Follow the Women!

I'm in the Middle East for an all-women bike ride but:

I can't bloody well cycle AT ALL!!! Went to the hospital for an x-ray on my ankle, sprained in Damascus a few days ago - it's not broken but the doctor was very clear: "if you want to have an ankle like that [i.e. massively swollen] for the rest of your life, go ahead and cycle". I've saved €165 on bike hire but how bloody annoying is that...I have padded pants for no reason at all! (Sorry Mum, thank you anyway! Do you think you can take them back to Cliff Pratt?)

But I got over the depression of the hospital visit and joined in the spirit of the trip. There wasn't any biking today anyhow - just a visit by bus to the Palestinian refugee camp Sabra Shatila (in Beirut); the opening ceremony at UNESCO and a massive dinner and general celebration.

But what is "Follow the Women"? What is it for? What is it about? That will take the whole trip to work out I think: there doesn't seem to be an easy answer which gives interesting differences of opinion, but a little more clarity would help me work out what exactly is going on and what I am representing. I hope a picture will emerge slowly...

Getting the bikes for hundreds of women ("I think 220 at the moment, there'll be more and more with every day" says the woman-in-chief, Detta Regan) was a mission, with spare time spent sprawled over the concrete in the sun, talking - mostly at first grouped by country. The Italians are instantly recognisable in their blue uniforms; other teams are more gradually identified, but it turns out other countries have uniforms. The Danish T-shirts have caused quite a stir, with "dialogue" written in Arabic, English and Hebrew - more original than airtex biking tops, but the Lebanese organisers (the Progress Youth Organisation, a social wing of the political party Progressive Socialist Party) are already giving "advice": "I don't mind at all, personally, but I can't say that about everyone". They blatantly do mind.

(There's a Shane from the L-Word lookalike which is fairly distracting, especially as she's as taciturn as Shane so has the same air of mystique.)

After lunch and an impromptu concert from various Arab girls, we go by bus to the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps (the place of a massacre in 1982 by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist group, sanctioned by Israeli forces who were controlling the area at the time). Welcomed by music, we are ushered into a memorial garden with a huge flower display dedicated to Follow the Women. We listen to passionate speeches from unidentified Palestinian leaders under the hot sun - "we will not rest until we have our own land!" (Applause). "We will sacrifice our lives to have our own land!" (Applause and cheering). And so on. Detta responds: "We stand with you!". I'm not sure that I do.

We do not venture into the interior of the camp. There are a lot of us, I can see it would be difficult, but it does seem a shame. [I've since found out that security is a nightmare, with tens of thousands of guns stored up inside.] Instead, we go to the hotel and prepare for the welcoming ceremony at UNESCO.

First was speeches in the auditorium. Various welcomes: Detta responding with "the idea is to cycle through the Middle East for peace"; but no mention of what is important to me, and that is we are all women. The next official used an unfortunate phrase right after this: "we need to end the cycle; the cycle of violence".

Next was the bus to a lovely restaurant by the sea, and dancing afterwards. My ankle didn't feel up to it, so I wandered back along the sea to the hotel...

I've followed the women for a day and am writing in bed in Hotel Legend (I'm trying to type quietly because of two sleeping women and one reading one). I have a headache, but only because my head is so full of what's been happening, or maybe standing in the sun listening to fairly standard Palestinian rhetoric and watching Palestinian children in army garb doing traditional dancing to nationalist songs...I have forgotten pretty much everyone's name already, but the conversations have stuck, from the Palestinian nurse who is paid by an NGO to go into schools and talk about sex to the Iranian journalist who lied to the Iranian authorities in order to come, so no photos of her can be published...

The three women in the room are all great [later addition: they all turn out to be three of the firmest friends from the trip]: Irish Mary, and two Danish doctors, Jutta and Mette. I have the first real analysis of FtW with Jutta, in that we agree that Detta's speech at the refugee camp was disturbing in content, tone and especially the "we": "we" have not been addressed directly by Detta since we arrived, and we certainly don't have a unified set of opinions on this region. Unease is setting in already.

Tomorrow is the first cycling day, and I will watch with jealousy...