The Freedom Theatre has been taking cultural resistance to the countryside with its playback theater project The Freedom Bus. Listening to the stories of occupation and resistance, the Freedom Bus acting troupe uses improvisation and music to reflect, validate, and elaborate on the experiences and emotions of their audience.
This time, the Freedom Bus is accompanied by 23 people from the US, Sweden, Switzerland, and Australia who have come to participate in a weeklong Freedom Bus tour to a number of villages in the West Bank and, hopefully, by video conference to Gaza.
In Faquaa, a farming village near Jenin, that suffers from extreme water deprivation, the performance had some uninvited guests — from the Israeli Army. Soldiers observed the performance with binoculars and cameras from the patrol road of the apartheid wall. Faquaa, whose name – bubbles in Arabic — derives from its plentiful springs, has been deprived of most of water by the Nakba and now the fence. 27,000 dunams of village land ended up on the Israel side of the 1948 border. That land contained the vast majority of Faquaa’s water. They have the funding to drill a new well on their current land but, because it is in the Israeli controlled Area C of the West Bank, they must apply for a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration (a branch of the Israeli Army). The response for the last three years has been that the water is not suitable for drinking, so no permit. There is also a pipe that goes under the apartheid wall that carries water from the springs on the other side of the wall. Again, the Israelis have refused to permit Faquaa to tap that water resource.
When the actors polled the audience for stories, simple tales emerged. A woman said, “A year ago, after very heavy rains, we got a very bad smell from our water. The rain had resulted in run-off and sewage penetrating the water supply. We could not drink it or use it for anything. Even adding chlorine didn’t help. We could only get water by buying it from tanker trucks. I want clearn water for everything –for drinking, for washing, for the children. Without clean water, it’s a disaster.”
A 10th grade boy recounted being the shower, covered with soap, when the water ran out. He waited three angry, impatient hours for the well to fill enough for him to rinse off.
These are simple stories, everyday stories of events so common people may not think they are stories at all. But, brought to life by the Freedom Bus actors, these stories were an account of an individual’s and a community’s struggle to live with dignity. Did the soldiers snooping at the wall hear them?
You can follow The Freedom Bus at www.freedombus.ps
