Sisterhood is still powerful
The Al Bureij refugee camp is located in the
Middle Governate of Gaza on the eastern side of the main north/south road,
Salah-ed-deen, which used to run from Khan Yunis to Erez check point, with Al
Nuseirat camp on the western side. I am on my way to visit with Al Zahraa
Society for Woman and Child Development which is located in Al Bureij. In the
last few years, three women’s organizations spun off from the Gaza Community
Mental Health program: Aisha, (which is the name of one of the Prophet
Mohammad’s wives), in the center to north of the Strip, Al Zahraa (which means
flower) in the middle, and Rafah Wefaq (which means accord) in the south. There
were a number of painful organizational issues, but financing has been a major
challenge. They got funds previously from PGS/Sweden and the Global Fund for
Women.
Another delegate and I meet with the administrative leadership of Al
Zahraa and then I meet with a group of women who are receiving psychosocial
support, crafts and vocational training. We sit in a small office,
sipping Arabic coffee, and talking over the loud din of voices in the central
areas of the building where women are working and talking energetically.
Although I have permission to write this essay, because I am reporting on
personal, sensitive issues I am not using the women’s names and I have blended
their stories to protect their privacy.
The main role of Al Zahraa is to support women from violence: physical,
sexual, cultural, etc., to provide empowerment, awareness, and consultation,
individual and group psychosocial support and links to organizations in society
for further support and intervention.
If a woman suffers from a psychological disorder, she may receive
treatment with organizations like the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP)
or the Palestinian Center for Dispute and Conflict Resolution. Some
vulnerable women get vocational training (like hairdressing) so they can get a
job; there are negotiations with families to allow this, there is coordination
with education ministries and universities for women to go to school.
The programs from this tiny agency are impressive. Female high school
students are offered sessions on gender awareness and sexual education,
hospital staff are trained to be sensitive to gender based violence and
diagnosis; starting with the basic principles: Ask the woman who committed
the violence against her and offer her personal and legal supports,
consultation and referrals. The women have worked on changing
discriminatory laws around the custody of children where women tend to lose
that battle. They have worked on the issue of honor killings. I am
told that men receive a reduced sentence in prison but if a
woman is guilty of a sexual transgression, she is killed, often by her male
relatives. Women are disadvantaged both culturally and politically. They
hold only 20% of political positions and are not in positions of power in the
government or the political parties.
During the 2014 assault, the refugee camp, Al Bureij, which is on the
border with Israel, was evacuated after shooting started, the most vulnerable
as usual were people living in marginalized areas on the borders. Al Zahraa
coordinates with other organizations to offer humanitarian and financial
support for displaced people who are in UNRWA shelters. They also coordinate
with Islamic Relief in coordination with civil society committees. (We
are offered small cups of coffee, juice and each of us given an embroidered
purse as we talk. The feeding and the giving are so central to this culture,
even when the needs of the givers are so great.)
While working as a women’s department under the umbrella of GCMHP, the
staff realized that women were very focused on their children so the work was
expanded to include women and children development, psychosocial support,
working with Mercy Corp which is a large organization that partners with
USAID. I learn that a number of organizations refuse USAID support
because they have to sign an agreement that they are against “terrorism” but
they know that the definition of “terrorism” includes militant Palestinians but
not Israeli aggressors and human rights violators.
I am very curious about the power dynamics and cultural norms of
marriage in this society. I am told that there are legal rights for
married women but it gets complicated quickly. A married woman is given a
dowry by her husband which is supposed to function as a kind of insurance
policy for the woman if the marriage goes bad. In real life, an unscrupulous
husband sometimes takes the dowry money and leaves the woman with nothing, or a
woman technically inherits money from her family but the family finds ways to
deprive her of this right, that moment where culture, sexism, and economics
clashes with law. Somewhat like the US when an abused woman goes to the police
and often finds herself in even greater danger, if a Palestinian women goes to
the police, she is at risk for punishment by her family, including divorce, and
police mainly considers the cultural dimensions and often advise her to go to
the Mukhtar, the head of the family or clan. Some Mukhtars are fair to
women, others not. There are, needless to say, no “Mukhtaras”. There are also
male religious mediator/committees. I learn from the psychiatrist I am with
that in the US there is project empowering women to be Mukhtars and some are
actually functioning that way. Check out facebook: Faten Harb who lives in Gaza
in the middle area for the Gazan version.
