Walking the Walls of Jerusalem

The past few days I have spent walking around and familiarizing myself with Jerusalem and the immediate area. Yesterday was a free day on which we explored the grave of Oscar Schindler, the Armenian and Jewish quarters of Jerusalem, visited a Catholic Mass in Polish in the Church of Nations in Gethsemane, and walked the ramparts around half of the old city wall. Today we went around on buses to places where we could look out over Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the West Bank and Gibeon. It was a very interesting few days and all the walking around reminded me of my mission. The streets here can get crowded in the Old City. We usually enter the city at the Damascus gate that goes through the city wall. While doing so two days ago, it was pretty crowded in the entrance. As we walked through, I noticed a few little kids flitting about through the crowd. One of them ended up going behind me and I felt a light brush of his arms on my rear. I knew he was checking my pockets to see if I had anything in them. Luckily I was wearing the protective pocket purse my dad gave me. They are sly little devils. I could see them later standing near the entrance waiting for it to get crowded once more so they could pick pocket someone else.
Many things in the past few days have brought me to thinking about just how uptight things are here in Israel. I have gone up to talk to a few Palestinians to practice the little Arabic I know or find directions, and others in my group have absent-mindlessly asked them if they speak Hebrew or Arabic. The reaction has either been one of disgust or slight frustration as they say, "no, no, no." One man did it with his hands waving in the air while vigorously shaking his head. As I look around in the streets here, the Jews and Muslims are very separate. I haven't seen two of them talking to each other yet. Israeli troops toting M-16s are seen all over keeping watch over things, and are never really seen talking casually with the Palestinians. As I watch how faithful they are in their religions and their goodness they show toward the members of their own communities, I am brought to think (and am almost blown away by the strong feelings it brings me) of the fact that all of these people are children of the same God and how much I want to help them, to speak with them of their troubles, to be a friend to them. It might be post-mission trauma, but at the same time it makes me wonder if I have a role to play in the future in this land.
Anyway, tonight we had the privilege of receiving a visit from Stuart Tuttle, a Mormon who works at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv as the spokesman for the American Ambassador to Israel. He gave us some candid thoughts about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has been here for 4 years and says that things have not really changed. The negotiations are in the same position they were when he arrived. He is fluent in Spanish, yet was somehow assigned here. He leaves in a few months to go to America to be the State Department Representative on the Mexico-US border problem. We will probably be seeing his name in the news in the future. His thoughts on things here as well as a brief explanation about his career in the Foreign Service has raised my interests in that area once more. He said that the students are more than welcome to visit the Embassy in Tel Aviv and sit down with any of the employees and speak with them about their careers. I think I'm going to do that, either with the embassy or the consulate here in Jerusalem.