It was eye-openning

Heba, Contemplating from Gaza, 22.11.07. I was part of a video conference meeting through which a group of women from Gaza met a group of women from the West Bank. Both groups talked about their daily problems and work challenges. And it just hit us, as Gazan women, that we are completely in the dark when it comes to West Bankers. They have to wait hours on checkpoints to go to schools or to go to hospitals and we thought that it is only us in Gaza who suffer. The problems get maximized when they live in a city and have to work in another passing several checkpoints a day to get to work and get back home. Added to that; all the economic problems, that might be less severe than Gaza, but are still visible and in need for structured intervention.

Isn’t this bizarre and to a certain extent appalling that we are so self-consumed in Gaza problems, which are now numberless, that we dismissed the idea that the West Bankers have problems of their own. Thinking about isolation and seclusion, permits, different weights of factional power, different borders, and absolutely different governments, it makes it pretty expected to grow apart. I think we are united at heart though and doesn’t that count? Does unity have to be associated with freedom of movement (pardon my apparently semi sarcastic semi confused discourse). We, as Palestinians, have the same plight, went through the same journey, know the same songs and surly have the same dreams still. Yet, I hope that this division will not yield in having two end goals. I would like to take my girls there, you know, and tell them all about their country. My daughter thinks her country’s name is Gaza!!!

Our participants from Gaza talked about their struggle to cope with a falling environment. I listened to the whole thing thinking that God blessed us with this ability to share our negative experiences to know that we are not alone in this world. This strength of women and this magnificent ability to keep trying to fix things up and change their reality for the better is so admirable. A woman said “I want to get literate and attend literacy classes to be able to read my son detainee’s letters from jail “. How amazing is that!