But what is it like really for women here? One spunky woman
recounts her bachelor’s degree and two graduate degrees including study abroad,
(plus she had passed the old age of 30), the indirect financial pressure she
felt to marry someone she now realizes is unsuitable, and yet despite her
professional job and tremendous accomplishments, she is still unable to decide
where her children go to school because her husband has the final word in the
family. She knows other women who were more directly forced to marry and after
the honking cars, and huge plastic floral arrangements and nuptial feast for a
ridiculously large number of relatives, there is immediately huge pressure to
have children, preferably of the male variety.
Another woman whose husband is unemployed, (big problem in Gaza due to
death of much of the functional economy), explains that if you are the only one
earning a living, that actually gives you power in the marriage, although it
may not give you happiness. Husbands often pressure their wives to stop working
or feel stigmatized and shamed if the male in the family is unable to find employment
or suffering from PTSD from war trauma or torture in prisons.
I ask, “Can a woman be raped in marriage?” and receive the quick reply,
“Yes. According to religion you cannot say
no. The problem is that people misinterpret religion, but religion also says
be gentle with the woman,” so people read the Quran and Hadiths selectively
(note: as in all known religions). Women also get that
you-have-got-to-be-available message and thus fear that if they do not have
relations on demand with their husbands, they will find a second wife who is
more cooperative.
I push a little further and learn that incest and rape do happen (like
in all other societies) but because the culture is conservative and religious
it is actually rare. With the tightening of the noose around Gaza, the
increasing unemployment and humiliation of the male population, women (as
usual) bear the brunt of male rage. Not surprisingly, honor killings in
the West Bank and Gaza are up: eight in 2011,
twelve in 2012, 28 in 2013. I have also heard that honor killings are often reported
as suicides or accidents so I suspect these numbers are artificially low.
Bureij Camp had the highest number of honor killings after the takeover of
Hamas and in one particularly gruesome tragic story, a man in the camp cut off
his daughter’s head and took it to the police station when she was accused of
having sex with a man. It is also possible that some people may kill their
daughters to prevent them from claiming their inheritance and UNDP has set up
legal aid for women, opening the door for women for legal consultation and
representation, and creating a massive awareness campaign.
In a less egregious example, one women shares the story of her brother’s
wife who owned land in northern Gaza (here I am thinking that this land has
probably already been claimed as a shoot-to-kill buffer zone by the IDF so
there are so many ways this woman can get screwed). Through legal
manipulations, she was forced to sign over almost all of the land to her
brother with the caveat that when she is ready to sell her portion she has to
sell it to said brother at below market rate.
And then I have heard all of these wicked witch of the west type stories
about mothers-in-law and new wives coming to live with their husbands’ families
and being emotionally tortured. (Oh but we have those in the US as well, just
pointing that out.) I am told that this was more of a problem in the past but
now a majority of men get married and live in an external apartment and get
away from the nuclear family. In the emotional and cultural world, however, one
woman confides, “there is conflict forever between the wife and
mother-in-law. If a woman is working and will not pay the mother-in-law,
then the grandmother won’t take care of children, or if there is a large
extended family and a flock of daughters-in-law, there is discrimination
between them and this creates conflict, always there is conflict.” Another
woman reflects on a horrific case where a mother-in-law and her daughters
killed her daughter-in-law in Khan Yunis. I am reassured that this is
really rare.
I have noticed that there are very dark Palestinians in Gaza, (also
Jerusalem and Jericho) and I wonder how racism fits into the culture
scheme. I learn that there is a term “slave Palestinian” referring to
people who came from places like Sudan to work in the region and they have
faced many decades of the usual varieties of racism. Apparently someone
asked a white male administrator about racism and he denied this problem
exists, (another I am not a racist type?). I was told, “If you want to know
about discrimination, ask a black person.” They are teased in school because of
their hair, children sometimes throw stones at them, lighter skinned Arabs
don’t interfere with cases of harassment by children. Although this is contrary
to Islamic religion, white families shun black families, white families will
refuse to attend the wedding of their son or daughter marrying a black
Palestinian. In another quirk, Palestinian men who get educated abroad,
sometimes bring home their lovely white Romanian/Russian/name your country
wife, which then reduces the pool of available white men so more white women
are marrying Black Palestinian men leaving the Black women once again at the
bottom of the selection pool.
Even today one woman reported on the difficulties her child is having in
school where she is in a high quality school that is almost all “white.” 99% of
black Gazans are poor, they very rarely get well educated, they rarely get
employment. They cannot afford to go to privileged or superior schools, teachers
discriminate against these students who often drop out. The majority who
stay in school are girls, they often work as cleaning women for well off Gazans
to pay for their educations. They are more motivated to go to school but
rarely can afford attending the higher level universities and struggle to find
good jobs.
