So what did you do over the summer?
Work on the Presidential Trail
Raf Sanchez worked on the Obama campaign for two months.
I went to Virginia in search of a Southern experience. I wanted to see the United States at its Bible-bashing, gun-toting, red-white-and-bluest. I wanted to sleep in a caravan, eat grits and have endless arguments with Republicans who would accuse me of being a “pansy-ass Limey”.
On paper Virginia isn’t a bad bet for this kind of thing. It hasn’t voted Democrat in a presidential election since 1964. The state’s Republican senator George Allen kept an antique noose in his office and referred to an Indian man as “Macaca” at a rally.
But the reality is a more complicated. In a country often divided into “red states and blue states”, Virginia is increasingly purple. Its current governor is a Democrat, as is Senator Jim Webb – who defeated Allen in 2006. The technology firms setting up shop in the north of the state have brought an influx of young professionals who are both highly educated and liberal leaning. It also among the top targets of the Obama campaign in 2008.
A lot of my time on the campaign was spent doing voter registration. It’s a pretty low tech affair. You stand at high-traffic areas like Metro stations and ask people whether they’re registered to vote. All that’s required is a clip board, a stack of registration forms, and a willingness to be ignored for hours by hundreds with varying levels of politeness in return for the five or six people you register.
Voter registration was easily the most rewarding part of my work on the campaign. It’s here that you really feel how much Obama’s candidacy means to people, especially many African-Americans old enough to remember the Civil Rights struggle. People don’t just agree with him. He is cherished. His “improbable” success is something people draw personal pride and happiness from, as a parent might from the success of a child. To be allowed in on a little bit of the solidarity people feel for the man is incredibly empowering.
Yet as empowering as it can be ‘voter reg’ can poses some difficult questions. Black people are statistically less likely to be registered than white people. Young people less like likely than old people. A young black man in jeans is many multiples less likely to be registered than a white man in a suit. But to what extent, for yourself if not for the outward appearance of the campaign, is it acceptable to act on those statistics? You don’t always feel great when you take an awkward sidestep to make sure you’re positioned to ask a young black woman if she is registered to vote for the candidate she statistically should support.
Although northern Virginia is growing ever more Democrat the love for Obama is far from universal. Every day on the doorstep and on the phone you would get abuse from Republicans as well as Clinton supporters who were unable to let go even after their candidate apparently had. One night when I was alone in the office a large gentleman wandered off the street and urinated on the floor. His even larger friends convinced me to shrug the incident off as a policy disagreement. We laughed the next day but several nights later a group tried to break down the locked office door while a number of people were inside. Staff members who had worked in other states previously told me about death threats they had received for being a white person working for a black candidate.
The international character of the campaign reflects the stake the world has in the election. By the time I left there were seven Brits, as well as a German and an Italian working in our office. All were greeted with a mixture of gratitude for “coming to help us save our country” and the usual curiosity with which foreigners are treated in the US. Like me they had come out to fight for Obama and for adventure, but stayed, working thankless hours, out of loyalty to the field staff who put their lives on hold for the election.
On my last day before leaving for the UK I met Obama on a tiny airstrip in New Hampshire. His jet, adorned with his mantra of ‘Change’, looked comical amongst the Cessnas and Piper Cub light aircraft. He seemed tired but glad to see us. He asked me about Virginia, nodding in quiet approval as I told him about our field work there. He is more substantial, tougher looking than his trademark slim suits make him appear on television. There is a swagger as he walks. He thanked us for our work and within minutes his jet roared off. For those of us left on the runway it was a moment on which we would giddily compare notes until hours later. For him it was just one more campaign stop on a long and difficult road to the presidency.
Visit Palestine
Laura Payne visited Israel and the West Bank to work in a refugee camp for a month.
For all the alleged spiritual power of Jerusalem, it is not a calming place. It’s a city under siege, where the air is thick with tension. School children on outings are accompanied by armed security guards. Police and Israeli defence force soldiers with M-16’s strapped to their back seem to outnumber civilians. I spend a lot of time trying not to look suspicious. When I stand on a crisp packet there’s a loud bang. People jump. A gun cocks. I freeze. Anywhere else that would be funny. Throughout my week, I struggle with the pathological security and remain scared that I’ll stand on another crisp packet.
Not so in the West Bank. The atmosphere changes immediately and tangibly. The volume increases. Music blasts out; people shout rather than talk; cars honk and screech. Finally I feel like I could jump on a crisp packet and nobody would notice. It strikes me now as ironic that even though Palestine is the occupied territory and Israel the occupier, I felt freer in the West Bank than I did in Jerusalem. Not safe, but free. People might watch me here as they did in Israel, but open curiosity replaces inherent suspicion.
We were staying in Aida camp, one of the biggest refugee camps in West Bank which houses around 4,600 people in cramped conditions. We slept in a school just outside of the camp in the shadow of the separation wall. It feels safe enough, until a fight breaks out down the road. We hear gunfire and run upstairs to the classrooms we sleep in. The local volunteers get caught in the fighting, and run to the relative safety of the school. We sit it out. Eventually the police come and tell us we should all go into one room at the end of the school. They ‘have the situation under control now’.
