With tears, hugs, compassion, appreciation we ended the great day, after 2 days of working and running around trying to make everything look perfect, this day exceeded every expectation we had.
It all started when our manager asked us to plan a day for Palestine, a day in which we will present our country to the employees and clients of MAPS, so at first I thought, well, okay this is going to be easy, we will do a small presentation, prepare some food, and we will show them the traditional dance of Palestine. But then we had to “face the music”, because this wasn’t easy at all, we had to prepare everything from scratch, we had to think of every little detail because we wanted to succeed , this was a huge responsibility that we were given, in order to share our reality, our occupation, our history and our heritage and everything. We had to be the ambassadors of our Palestine and send the message and the awareness to our audience.
So this is how we started, First of all, the history of Palestine since the early times until our recent was covered including the occupation of course, and how we got where we are today, and apparently it was shocking to most of them since all they ever know about Palestine is from the mainstreamed media and Propaganda so this rose a lot of questions.
Then circles were made, with a background music playing and everyone was cheering and moving around trying to learn the “Dabka” in the Palestinian way of course.
In addition, to the highlight of the day, “The Food” it started with the manaqeesh as breakfast with tea and sage, then the bomb of the day was the upside chicken “Makloobe”, it was a very challenging part of the day but thank God it was a success and everyone loved it, and now we need to go back to Palestine and open a restaurant for Olivia since she was the amazing Chef of the day.
At the end, I wish there would be ever enough words to describe this amazing day and how it ended and how much it affected me, Wissam and Olivia, and everyone that was there, and the words of the manager and the director of MAPS and the way that the described their experiences and visit to Palestine was very emotional and made us cry. In addition to everyone’s compassion that made us feel how important and emotional was this day for everyone, and we could never be thankful enough or prouder of this opportunity and this day.