Health Care and the Apartheid Wall

**Note**:  I am still trying to work out the bugs on my blog so click on the photos to make them larger! Thanks for your patience! 

I have been living in occupied Palestinian for a little more than a week now and I already have an endless amount of things to say. I have never meet a culture with so much generosity, compassion and hospitality. The people living under occupation have been stripped of everything by the Israeli government with their living conditions falling under poverty standards to American eyes and still they find ways to give you everything they have. After meeting a villager for only 5 minutes he offered me a house on his land and asked if I wanted to move to Palestine permanently! Families insist on giving you a place to rest, food to eat, water to drink, clothes to wear and money for traveling, even after you continuously insist against it. Paying for anything is almost forbidden and leaving money around the house for them to find later almost becomes a game. 

Considering our current American healthcare system (or complete lack there of), this is something that happened to me that I felt I had to tell:

Yesterday I had to go to a small Palestinian hospital in a local village to receive needed treatment. When meeting the doctor I showed him my injury and his eyes opened widely  after viewing it for on 1/2 a second (this is never an expression you want to see a doctor make when looking at you). After a very broken conversation in english the doctor wrote me two prescriptions in arabic and gave me an injection of something (I still have no clue what it was or how my body would react to it. Our language barrier prevented me from asking questions and understanding what was happening). At this point I was beginning to pass out and was in so much pain I didn’t care and just trusted that everything would work out. When I entered the hospital I only had 20 shekels in my pocket (about $6 American). Now the truly amazing part about this story is that when I explained to them that only 20 shekels the doctors refused to accept any my money! They knew that I was a foreigner here to help with the olive harvest and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They explained to me how as Arabs and Muslims it would shame them to accept such a payment and that they were grateful that they could help me. A quote that will always stick with me was when I was told “You were injured, did you think that we would forget about you? We are all very poor but we must take care of the people.” Then they called a taxi and sent me on my way. On the ride back to the village I was living in I couldn’t stop thinking that this is something that would NEVER happen in America.

Here are my first set of photos from the West Bank. I hope you all enjoy them.

Please support independent photojournalism and the ever growing push to end the occupation and create a free Palestine! 

Occupied West Bank, Nablus District

Al-Saway Village, West Bank, Overlooking Illegal Israeli Settlements

A brother comforts his little sister, West Bank

Illegal settlements that are encircling the city of Bethlehem 

Apartheid Wall

Walking along the wall

Art from inside a Palestinian refugee camp, occupied West Bank

Israeli checkpoint. (Yes I know its not a good photo, but there isn't much time to set up a shot when you are trying to smuggle your camera across the boarder!)