Today saw the latest in a series of strikes at Birzeit University. This was a teaching staff strike (from which my course was exempt), though over the past few weeks there have been general and student strikes too. This morning I arrived at the servees station a normally-dangerous five minutes late, expecting to see the usual swarming tangle of people fighting over buses. Instead, I unhurriedly took a seat in the first of a neat row of waiting yellow minibuses.
The scene up at the university was similar. Instead of the usual slipstreams of noisy students filing along in all different directions on the campus roads, it was empty. A few grounds workers checked the bins in vain. Three boys carried a football, approaching the sports ground with a ‘no-school’ bounce in their step. All was uncharacteristically peaceful.
I saw the Faculty of Arts canteen for the first time today. I’ve been there often, but the sheer density of students milling and queueing and sitting on tables and floors had always obscured it from view and jangled my claustrophobic tendencies. Procuring food there is, for me, normally quite a test of nerve. But today I was the only one there, standing in a sea of my own space and unbreathed, unsmoked air. I bought one of those baguettes they toast, unafraid of being jostled while I waited.
I wondered what they were all doing, the other students. Where are the pairs of young female best friends in matching headscarves and dresses? Where are the couples who sit on the wall so close to each other yet so far away, never touching? Where are the groups of studious-looking Muslim students in long overdresses carrying books? And where are the glamorous ones in the tight jeans and fashionable shirts, worn equally with hijab or long flowing hair? Where are the political students, Birzeit’s union hacks and party members, who hang around the Student Council looking ready to spring into action? Where are the gangs of macho guys with greased hair and observable pecking-order who get so physically intimate with each other that they really do look about to kiss?
Despite my new-found personal space, I missed them all!
