6 Shekel Falafels and the South Sudanese

March 19

I wish work wasn’t so hectic, and life threatening to other people, and stressful, and busy. Although if that was the case, I’d probably never leave. . . I’m already getting that nostalgic fondness, when I look around my bus station, or my office in the quite hours of the early morning/late night.

I mean what will I do without 6shekel falafel? We (me, and pretty much the entire staff respectively) go there every day and every day the man who works there forgets who we are. However, after we made a huge fuss of introducing ourselves, he finally remembered!! Acknowledgement, the greatest prize of all.

And what of the crazy kids who come into the office, run to the kitchen and steal the juice, sometimes even pour it on the office manager (my boss…). We’ve taken to grabbing them, maybe an ear, throwing them out of the office. Because after all, the police don’t care if we throw around a few refugee kids.

But that brings me to the serious stuff, on a scary note.

The interviews that the legal team and all who can help, like me, have been up to our eyeballs in. The South Sudanese issue. April the 1^st is their deportation date. It’s a scary scary thing when figures have faces, and faces have stories. And the ‘700 Infiltrators’ are each clients, allocated to one of us, where we hear their story and write it down in the most impressive looking document but which, fancy lingo and references and statistic aside is a letter to say ‘dear government, I have a story, I have a reason for being in this country and not wanting to go back, all I’m asking is that you hear my story before you decide’.

Its crazy how we rejoice over the bad stories, over the people who’s actual lives will be threatened if they were to be sent back, because they are the ones who have a chance. Those who will be merely subjected to trying to bring up their children in a country with no food, no work, no healthcare, and bad memories of war and terror have no chance. They are seen as ‘infiltrators’, a security threat.

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April the 1^st

Best April Fools Day ever, in our meeting that morning instead of the soft mournful voices I’de been expecting we were playful, foolish. Everyone was too relieved. On the last week day before the deportation date just before the office closed up for the night we got a phonecall with the news that deportation had been postponed, paused. A petition from the organisations had caused the courts to stop the ministry of interior and make them THINK. This is all the pause is for, they are willing to reconsider, and not just chuck a bunch of people out. However, one plane had left already, people were scared, who could blame them.

But that weekend turned out to be an amazing one. The demonstration was cancelled, and the deadline on the applications postponed and so when me and my friend from the office left we needed sleep, but more importantly – stress relief. And so we set out for a good meal. We looked hither and yon unsure of what we wanted until I bumped into one of my co-workers clients who is a good buddy of mine. He sometimes just comes into the office to chat, I have no idea what he does all day, and he often helps us out with translation (he’s Eritrean and can speak Tigrinya but also English). And right where I bumped into him was a restaurant that we would never have seen had he not pointed it out. It was owned by his friend ‘Jon’ who came up to us, eating some kind of amazing grain that was going to be our dinner. That’s the thing about travelling, there is no way to find the good places until someone tells you where to go. Best meal ever, and cheapest. It was an Ethiopian place, and although we’ve eaten Indjura before (the sourdoughpancake under the saucy stuff) the gorgeous waitress/hostess/friend of Jon took a piece of our food before we did, to show us how to eat it. It was so great, to be babied so. Wordless communication “here, this is how you do it”. However I think it might be more of a tradition thing, at least in that restaurant, because every time they bought more food they had some first. <When I sent my sister and her friend there the next day, the hostess people properly joined them for the meal and even taught them a bit of Amheric> but we just spoken English with Jon, who now calls me every few days to ask why I haven’t come back and why I sent my sister instead. . .

That weekend we finished work in the trendy lesbiansit coffeeshop, I busted the usual mission to J-town, woke early to go to shul on Saturday morning, walked the whole of Jerusalem on Shabbat, walked the whole of Tel Aviv on Saturday Night, went to my friends 40th birthday party, and wellcomed my parents and grandparents who arrived on Sunday morning:

This begins the point where my two lives converge..