borders and boundaries

I wonder if it would even be possible to travel through Amman onward into Syria according to existing restrictions in place regarding Israel stamps and visas. Even so, If I made it there, would I be jeopardizing any chance of developing the public health focus of my career in Israel? It's easy enough for me to assert that health is a human right and that it's apolitical and that within my NGO I can function as a professional bridge, or as my mentor A likes to call it... "an honest broker for peace". He prefers to not use the term collaboration. Actually there are many terms which we're not supposed to use in our public health work, and many phrases that we're encouraged to utilize with our cross border partners so that they feel more comfortable acknowledging our existence and are more likely to take our hand. Language has such an immense role.

my own language skills have vastly deteriorated since I was unceremoniously tossed into the dumping grounds. I avoided anything associated with mr.dump. My hebrew speaking friends and colleagues commented on how I completely stopped speaking to them in hebrew for a long while, whereas before I would struggle through entire conversations, patient workups and journal club sessions with corrupt, mispronounced, pidgen hebrew. Of course, avoiding hebrew is the fastest way to create a cement ceiling over my career progression here. But, who knows whether I'll be strong enough to stick it out in the long term, or even in the short term. Now that there's been some distance, I actually am starting to feel like I want to speak it again. knowing a language really comes down to wanting to know it, sponging up as much as you can, and having the will to use what you know. But, what you learn can disappear in a second in tandem with the disappearance or waning of the will.

At this point arabic would be just as useful to have in my toolkit. There's a two week course taking place in a bedouin village in the south that serves as an arabic immersion program. This might something that I'm keen on taking soon.

As for a trek to syria, I'm not entirely sure that I want to dip my toes in troubled waters that will cause me problems in my home country with a government that might question my intent. I'd like to reach across the border but it'll depend on what the risks entail.