I also learn of families that are suffering from the toll of domestic
violence, fathers, (who are often unemployed, depressed, humiliated,
traumatized by war and prison and all of the things that stimulate male rage
but do not excuse it) beating their wives and children. Wives are trapped in
conservative families, afraid to report their husbands to the police, entire
families desperately in need of a thousand interventions.
I am feeling a bit run over by now, and it is time to change rooms and
meet with a group of 30 women who want to talk about…. Well I am a
gynecologist, the niqabs are flipped up, women are obviously yearning
for knowledge and thrilled that this doctor lady has just dropped in (along
with a copy of Our Body Ourselves in Arabic). We launch into an
utterly frank conversation about everything anyone wants to know about the
female body. So we talk shamelessly without embarrassment about vaginas
and yeast, ovaries, sex, birth control, over active bladders, back pain, how to
make a male baby, menses; for me a totally fun sharing of questions and
information, woman to woman, just the way I like to do medicine and these women
are just like women everywhere in my experience.
I also am invited into the crafts room to admire the embroidery and
other crafts, and soon I am handing over my shekels to become the happy owner
of a very unusual shawl with lovely sandy brown to orange embroidery with bits
of sparkle. Everyone is beaming and laughing. We are all sharing our
expertise, celebrating our connections, and our powerful sisterhood.
When I first entered the center I noticed that there was a (training)
hair salon and I mention I would be honored to pay a visit to the salon.
The woman who clearly knows what she is doing, takes my hand and soon I am
sitting in a chair with a cluster of women all offering advice, showing me
wedding photos of them without their hijabs, hair movie star coiffed,
and I am wondering, what have I gotten myself into? (For those of you who do
not know me, my husband trims my hair every few months and that is the full
extent of my salon experience.) It seems the technique here is to clip up
bunches of hair in little balls, take a hot dryer and take each ball and pull
and dry it until every hair is very straight. There is general admiration
and a most universal conversation with the dark skinned woman who bemoans her
African hair, the irritations from hair relaxers, the cost of extensions and
braids. Where am I? I suggest that maybe she could just learn to
love her hair?
I am informed that I really need to take care of my split ends! The
beauty transformation is met with major appreciation and then one women
suggests I really should do something about my unfashionable bushy eyebrows and
faint mustache. I am not about to go that route (I do stay true to my
flower child roots) and suggest, how about make up? Soon my fashionistas are
consulting about what color powder, creams, eye shadow and who knows what else
are needed to complete my make over. I go for the full effect eyeliner,
lashes, kohl. This is all met with that kind of connectedness and
pleasure in the simple joys of sharing and laughter that makes sisterhood so
powerful.
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Alice after hair and make up at the salon at Al Zahraa
Society for Woman and Child Development
|
A roller coaster day: I take my new face and light heart with two women
to make a home visit at the camp to see a woman who lost her husband in the
2014 assault. We walk into a moderately bare apartment she is renting, I
sit on one of the mattresses along the wall; there is a poster of her husband,
green head band, Kalashnikov ready. She is 40 years old, has five
daughters, two sons, three miscarriages and is still recovering from a
C-section. We joke, she says she was once beautiful and even when married, men
were interested in her. A young teenage girl brings in glasses of Coke, a
dumpling of a baby in yellow flannel squawks to be nursed.
When I ask her would she feel comfortable talking about what happened,
the mood changes dramatically. The tears are flowing as her voice becomes very
soft and whispery, she seems disconnected, I wonder if she is having a
flashback. She says she tried to watch a video of her husband and felt
suffocated. Her grief is fresh and powerful. She also has seven children and no
means of support.
“I was very close to him, when I feel worried he always assured me he will
be okay. He was my cousin, very close, very worried. I don’t sleep
until he comes home.” When he died she was unconscious for four days in shock,
her face contorts in pain. “Although I know he went to paradise, I miss him all
the time, sometimes I talk to his picture.” She does not want me to take a
photo of his poster because she is not ready to share him.
They were married when she was 18, he was 27, he was a farmer living on
the eastern border of the Gaza Strip in Johr El Deek. When the shooting
started, they were forced to leave their home. “Though I left the border area
to be more safe, I was saying I will return back to my home. I was insisting to
go home. One day he said, ‘Let’s go.’ He went up on the roof to sleep as
it was hot…. After a while he came down. I was about to pray,” and she
saw him floating down the stairs, “flying, his beard turned white, his wrinkles
disappeared, his brown teeth turned white. I cannot understand what I saw. He
came down, we sit with each with other, it was Ramadan.” She is speaking very
softly. She made him and her kids breakfast and did not share it with them,
just sat in front of the home; he came to her wondering why she did not want to
eat and asked if she wants him to bring the food outside for her, she refused
and accepted only a glass of water. Her face is almost trancelike. “After he
finished, he went out. I said stay. He told me he will hurry. ‘Don’t
be late.’ He hesitated twice and said, ‘I will not be late.’”
