Nora Kort, behind Blaine, invited us to the inauguration ceremony of a senior care facility in Ramallah. Nora is a people person with a lot of energy. It seems that everyone knows and loves Nora.
Clayton, in the back, used to volunteer for Nora. He is now a theology student at Oxford. He returned to Jerusalem for a week to interview the brotherhood at the Greek Patriarch at Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Greek Orthodox Church does not have a heirarchy like the Roman Catholic Church with a pope over everyone. There are several groups that meet periodically to coordinate, but one group does not have authority over the other groups.
We met four volunteers with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). They are in Israel / Palestine for 3 months, then rotate out with others who come for another 3 months. They monitor human rights violations. Some days, they are up at 3:00 am. They monitor checkpoints, they record how long people have to wait at check points, they monitor if Palestinians are harassed, etc. If they learn a village is scheduled for demolition, they go to the village to try to stop it. They were leaving to interview a Palestinian family whose house was burned by Israelis from a nearby settlement as retaliation for the death of a soldier in the North, completely unrelated to this family.
They give their findings to the UN, they use social media to publish human rights violations, they try to get newspapers back home to publish the stories (with minimal success), and they speak at least 10 times when they return home about their experiences. There were 4 people on this team - from Norway, England, Brazil, and Canada. The objective is to educate the world about human rights violations.
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