Despite the ugly reality of Gaza these days, I love its spring; I used to love it, and always give me a sign of hope that things would be better. Watching the trees blossoming in the spring time, smelling the nice perfumes it sends make me feel better, I loved walking in the streets where there were trees so I can watch the different kinds of blossoms, especially those of the orange, lemon, almond, and Jasmine trees were a treasure for me.

However, since the Israelis adopted the bulldozering policy where large agricultural areas were erased, I missed seeing the large spaces full of orange, lemon, and almonds trees that were the source of the nice smell and nice images, but there is always something left, that marks the spring time.

It is spring time in Gaza, but the spring of this year is different on the smells it brings to us, it is not the nice smell of the blossoming tress but the smell of the deep-fried fast food wafting from the cars exhausts. The creative people of the impoverished Gaza are mixing gasoline with cooking oil to maintain their cars driving longer distances, and to over come the fuel crisis, a creativity that replaces every nice smell with ugly, disgusting, stifling smell.

Car drivers defeated the siege with using cooking oil instead of petrol, ignoring the choky smell that the user of the car, children, women, old men, and sick people have to inhale it, no matter what are the results of such an action. It is funny that people call it creativity, and still praising it.

The petrol stations in Gaza closed and replaced with the supermarkets, where you can find lots of cartons of soya bean cooking oil pilled in front of these supermarkets, in the streets, and at the main taxi station of Gaza city “Saha”.

While the drivers in Gaza found using the cooking oil as an alternative to the high cost of petrol, and as a solution to the fuel crisis, researchers and doctors started to warn from the mass use of this material explaining its real threat on both the environment and the public health.

In this context doctors say that the combination between the cooking oil and the fuel result exhausts containing substances that cause cancer for the inhalants, Gaza people are vulnerable to very serious diseases because of the smells emitted from the burning of the cooking oil, and the effect of such creativity will appear in the long term.

The life of the Gaza people endangered since ages, the weaponry used against us by the Israelis, the sanctions imposed by the Israeli government, the creativity of my people, all are factors proved that the people of Gaza are created for testing and not for living as humans.

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May 14, 2008 By Najwa Sheikh, in Gaza