Najwa Sheikh Ahmed

The place where you live and the circumstances surround your daily life force you sometimes to endure great pain that overwhelmed you squash your heart, conquer your mind, and swallow your soul you to the darkest sides in your life. With such feelings, and state of mind you will be standing helplessly, paralyzed, unable to do any thing, or to make any kind of reaction, expect of a voiceless scream that even increases your pain, and leaving you in a great loss of time, place, and even your own humanity.

The promises you keep for the future encourages you and provides you with the eagerness to continue hoping for a better life, for a better future, but when you realize that you become a prisoner of the place where you live, deprived from all the feelings and sensations that defined as a human being, then all your promises will be vanished so easily, like the wind, unable to catch or to keep any.

Being in Gaza, stranded and exposed to the many fast changes occurred in my society since the crushing blockade was imposed, under the heavy burden of this offensive blockade, and the haughtiness of Israel, the life of the Gazan people have changed a lot, the life quality has been affected so much, in all aspects, from the simple needs such as food, cloth, shoes, to the basic needs such as medications, building materials, and anything that can come to one’s mind.

One’s can not imagine how painful it is to realize that 60 years of resistance, of pride, and of honor have gone so easily and simply when we stand a brother for a brother. One’s can not imagine how disgusting it is to read the flow of exchanged accusations, arresting people, between Palestinians divided between Gaza and the west bank as if our cause was shrink, and summarized to include only Gaza and the west bank. This is the great pain, the pain of all pains that squeezes your heart so hard to the extent that you can not breathe anymore.

Since we became divided in ourselves, on our roads, and inn our aims, we only harvest pain, and the bitterness. A bitterness that is greatly felt by the ordinary people who wanted to live a normal life, who fight for their children and who pay the cost of such conflict of interest. The loss of those people is greater than others.

Our internal fighting along with the inhuman blockade proudly bring daily tidings about those who lost their lives because they had their own believes and they pay their lives for it no matter if it is right or wrong, to those who were denied access to travel and to receive treatment outside Gaza, to the news of the increasing number of young people dying under the rubble of a crackdown tunnel for 20 shekles only, to the dangerous accidents happened by the increasing number of adults and young men driving a motorcycle in the streets of Gaza, and doing some dangers movements to have some fun. And at the end our lives in Gaza become a toll of daily losses.

Parents and bread winners indulged in a feverish race of how to survive the moment, and of how to continue in such deteriorating circumstances, where poverty, insecurity and the increasing number of people in need became a common characteristic in Gaza.

The fearful fact which is most shocking, that the young generation in Gaza become untouchable, with a great desire to risk, even if this risk cost them their lives, with no fears or regret. Facing death in many occasions create a special kind of invulnerability, where in a crackdown tunnel young chaps of about 20 years old and may be younger can risk their lives and crewel inside it, facing suffocating, burning, and witness the death of other laborers in many cases reported by the media, but this would not stop them from continuing their work. I wonder is it the need for money or is it the meaningless of life that leads someone to do so or may be it is the state of loss that overwhelmed all of us in Gaza, and turned us to an aimless nation!.

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Najwa Sheikh Ahmed, Nusierat Camp, Gaza Strip. Najwa Sheikh's blog: http://www.najwa.tk/