غزة، قط بسبع أرواح. روح للأرض، روح للبحر، روح للسماء، روح للقضية، روح للماضي، روح للمستقبل، و روح للانسان.
Gaza, like a cat, has seven souls. A soul for earth, a soul for the sea, a soul for the sky, a soul for the cause, a soul for the past, a soul for the future, and a soul for the human.
And Gaza will survive this time, like it always does.
Because this city will continue to give, and never ask for anything in return...
I'm heading to UNRWA's Rehabilitation Centre for the Visually Impaired-#Gaza to celebrate its golden jubilee. This amazing center, which runs under UNRWA, has been helping visually impaired in children enjoy life for the past 50 years. An asylum providing educational and rehabilitation services for 150 'different' kids, right in the middle of a crazy city.
Its a doubtless fact that only a marginalized minority in the world relates anything but negativity to "Gaza". But how many of the overwhelming majority remember that the people of Gaza are vulnerable to other issues faced by humanity, such as, cancer, and, more specifically, breast cancer?
Few. And its shocking because cancer is the second cause for death in the Gaza Strip. Today, there are 11,000 cancer patients in Gaza, not counting those who have not been diagnosed yet.
Women Die Waiting - Breast Cancer in the Gaza Strip
So this month, Gaza celebrated Pink October by launching an extensive awareness campaign, calling on women to get early screening and protection. The campaign also featured:
Making the largest pink ribbon in the work, ON GAZA'S BEACH!
And we did! The organization behind this amazing initiative is called the Aid and Hope Program for Cancer Patients Care. It's led by Eman Shannan, a survivor of the disease. Running on a low budget provided by several Palestinian private sector institutions, the team (75% of the staff are patients or survivors of breast cancer) made the ribbon using a 1.4 kilo long pink cloth, breaking the Guinness Record, on the beach.
Its a message to the world, and more importantly, to ourselves. Living in Gaza takes a fighter, but a fighter with cancer? A female fighter with cancer? Fighting off the disease and its provider (the occupation) with abnormal resilience, hope, and will. Israel's war machines, the #1 provider of Cancer cells in Palestine, do not only destroy buildings or human lives, they also cause slow death and prolonged suffering, embodied in cancer.
It might destroy a human body, but it would take a lot more to destroy a Palestinian soul, and it never will.
Find below a screenshot of an article published by "London News" in the 1920's, titled
"4000 year old jewelry: Goldwork of the age of Shepherd Kings, Gaza (2000-1500 BC).""
by Petrie, W. M. Flinders Sir.
This is the Gaza I proudly belong to!
p.s. I'm doing more research on the topic and will be publishing it within a bigger Gaza cultural heritage and history preservation project that I'm working on.
I must apologize for having been an inactive blogger for the last two months. Swamped with work, busy with a new project, and adjusting to a slightly different lifestyle. I'm thinking outloud here- would it be ok if I blog about random, non-Gaza/Palestine related things? I won't give examples until I figure out the answer.
Last night's midnight hallucinations- Israeli Apaches woke us up around midnight. The whole city was up in anticipation, fear (yes, its ok to be scared), while a toddler (Hadeel El Haddad) was assassinated by the Israelis. Fifty people were being murdered in Syria. Meanwhile in Egypt: Egyptians were divided between Shafik and Morsi, and Mubarak's death or survival. Spare us the drama, please? Who cares if he's dead/alive/resurrected/incarnated? What significant difference is that going to make at this stage?
On Egypt: my friend posted this hilarious comment this morning:
النهارده يوم سعيد جداااااا فى تاريخ مصر..اللى انتخب مرسى فرحان لأن مرسى كسب واللى انتخب شفيق فرحان لأن شفيق كسب. و اللى قاطع فرحان لان طنطاوى لبس الكسبان السلطانيه. اللى بيكره مبارك فرحان لأنه مات و اللى بيحبه فرحان لأنه لسه عايش ربنا يباركلنا فى الحشيش المصرى طويل التيلة
It roughly translates into:
Today is a very happy day in Egypt's history.
The people who elected Morsi are happy because Morsi won, and the ones who elected Shafiq are happy because Shafiq won. The ones who boycotted are happy because Tantawi/SCAF is the winner.
Whoever hates Mubarak is happy because he died, and whoever likes him is happy because he's still alive. Long live Egyptian hash!
9.50am:As part of today's
Gaza Live blog, young Gazans bloggers talk about their lives. First up isYasmeen el Khoudary(left).
What's it like to live
in Gaza? I get
that question so often that answering it becomes tiring. But what is it really
like to live in Gaza?
Here, I'm going to try to answer the question in five main points.
The political and
economic situation in Gaza
is unbearable. With 64 years of Israeli occupation, five years under Israeli
physical, political and economic siege, five years of political and geographic
division between Hamas and Fatah/Gaza and the West Bank,
we have enough problems to fill the world.
Simultaneously,
unprovoked Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip remain relentless. I don't have
figures, but I have personal experiences. A couple of nights ago, my usual
bedtime lullaby was playing - a series of loud explosions, followed by the
buzzing of Israeli spying drones. The following morning's news revealed that Israel bombed a house in one of Gaza's refugee camps–for no apparent reason-
leaving seven injuries, including four children.
There is never a
guarantee of safety in Gaza,
a truth that does a great job messing with our heads and stability. Not all of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants were injured and/or
suffered the pain/loss of a relative or a friend, but each and every person in Gaza is a direct victim of Israel's unwavering psychological
warfare on the Strip.
Yet, the bigger
threat/problem is isolation. Israel's
policies deliberately aim at keeping the Gaza Strip physically isolated from
the world, and also lagging behind in the fields of economic, industrial,
educational, technological, cultural development. While the results of the
latter speak for themselves, the former has dire consequences that include a
blindfolded generation with almost no exposure to the outside world, and a
world with no exposure to a population that it plays a major role in
determining the fate of.
Conclusion? Despite everything, hope exists.
There's nothing easier than giving up on living in a place like Gaza/Palestine,
but the real challenge lies in persisting, loving, and believing in Gaza. A common saying
here goes: "Love Gaza and it will love you back." To that end, my
friends and I found our own way of loving Gaza
collectively:Diwan Ghazza,
hosted by Gaza's
only Museum (Almat'haf),
we organise independent activities that we feel Gazan youth need, using
ourselves as indicators. We started Gaza's first book, film, and photography
clubs, launched a contest for Palestinian bloggers, in addition to several
other activities, using nothing but each other's books, DVDs, and cameras, and
the cultural thirst of no less than 200 young Gazans.
Almat'haf is part of a
greater effort to save all that remains from Gaza's glorious past led by my father, Jawdat
Khoudary. An exhibition about Gaza's history is
travelling around Europe, and a book about the most important pieces in
Khoudary's collection displayed in the Museum and the Exhibition was published
in Gaza last
month after 5 years of research. We have also finished renovating an 800+ year
old house in Gaza's OldCity and will turn it into Gaza's first cultural
heritage preservation centre. Despite everything, we will keep working towards
restoring the glory that once existed in Gaza.
