A Small Reminder
This morning I came to a both a sad discovery and a reminder of why I am here. My host mother, a tiny 72-year-old woman who looks much younger than her age, has told me multiple times that she gets "nervous." Her English not being quite good, and my Arabic being quite terrible, I try to stick to conversations in which either she or I do not have to give lengthy answers to questions. This morning, however, as she sat down after putting out some breakfast goodies (a Palestinian breakfast, in my experience, tends to be hoobiz and a spread of cheeses, olives, some sliced deli meat, mish mish jam, tea or coffee, tomatoes, and a native cucumber) and I began to eat, I asked her why she wasn't eating. She told me she was nervous. I asked why. As we have a severe communication problem, I did not really expect an answer, or an answer that had much to do with my question.
My host mother told me that she gets nervous because of the war. During the second Intifada, the hotel just a few feet from her house was bombed, and she had to go to the hospital because she was so terrified that she had a severe panic attack. Normally cheery, this morning she was sad and doubtful of peace. She asked me woefully, "What do we [the Palestinians] make?" of the situation she has endured for a majority of her lifetime. She asked me, rhetorically, what has happened to her country? The answer was that it has become Israel. The answer was that neither Israel nor Hamas want peace. She showed me her Palestinian identification card as she told me that I can go to Jerusalem, but she cannot. As a very religious woman who goes to church almost every morning, it must be painful to be so isolated from a piece of her history. As a Pakistani whose own country is being torn to shambles under the cover of fighting terrorism, I can empathize with her sadness in finding her home at the mercy of others' greed.
She spends a lot of her time cooking and watching television. My host sister's friend said that for women both young and old, the Turkish soap operas that play continuously represent a life they would like to but cannot live, a life where people can quarrel about things such as their love. The friend didn't believe that someone could have a love like Mirna and Khalil's in Palestine, where the only thing that matters is a romantic relationship between two people. Palestinians have other problems, such as wondering if their homes will be arbitrarily bulldozed for 'security reasons', whether their children will come back every time they leave the house, whether or not they will be stoned (again) on the way home from school in Hebron. There is neither time nor energy for meaningless quarrels.
Boxes of medicines find a home on a shelf in the refrigerator. My host mother, an elderly woman (though I do not consider her so), needs them in order to stay calm and pretend she is living a normal life. The medical clinic in one of the refugee camps we visited is closed--anyone with a health problem must walk into town in order to receive care. In Dheisheh, the free UN-run clinic does not have a good reputation; if people have a serious illness, they find another doctor, most likely one they will have to pay for. One of the men we spoke to about his experience being arrested said that, for a misaligned spinal disc, the Israeli prison doctor told him to take four aspirin. The situation in Gaza is far worse than the small snippets of health information I have managed to pick up in the last week--a spokesman for UNRWA estimates that even with the Egyptian border opening, there will not be enough personnel entering the Gaza strip through Rafah to even put a dent in the need for health care and humanitarian services.
In many of the articles on health and aid I have read over the last year, many situations have appeared where what is being done is either inappropriate or not enough. It is more than obvious that this country, territory, whatever one wishes it to be called, needs more than what is being given. The international community is slowly being prodded from the hibernation which has allowed it to ignore the past forty-plus years of growing colonialism in Palestine. It was sleeping in 1994, when hatred bred and built by colonialism erupted into genocide in Rwanda. It was sleeping in 1939, when Hitler used the psychology of "us versus them" to justify the ghettoization of German Jews. It has only recently woken up to the genocide in Darfur, but Western demonization of Arab states and neocolonialist policies in Africa have backfired to the point where Arab and African leaders are defending al-Bashir against the existing double-standard in international law.
I had nothing to say that could comfort my host mother besides my belief in the possibility for peace. Her response was a sad smile.
Submitted by: KA
