I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (6 page)

I remember my paternal grandfather holding court in the refugee camp. Everyone came to listen to Moustafa Abuelaish because of the position he’d held in the village of Houg. I saw him as the rock, the man with the power, the leader who discussed the issues of the day. He was highly respected and set an example for all of his sons, brothers and cousins, and even for my family, as he was the only one who came to see us regularly. I was only a youngster at the time and children weren’t allowed to sit with the older people; I knew mostly by the way others came to listen that what he had to say was important. He and his peers talked a lot about being displaced. I suppose that was natural for people who felt they had been forced from their homes. Your home, whatever it is, is where you feel safe, or at least grounded. To be pushed out of it is to be marked with the scar of expulsion for the rest of your life. Even now, six decades after my family became refugees in the Gaza Strip, knowing that our family land will never be ours again, I still suffer from this loss. But I was never drawn in by the loss and nostalgia my grandfather expressed, or his outrage. I learned instead to direct my attention to studying and surviving. I knew there was a better way, and even as a kid I set out to find it.

Like most Palestinian children, I didn’t really have a childhood. Until I was ten, my family, which eventually numbered eleven (two parents, six boys—I was the eldest of them—and three girls), lived in one room that measured three metres by three metres. There was no electricity, no running water, no toilets in the house. It was dirty. There was no privacy. We ate our meals from a single plate we shared. We had to wait in line to use the communal toilets and wait for water that was delivered by the United Nations—we were only allowed to fill our pots during certain hours of the day. We waited for trolleys to come by with
kerosene or wood for us to buy to cook with. We were usually barefoot, flea-bitten and hungry.

We all slept together on a huge mattress that was hoisted up against the wall by day and lowered at night—except for the baby. There was always a newborn, it seemed, who slept in the same basin my mother used to wash the dishes, scrub the kids with a loofah and clean the house. When we were ready for bed, she’d wipe the dish bucket out and use it as a cradle for the baby to sleep in.

One night my brother Nasser was acting up, aggravating my mother. She reached out to slap him, but he got away from her and she leapt up to chase after him. He jumped into the dish bucket to escape her, landing on top of the baby. The baby, my sister, who was only a few weeks old, died. It’s hard even to imagine a baby dying like that. I was five years old at the time and don’t remember the exact sequence of events. My mother grabbed the baby; she was crying and screaming. Nasser escaped by running outside. I do remember that female babies were not valued; people saw it as a tragedy if a newborn wasn’t a boy. It was the way the culture was at that time. The little baby girl, called Noor, was buried in the cemetery the next day and we never spoke about the incident again. It’s the worst memory I have of growing up.

In an overcrowded refugee camp, people cling to hope by a thread that threatens to break at any moment.

I don’t really know how my father bore it—the conditions we lived in—given that he had lived the first part of his life on the family farm, where there was plenty of food, and just as much pride. My father was thirty-five years old when I was born. He was of average height but he was strong, and he always wore the national Palestinian clothes and wrapped his head in a keffiyeh. He was the second eldest in his family, a hard-working and successful farmer, but in the camp he had to search for odd jobs that
never paid enough to feed his first wife and two sons and all of us. I remember once he had a job as a guard at an orange grove. My mother would pack a lunch for him and give it to me to deliver. To me this task was of enormous importance, and I swelled with pride each time my mother handed me his food, honoured by the trust she had in me. But even at six I understood the angst he felt at being a provider who couldn’t barely sustain his family.

My mother was tall and pale-skinned, with a strong personality. Her courage and determination made her a great role model. Indeed she challenged everyone who came on her path. It was my mother who had the character and tenacity that helped us cope with the changed circumstances of our lives, the deficiency, the want and the incessant need. She’d fight for us, protect us and whenever it was possible she did not hesitate to take over the economic lead from my father. She raised goats and pigeons in our small space. She got milk from the goats and eggs from the pigeons, enough for our table and something left over to sell at the market to make money. I remember that after I started my education, she’d come to the school to ask my teachers how I was doing. I didn’t want her to come, would beg her not to embarrass me in front of my friends, who would all tease me, saying, “Your mama is here.” But it didn’t stop her. She wanted to know how I was doing, so she came to the school to ask.

I don’t dwell much on that time, but I do remember how painful it was, before I got to go to school, to sit on the stoop outside our house and watch other children walk past on their way to kindergarten, dressed in their handsome uniforms. A uniform was something my family couldn’t afford, so I couldn’t go no matter how eager I was to learn. Remember, there were people living in Gaza long before the refugees arrived. Their lives were vastly different from ours, and although they didn’t live in the camp, those children walked by our home every morning while I burned with
jealousy and told anyone who would listen that it was unfair that only some children got to go to school. But the majority of the people we knew were in the same situation, too busy with survival to worry about coming up with the money for school fees or uniforms so they could send their children to kindergarten.

At last, in 1961, when I was six, I was able to go to the United Nations school in the camp. But even at that school, which was staffed by Palestinian teachers, the prizes went to the kids who were deemed to be the best dressed. Old habits die hard: this school may have been run by an international body, but local rules held firm. The teachers called it the “cleanliness prize,” but we all knew it was for the kids with the nicest clothes. I was dressed in hand-me-downs that had been stitched and restitched so many times there were more mended threads in my trousers than original ones. I thought the awards should have been given to the students who got the highest marks. It would be several years before the system changed and students with academic prowess came to the attention of the teachers. That would be my salvation.

My first morning in the United Nations school, I was apprehensive for more reasons than just first-day jitters. My mother had found a pair of overalls for me to wear, an item of clothing I’d never seen before. Like almost all of our clothes, the overalls were hand-me-downs donated by other people, even from other countries. I was worried because I could not figure out how I would get the overalls off if I had to go to the bathroom. I got through the day all right, and once I got home that night I figured out how to get the overalls off and on again. But the memory has stuck with me to this day.

