It can feel like you’ve been hired as an extra chaperone at a children’s party. On most Saturdays in Um Safa, Sa‘id ‘Awad packs his wife Rima and six, seven, or eight of his fourteen children into his lively SUV, all of them bumping and bouncing on the uneven roads. After a short hike to the family’s fields in Wadi Al-‘Ara’is, the soccer games begin.
Continue readingMost photographs here were taken by Margaret Olin in Al-Auja in late July, 2017.
Dotting the slopes on either side of Wadi Auja are the widely scattered houses of Al-Auja. In most cases only three or four Bedouin families live in each such tiny point, some to the west, climbing the steep hill less than halfway up to the ridge that overlooks the Jordan Valley, others, like the homes of our shepherd friends today, further east, near the road to Jericho. Continue reading
Photograph by David Shulman
There are about 40,000 Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley—the Israeli-occupied segment of the long deep crack in the surface of the earth known as the Syrian-African Rift. Half of them live in the tropical resort town of Jericho, once thought to be the world’s oldest city. The other half are mostly Bedouins, descendents of pastoralist nomadic tribes that have by now settled down in small, fixed clusters of tents and shacks, though they continue to live primarily from their flocks of goats and sheep. Continue reading