There’s a look I’ve come to recognise – the best way a toddler’s eyes widen once they see me, sporting a press vest and holding the microphone. It isn’t curiosity. It’s hope. A fragile, determined hope that possibly I carry solutions I shouldn’t have.
“When will this finish?” a boy as soon as requested me, tugging at my sleeve as I filmed close to his shelter. He couldn’t have been older than 5, his ft naked and caked with mud.
His mates gathered round him, watching me as if I held some secret key to the longer term. “When can we go house?”
I didn’t know what to say. I by no means do. As a result of, like them, I’m displaced. Like them, I have no idea when or if this struggle will ever finish. However of their eyes, I’m somebody who would possibly know. Somebody who, by merely being there with a digicam, may change one thing.
And they also cling to me. They comply with me via rubble and throughout damaged streets, asking questions I can not reply. Typically, they don’t say something in any respect. They only stroll alongside me, quietly, as if my presence alone is sufficient to fill the silence that struggle has left behind.
I can not depend what number of instances a mom has pulled me apart after an interview, held my hand tightly and whispered, “Please … are you able to assist us?” Their voices tremble not with anger, however exhaustion – the type of exhaustion that sinks into your bones and by no means leaves.
They don’t ask for a lot. A number of extra blankets. Cleaning soap. Medication for his or her youngsters. And I stand there, my digicam nonetheless rolling, nodding, attempting to clarify that I’m right here to inform their tales, to not ship support. However what’s a narrative to a brand new mom who doesn’t actually have a mattress to sleep on, not to mention to her new child?
I relive these moments each time I sit down to jot down. They replay in my thoughts like echoes – each face, each voice. And with every phrase I placed on the web page, I ponder if it’s going to make a distinction. I ponder if the individuals who learn my phrases, who watch my studies, will perceive that beneath the politics and the headlines, there may be this: a girl washing her toddler’s garments in sewage water, a boy choosing via garbage to seek out one thing to promote, a woman lacking faculty as a result of she can not afford sanitary pads.
I don’t cowl politics. I don’t must. The struggle speaks for itself within the smallest of particulars.
It’s within the tangle of ft beneath tents, the place households share areas too small to breathe. It’s in the best way youngsters cough at night time, their chests heavy from the damp and the chilly. It’s within the sight of fathers standing by the ocean, staring out as if the waves would possibly carry away their burdens.
There’s a type of grief right here that doesn’t scream. It lingers, comfortable and protracted, in each nook of life.
Sooner or later, whereas reporting close to a uncared for group of tents, a woman handed me a drawing she had made on the again of an outdated cereal field. It was easy – flowers and birds – however within the center, she had drawn a home, complete and untouched. “That is my home,” she instructed me. “Earlier than.”
Earlier than.
That phrase carries a lot weight in Gaza. Earlier than the air strikes. Earlier than the displacement. Earlier than struggle stripped away the whole lot however survival.
I write these tales not as a result of I consider they’ll finish the struggle, however as a result of they’re proof that we existed. That even within the face of the whole lot, we held on to one thing. Dignity. Resilience. Hope.
There’s a scene I return to typically. A lady standing on the entrance of her shelter, brushing her daughter’s hair along with her fingers as a result of she can not afford a comb. She hums softly a lullaby that drowns out the horrific sound of shut air strikes and distant shelling. Her daughter leans into her, eyes half-closed, secure for only a second.
I have no idea what peace seems to be like, however I believe it would really feel like that.
That is the Gaza I do know. That is the Gaza I write about. And regardless of what number of instances I inform these tales, I’ll hold telling them, as a result of they matter. As a result of, at some point, I hope that when a toddler asks me when the struggle will finish, I can lastly give them the reply they’ve been ready for.
Till then, I carry their voices with me, and I’ll be sure the world hears them.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
