English!!

I'm starting a month long super-subsidised intensive TEFL - Teaching English as a Foreign Language course that starts on the 16th, then I'm off to Amsterdam for a week on the hitchhike down to see a close and valued friend, and explore some of the things that the Dutch have going for them (transport, bicycles, wind-power, schools you can set up with government money if you have 40 families that want it a certain way.... Lots of niceness) and some of the nastier aspects of liberalism - mainly prostitution. Well, I probably won't get a chance to explore the prostitution things because you have to be quite old to volunteer with anything like that I think, and dipping in for a week would probably be a bit destructive (with Stop the Traffick or something... but they seem to be tied up with cocoa farmers on the Ivory Coast at the moment..) so I'll probably mill around having a nice time before hitching hard to Israel and the territories.

Once there I'm going to start with teaching - I think that this will be a good platform in terms of connecting with people, making friends and sussing out what's going on. If anyone has any better ideas taking into account what I can do without any qualified skills, then please leave a comment!

So there are over 650,000 official refugees in 27 official refugee camps in Palestine among a tiny population of 3.7 million. That would be the equivalent to about 12 million refugees in our population if you took it as a rough percentage (600,000 * (60million/3million)). I don't know what help teaching a few of them English is going to do to be honest. It is viewed by some as counterproductive I'm sure - making more people reliant on Western economies and culture to provide for them in exchange for labour rather than just organising themselves. But I think this is a unique situation and these people are asking for it, and it's pretty much all I can do until I get settled there and ken what's going on :)

I'll try and keep the posts short - I know how annoying reading from a screeeen is!