barging into my house in the middle of the night, or bombs and missiles falling from the sky. What shocked me the most was that this person, who worries about these things everyday, was around my age.

Yet, it seemed too fantastic to believe. These stories felt like they came from a land far far away, perhaps not even from Earth. That was the definite proof that I was an utterly pampered child. I wasn't the only one who felt disconnected from the Middle East, though. The guest speaker of the last workshop, Haiti, told the group that she wished that Canadians, as well as the rest of the world, would pay more attention and care about the conflicts in the Middle East. Because we have been cuddled by peace that cushioned the impact of the harsh world, we became superficial. This conference really opened my eyes. I was left thinking: what am I doing--sitting here and doing nothing, when people in the Middle East were struggling to live through one more day?