The most volatile region in the West Bank is Hebron, where the Israeli settlers have built their settlement right in the middle of the Palestinian old city. 700 Jewish settlers live under massive Israeli army and police protection, disrupting life for the 180,000 Palestinian inhabitants. They are about as fundamentally Zionist as it is possible to be, and harass, abuse and victimise anyone who is not also a settler, including internationals.
We are supposed to be meeting with the Christian Peacekeepers, a group of observers that patrol Hebron to try to prevent violence, and walk down one of the city’s most contended roads, one that is officially shared, but is in reality controlled by the settlers. As we walk, the settlers tail us, shouting abuse. This road was once a bustling marketplace; the heart of the Hebron economy. Now it’s like a scene from a war movie. Soldiers are positioned every 20 meters or so. Another settler comes out and starts to put up Israeli flags. I follow the example of our guide and offer him a friendly ’shalom’, but he just spits onto the ground.
None of this phases Terry Boulatta, a Jerusalem born headmistress, filmmaker and activist. Married to a Palestinian man, she believes that both communities should start building links with each other: ‘If they build a wall, we should build a bridge’. I had heard many such sentiments, but her hopefulness managed to catch me off guard.
Since I left, local volunteers I worked with have been imprisoned, the UN are still distributing food aid in Aida camp, and the daily fight to survive continues. My trip didn’t change that; I never expected it would. But it did change some small things. We left a garden for the children to play in at Aida Camp, and murals depicting the children’s original villages. Helping Kholoud, a local volunteer, apply for a Visa means she’s now studying Peace Studies in the UK. It’s these small things that endure, that made the trip worthwhile. It might not have been pretty all the time, but would I recommend it? In a heartbeat.
Perform in Edinburgh Fringe
Jamie Wilkes went up to Edinbrugh Fringe with York performance company ‘Belt Up’.
This summer, the York theatre company ‘Belt Up (nothing to see/hear)’ planned to invade the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with our venue ‘The Red Room’. Armed with truckloads of red fabric, old carpets and Victorian paraphernalia, we transformed a hotel function room into a run-down bohemian boudoir. The idea was that this venue would be an immersive theatre environment hosting a ridiculous amount of shows from butchered French classics to unabridged Shakespeare’s stretched over three days in fragmented episodes across the entire city of Edinburgh. It was a mammoth project, and one that had dominated our lives since January.
It was hard work, very hard work. I began to forget what sleep felt like because there simply wasn’t time. Our venue was running around 25 shows over the festival with at least 7 every day. Naturally, after a hard and draining day’s work, the only sensible thing to do is go out and get plastered. This, of course, made the following day harder – I don’t think I will ever live down a podcast interview for ‘threeweeks’ in which I was still drunk from the night before and started ranting about “fucking the fourth wall”.
As the festival gathered momentum, audiences started to pick up. With larger audiences came more press interest, and soon the reviews started coming out. We had novelty to our advantage – not many shows could offer being shown to your seat by a dwarf or saving you from an invisible falling grand piano. By the end of the fringe three of our shows were listed in the top 50 by ‘The Scotsman’, with ‘The Tartuffe’ making its way to the top five.
This was my first experience of the festival and to say I was thrown into the deep end is an understatement. It is a weird place, like some sort of alternative reality. My most memorable moment was post-final Red Room party; we decided to climb ‘Arthur’s Seat’, a small mountain overlooking the city. I excitedly decided to run ahead of the rest of the group despite not knowing where I was going. After several minutes of shouting, I realised that I was in fact going up the wrong hill. To make up for lost time I ran, as the crow flies, in a straight line from one mountain to the other. I was invincible. I was that superhero in the ‘drinking doesn’t make you a superhero’ advert, and I survived. We eventually reached the top and watched the sun rise whilst burning flyers for warmth.
As the festival drew to an end, our hard work and overly ambitious ideas were rewarded. We received two awards for ‘The Red Room’. One was the ‘Threeweeks’ editors awards’ for our “prolific 2008 programme”, one of 10 awards given out by the magazine. Interestingly, one of the other winners was a 75 year old stripper. Belt Up was also awarded the Edinburgh International Festival award, in the form of £5,000 towards developing a workshop for next year. Although before the Fringe I had dreamt of a transfer to the National Theatre, or a Pulitzer or two – I never thought we would actually achieve such recognition. It was an incredible feeling.
Loading ...
I can only express my disbelief at the fact that this article was even considered for publication.
I’m very pleased that the first two contributors had not only the funds but also the time available to carry out their no-doubt rewarding summertime jaunts. Alas for many, the reality of most University summers is days and weeks spent working at underpaid and often deeply unchallenging jobs.
Fair enough that you don’t have a requirement to slave away all summer to fund your studies, but those who do could do without returning to york to be greeted by the egotistical boasting of evidently well-connected individuals who seem unable to contain their glee at the “incredible” summers they have just experienced.
Take a reality check, and consider for a moment the answer that the majority of students would give to the question posed as the article’s title.