1990 Summer

The Summer 1990 groups was there during the first Intifada.  Andrew Wagstaff remembers “being instructed to exercise caution as we went out into the city, to always travel in groups and always leave immediately if any trouble started near us.  We would sit out on our balcony in the evenings and watch as large puffs of tear gas would appear at various points in the city.  This was a little exciting for us, but I don’t think we fully appreciated the human costs.”

 

“About 2 weeks before we left, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait.  We had a front row seat to a piece of history.  The Palestinian people were largely pro-Hussein, I suppose mostly just because Iraq was largely anti-Israel.  I remember speaking with a Palestinian woman who ran a flower shop.  Without offering an opinion of my own, I asked her about her feelings of these events.  She told me that Saddam was a very good man who gave all that he had to his people.  I just thanked her, bought some flowers and moved on.  I think most of us were very moved by the various circumstances of the different peoples in this part of the world.  We saw a tiny corner of the troubled tapestry of the holy land.”