The overalls weren’t my only concern. It turned out the school was already overcrowded. On that first day, some of the students, me included, were told we’d be attending a school that was farther from my home. The other kids who had been picked
to move weren’t my neighbours or my brothers, and I didn’t want to go with them. But my parents weren’t there, so there was no one to speak up for me, to insist I should stay in the school near where we lived and attend classes with my friends. I had no choice but to move to the other school. (What I could not have known was that a teacher at the new school would become one of the most important mentors of my life. He treated me like a son. I learned from the experience that you shouldn’t hate something you don’t know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.)

That first year at school, I had a succession of three different teachers. One sat on a chair and passed out textbooks for us to read and another gave us music lessons, which I liked a lot. The third was a man who acted as though he’d discovered a student in me. He paid so much attention to me that by the end of the year he had thoroughly convinced me, a first grader, that I could learn anything I wanted to learn and become anything I wanted to become. He was an extraordinary man.

The school was crowded, we sat three to a desk with sixty kids in every class, but I could hardly wait to get there every morning. I loved being at school, enjoyed the challenge of learning new things, and when the teacher asked a question, my energy level shot up as I raised my hand to answer. New information was like a gift to me. This was the place where I found out what I could do.

By the age of seven, as the eldest boy, I was expected to help the family with money—earn a little here, a little there, to plug this hole or that hole. For example, the United Nations used to give each family a milk ration and it provided an identity card that we had to present to be punched each day when we collected the milk. But not everyone wanted the milk, and those unclaimed rations turned into an opportunity for me. My mother gathered
the cards of those who didn’t want the milk and then would wake me at three in the morning so I could be first in line at the distribution centre when it opened at six. I’d collect all the milk and then sell it for the highest price I could get to women who needed it to make yogurt, cheese and other goods they could sell in Gaza City. The buyers were always in a hurry to get their milk, make their product and get to the market in Gaza City, so a fast-moving, enthusiastic and enterprising boy could make quite a bit of money in the early morning and still be in time for school.

Everything I earned was always for the good of my family. So if I managed to acquire something of my own, I guarded it as if it were gold. The school provided each student with a notebook, pencils and an eraser, which felt like treasure—so much so that I kept all my belongings in a “school bag,” which was actually an old flour bag with a string threaded through the top. The eraser was somehow very special, maybe because it was so small or maybe because my mother had never seen one before. In any case, so I wouldn’t lose it, my mother put a hole in it and threaded it with a string so I could wear it around my neck. But I was a boy all the same: the eraser, precious as it was, became a toy I loved to take off my neck and swing through the air at the end of its string, higher and higher, watching it spin like a flying saucer. Then one day the string flew out of my fingers and disappeared into the crowd on the street. I was on my knees in a flash, searching everywhere, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t tell my mother that I’d lost the eraser—she would have thrashed me for sure—so I ran to the school, confessed to the teacher who’d given it to me, and tearfully told him I was sorry. He gave me another one, just like the original, and sternly reminded me to be careful. He didn’t have to worry, though: losing it had been devastating.

In my neighbourhood, we studied the Quran, learning it by heart so we could recite it in competitions. The first competition
I won was during the festival of Ramadan when I was ten years old. The prize was presented by the Egyptian governor of the Gaza Strip, Ahmed Alajroudi. When they called my name to go up to the stage to receive the prize from this dignitary, I put my hand out and couldn’t believe my good fortune when the governor handed me enough money to buy two weeks’ worth of food for the family. Here was this truly poor child, wearing clothes that were patched together from rags, standing on the stage at the Jabalia Camp mosque receiving two and a half Egyptian pounds (about one U.S. dollar). That was a fortune in those days, when a state employee earned eight pounds a month.

At about that time, my family was participating in a community fund. For a fee of fifty Egyptian piastres, or half an Egyptian pound, we’d get oil, butter, rice and soup at cost. My earnings from the Quran competition would pay the fee for a month. I remember standing in line to fetch the goods for my mother, but when I got to the front and reached into my pocket to pay for the groceries, I discovered to my horror that I didn’t have the money. Had it fallen through a hole in my pocket, which had been re-sewn so many times it wasn’t reliable for holding the coins? Had someone stolen the money? All I knew was that it was gone and my mother was going to be very angry. I went home, dreading to tell her what had happened.

I feared my mother as much as I loved her, and that day she beat me so much for losing the money I wondered if somehow she thought her blows would magically produce the fifty piastres out of my flesh. Afterwards she sent me back to the street to retrace my steps. I crawled about looking for the money under tables and behind stalls. I knew it wouldn’t be there, but I was scared to go home again without it. As a boy, I could only wonder why she was doing this to me. Now I understand the level of frustration that wells up when you don’t have enough to feed your kids, when life
deals you one mean blow after another, when you feel that no matter how hard you work or how devoted you are, your efforts are for naught. Desperation was the motivating force of her anger, and sometimes the only targets she could find were the people she was trying to protect.

There were times when I hated my life, hated the misery we lived with, the filth and the poverty and being wakened at three o’clock in the morning out of a dead sleep to go to work. I hated myself for having to live like this, for not being able to change our circumstances no matter how hard I tried. In my culture the responsibility carried by the eldest son is very heavy—I was responsible for my parents as well as my younger brothers and sisters. I felt as though I was always living for someone else, never for myself. I railed against so many injustices when I was growing up, but today I look back and am thankful for getting through it at all, thankful for the teachers who saw a brighter future for me. I was lucky that so many of my teachers reached out to help me. They are the ones who boosted my energy and gave me the self-confidence to carry on. It was the teachers rather than my parents who opened doors for me and let me know there was a future apart from the grinding poverty in which we lived.