PEN-L message, [Pen-l] A father's story from the Gaza Strip

My Day Begins at Night

Nowadays in Gaza, I am no longer an early bird not because I am a pop star or belly dancer. Ever since the Gaza Strip lost most of its electricity supply, I find myself forcibly waking up every morning. . I am not an early bird anymore because my night turned to be my day since I help my eight year old son prepare his homework and exams after midnight when we have the electricity back.

On top of this, I am waking up the other members of my little tribe to do the laundry, heat water which we then store in a heat container. We use this water to prepare food and tea and for other purposes as a best-available substitute for cooking gas which we ran out of for the last two weeks.

My little boy, a villain, showered me with so many questions related to his daily life for which I did not have any answers; at least none which would have not been highly politicized. Fact is I don’t want my son to be subjected to the Palestinian syndrome of having to face politics in almost everything, at such an early age.

He posed questions about the sources of our electricity. Is it from Israel? Why is Israel selling it to us? Why has the Gaza power plant stopped? They don’t like us? Are we not paying the bill? Do their villains study at dusk like I do? Under such shelling from my villain, I advised him to focus on his book before electricity goes off again.

Fact is, kids are asking direct, simple, and smart questions for which we, older people, do not have answers or feel paralyzed when confronted with them. This is despite our beliefs that we have very sophisticated, articulate and persuading arguments. Once again I don’t want my villain to be contaminated with the Palestinian syndrome I mentioned earlier, but it seems that the details of his daily life are stronger than my instructions to him. How could this not happen when the car which takes him from home to school is no longer there due to lack of fuel, when he has to wake up at midnight to review his homework, and when he finds no favorite milk either because it is no longer available in the market or because we are out of cooking gas to prepare it for him.

During the day, my son misses his computer games and his favorite cartoon channel not only because of the electricity cut but also due to interference caused by countless pilotless aircraft circling Gaza’s sky 24 hours a day, every day. These Israeli drones film everything on the ground including, may be, our private activities.. My son calls these aircraft ”Zananat” characterizing the noise they make – ZN .. ZN .. - as they circle the sky . My villain expressed his frustrations too many times by mumbling and damming me, his school textbooks, our luxurious LCD TV which we are unable to turn on and damming those who are responsible for the electricity cut and the ZN-ZN.

It’s an impossible mission to put a villain into a well structured system, asking him to be disciplined, while the entire surrounding environment is undisciplined and chaotic. Nowadays we, all the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, are asked, even pushed, to become villains as nothing encourages us to be disciplined. Prices skyrocketed like an unguided missile with the scarcity of many food items and essential drugs. The market mostly has bad quality food items coming into Gaza from Egypt through the tunnels. There is no supervision or monitoring for neither the quality nor the prices of goods that are brought in; no right to choose, take or leave it. Unemployment is high and poverty reached 80% of Gaza’s population. Bakeries are shutdown, sick people are dying for lack of simple life saving pills and medicines as a lot of medical disposables and essential drugs are at zero stock levels. Even kids have forgotten the size and taste of chocolates and chewing gum.

It has become such a “luxury” to talk about development or de-development in Gaza as all its small industrial enterprises have been forced to halt their operations and as our formal economy is transformed into tunnel operations and whatever they bring to us. We are asked to drink Gaza’s sea water or that brought up from wells which may be contaminated. On top of all this, I ask my villain to be disciplined, and I am asked to raise him on tolerance and liberal values under a clinically dead political process, the absence of any future political horizon and a severe siege!!

I am one of the fortunate ones whom you could rarely find in Gaza, those who could find some alternatives and means of survival to overcome such complexities in their daily lives. I am still employed and make a good salary, but I can’t ask my villain to be disciplined! My villain left me with a stronger belief that not everyone of his “why’s” necessarily has an easy-enough explanation. He also left me with a clear impression that desperate diseases need desperate remedies. How do I explain that hungry man is an angry man and that a living dog is better than a dead lion?

I am sorry my villain, I have to say that you enjoy better arguments than I do, and I shouldn’t try to be the jack of all trades for you. Do not forget that what comes easily goes just as easily;, you have to work hard and to wake up at midnight. Finally, my lovely villain living under such complicated and chaotic life, please do not ask me to be your idol since I am blind, and if the blind leads the blind both shall fall into the ditch.