Walking Diaries #4 with Jordan Miller-Stubbendick

A walk in Bethlehem

Welcome to the Walking Diaries where each month a friend of mine will share a story/reflection/poem/photo essay from a walk they took. Through their words and pictures, they’ll show and tell what the walk meant to them, and how they grew from it. And with each diary shared, I hope you’ll be encouraged to lace up your shoes and put one foot in front of the other. Want to catch up on the Walking Diaries? Check out a walk in Turkey by Sarah Bahiraei, a contemplative walk in the woods taken by Christina Hubbard, or Four Walks for Ten Years by Stacy Bronec.

When I invited my friend Jordan to write a Walking Diary I had no idea the Middle East would be on fire. I imagined her words would be fitting for Christmas as she and her family were living in Jerusalem serving as coordinators for the Young Adults in Global Mission Program through the Lutheran church. Today the words she shares are important to read. Like many others who have shared a Walking Diary, Jordan and I have never met. But we’re both Lutheran pastors and writers. Through mutual friends we’ve recently connected by sharing the joys and struggles of writing and ministry. I pray her words meet you as they did me.

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(Fig trees in Ahmad’s refugee camp, Bethlehem, Palestine. Taken September 2023)

My feet kick an empty plastic water bottle as I follow Ahmad through the streets of the refugee camp in Bethlehem where he was born. He lives not far from where Jesus was born, and like Jesus, Ahmad was born in less than ideal conditions, under military occupation, in a town the world does not much notice. The first time I met Ahmad, I learned that he and I were born in the same year: 1982. Our forty-one years have been as different as you might imagine. I slept soundly through my childhood nights, never worrying that soldiers would burst into my home in the middle of the night. I’ve always been a citizen of a recognized country. Even before I ever visited Bethlehem, I had more rights in Ahmad’s country than he ever has.

I was born in the United States, and Ahmad was born here in Bethlehem, Palestine, in this camp for Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes and land when the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.

Until last year, I did not really know much about this camp or any of the others in Bethlehem, the West Bank capital city of Ramallah, or those in Syria or Jordan. I am learning quickly now, making space for a narrative that is different from what I’ve always been told.

This camp began as tents set up for these refugee families, as temporary shelter for the children, women, and men who lost their homes and villages when the Israeli military plowed through historic Palestine with their guns and bulldozers.

Even now, if you speak to a resident of this refugee camp, asking where they are from, you will likely hear, “I am from Jaffa,” a historic Palestinian city on the Mediterranean Sea, famous for its oranges, or “I am from Haifa,” a seaport known for its railway, bringing travelers from diverse places. Even children will give you these answers, children who, like Ahmad, were born in this camp, who have never seen Jaffa or Haifa. These towns were home to their great-grandparents, but the shape of the town has been carefully handed down to each new member of the family.

For Ahmad, it is the same. His ancestral village is Ayn Zaytun, where his grandparents lived, where his family was forced to leave in 1948. You can no longer find Ayn Zaytun on a map. Long before Ahmad was born, Ayn Zaytun was plowed under by the Israeli military, planted over and given a Hebrew name. But Ahmad can close his eyes and sketch the layout of his village, detailing his grandparents’ house, the place that his family still names as home.

It has been four generations that Palestinians have lived in this camp. The temporary tents were long ago replaced by more permanent structures of concrete. The false permanence of this camp has emerged through necessity. With no way to get back to their homes and land, the people of this camp had to create more lasting temporary shelter.

Ahmad explains that the first residents of this camp were farmers. They were used to caring for the land that was like an extension of their own body, to planting fig and lemon trees, grapes, olive trees. Their days and years were shaped by planting, watering, harvesting. Now, 75 years later, in this collection of concrete buildings crammed with 13,000 people living in a place where there is no privacy, the trees planted over decades have taken root and blossomed.

As trees tucked into tiny pockets of land bring some needed relief to this camp, so too does Ahmad. Ahmad is an artist. He distills the grief and longing, the beauty and joy of not only his life, but the life of his family, his neighbors, his community into carefully crafted images that are both haunting and hopeful.

Consider the balance between the human need for beauty, and the human yearning to return home. It is against the United Nations’ international law, and against the desire of the human heart to keep so many generations of people packed into a still-“temporary” camp, refusing to allow them to stretch out physically, emotionally, or spiritually.

Ahmad tells me that one tension of living in this camp is the innate desire to be surrounded by beauty in one’s living space—and also the need to keep the hope of freedom alive by not making this refugee camp too beautiful, to continue pressing towards the dream of a permanent home of one’s own, that is safe and lasting, where Ahmad and his family can live in peace and dignity, without fear of nightly raids and with reliable access to water and electricity.

For now, I continue to follow Ahmad as he shows our group around the camp that is uneasily, reluctantly the only home he has ever known. My feet scuttle a soda can over the pavement as I come to a stop. Ahmad is telling us about one of the thriving trees that are carefully tended by the residents of this camp. I look up. It is a fig tree abundant with fruit, its branches bending down as if they would embrace anyone walking by.

“It is our culture to be generous,” Ahmad is saying. “If someone passing by takes a fig from my tree to eat, I will not stop him. To be honest, I will say, Take more. It is our way.”

The September sunshine slants through the canopy of broad, thriving green fig leaves overhead. Like the Palestinians, this fig tree is deeply rooted in the land, taking even the sparse, minimal conditions of this “temporary” refugee camp and turning them into fruit that is nourishing, life-giving, abundant.

With proper conditions and care, a fig tree can live for a hundred years. If the fig tree can flourish in a refugee camp, how much better could it do on proper farmland?

How much more so the Palestinians?

Author’s note: Ahmad’s name and the location of his ancestral village have been changed to protect his privacy.

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Jordan Miller-Stubbendick has recently served in Jerusalem as co-country coordinator for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Young Adults in Global Mission program.