Najwa Sheikh Ahmed, Nusierat Camp, Gaza Strip

The life of the Palestinian refugees over the last 60 years was very unique, and rich, rich of the amount of sufferings they have to endure, rich of their capability to live and to cope, and rich of the their willingness to survive and continue, to challenge all the circumstances around them. The dilemma of the Palestinian refugees was not only about loosing the homeland but also about loosing all the human rights that the free world is calling to adapt, loosing the security, the respect and the dignity.

My father represents the second generation of the refugees in Gaza, he was a hard worker, spent most of his life working in Israel, he was such a peevish father, but from the inside we all knew how much he loved us and wanted us to be the best in everything, his ambition stimulated him and gave him the strength to work even harder to fulfill it, until he managed to support his nine children high education. I still can remember how my father managed to save the money for my eldest brother’s study at the university in Cairo, and how he used to hide the money inside the shoes, I also still remember how he used to repair our shoes with his own hands, but what I mostly still remember the moment when my father slaps me on the face before he gave me the Arabic book he bought to me for school, I felt frozen, could not find an explanation until I heard his words, “I slapped you to remember how hard I worked to buy you this book, so you will never loose it, and you will know how expensive it was”.

With all these old memories, hard work and dire life, there was always a space, a window that is widely open to show us tomorrow, a better future. There was a hope that encourages my father as well as many fathers to work as much as they can to find a better life of their children. And this was the reason behind their struggle.

Since these memories, life in Gaza have changed, the Israelis continued their blockade to Gaza and its people, who become overwhelmed with feelings of exhaustion and depression, especially after the last war which exposed them mentally, and psychologically, leaving them unable to forget or even to live normally.

Days become similar, loosing interest in anything become a phenomena that affected not only the adults but also the children. There is no room anymore for dreams, for wishes, for an innocent smile, for a joy.

Our minds are tormented with the continuous worries and thoughts about what will happen tomorrow, another invasion, or another war, two different terms but similar with the consequences followed, more pain and more deaths.

However, with the frequent exposure of such traumatic experiences, left us drained, with a strange emptiness inside us. The death of one person equal the death of other hundred, death and life are equal in our minds, the line between both become so dim to us.

Our children stopped dreaming about what they would like to be in the future, because the future in Gaza is ambiguous, dark, and difficult to determine its lines, our future and the future of our kids will be the same, as far as Gaza is sealed, nothing will changed. What will happen in ten years is the same to what already happened during the last ten years.

The people of Gaza are locked and their lives will go according to the rules of Gaza, all the lines of these lives are drawn in advance. The same life in the same camp, with the same events and episodes, since there are not enough options for those who would like to join the universities in Gaza, and they can not travel outside Gaza to choose their future comes the result in a child mouth “What is the benefit from going to school if I can not study what I mostly like”

“How can I be open since I am living in Gaza and can not see other world, other horizons?”

“I don’t want to marry and to have children because I don’t want them to suffer the way we suffer in Gaza” another say

“I finished my study, and then I’ll have a job if I was lucky, and then I’ll got married, and then what, the same routine, nothing will change, then why to bother having a dream about the future” another comment

These are not empty words, to capture the readers’ attention but rather tell the horrible fact about how the future looks in the eyes of the Gaza people specially the young generation.

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