The electricity was out “as usual. Suddenly I heard a loud voice
and saw a big flash of light, I found myself beating my head. The missile
went directly to her husband’s head. The accident was eight meters from home.”
At the beginning they told her that he was injured, she mentioned that one day
before the accident he was nervous, talking about death.
“He was targeted by an Israeli airplane and the plane called the
ambulance and told them not to rescue him or to pick up the body.”
It took them a day to find his missing arm. As soon as he was shot relatives
called and she wanted to evacuate him. “I will carry him to the hospital
even if I’m pregnant I could pull him.” A relative said no and she felt he was
dead.
Her home was demolished 20 days later.
“I cannot describe, the children could not stop crying. I told
them he went to paradise. He was everything for us. They carried me to say
goodbye to him, I was shivering. They were in a hurry to bring him to the
cemetery because shooting all the time, it was very fast. They took me to
the hospital and then took me to my family home.” She was then told to evacuate
that home and she came to Bureij Camp and some cousins. There was another
shooting and she fled to Deir Balah area.
She reports that during the war, the IDF called people in Bureij on
mobiles and told them to leave to Deir Balah. She heard a loud speaker warning
and a direct call to her son. When told to evacuate, he retorted “Why? I
don’t want civilians to be affected! Really were you worried about all the thousands
of civilians that you have killed. Do whatever you want.”
During the war she remembers planes flew over Gaza and dropped leaflets
with the names of kill targets. After her husband died lots of leaflets included
the names of those already killed, including his.
She is now renting in Bureij Camp. UNRWA paid the first payment, she paid
the second. She doesn’t know how she will pay this month. All she has are
her children. She hears rumors that the government will build housing units.
She does not know how to negotiate with her landlord, “the owner is
shy.” We leave her breastfeeding her baby. What can we say?
So If You Killed My Child, You Think You Are Strong?
One of the greatest casualties of the ongoing war on Gaza is
childhood. The Gaza Community Mental Health Program Deir al Balah Community
Center has an extraordinary exhibit of post-war children’s drawings that gives us
a window into the loss of the sense of order and safety that comes when one of
our smart bombs lands in your bedroom.
The drawings
are breathtakingly painful and simple in their honesty, a child’s view of a
world gone horribly wrong:
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The delegates stare, take photos and are pulled into each
drawing; some of us are weeping, some of us just floating in a sea of societal
trauma.
Children chained together in front of a soldier with a whip,
families lined up in front of a tank, bombers shooting birds out of the sky,
pools of blood, lots of blood, bloody circles on people’s chests, over and over
again, fallen trees, smiling men in kaffiyas waving the Palestinian flag, a
dove holding a circle of wounded people facing a missile, apache helicopters dropping
bombs, walls crumbling and crumbling, neatly drawn piles of rubble, fires,
ambulances, more dead people, doves the color of the flag dripping with blood,
lots of blood, naval boats bombing from the sea, tanks, planes, and soldiers
with prominent stars of David, curled barbed wire, missiles landing on
vegetable trucks, more tanks and planes and fire and people lying on the ground
bleeding, four boys on a beach flying kites with bombs falling on their heads,
a heart with the word Gaza written across it in black, white, green and red, split
in half, pierced by two missiles bearing the Star of David.
Not only am I appalled by what these children have
witnessed, but I am sickened (once again) that in this world, the Star of David
is synonymous with military violence, grief, and death.
Dr. Amal Bashir the only female psychiatrist in Gaza,
explains to us that the children are six to 14 years of age and were involved
in art therapy workshops to address their posttraumatic stress disorders after
the war. She reminds us that behind every picture is a story and she is filled
with these stories. Most of the children lived along the border towns. One of
their fathers picked up a stranger looking for a ride and both were killed, he
has two daughters and is also related to Amal.
The targeted assassination hit the wrong guy. One of the children wrote
on his/her drawing: “So if you killed my child, you think you are strong?”
Another: “I want to live in peace.” She admits, “I cried a lot during their
therapy.” Another family, the grandmother was killed, the family was running in
the street to the UNRWA school, rockets and bombs flying, a sister and a
chicken were killed in front of the child and (s)he did not respond. “They get
used to the situation. A six year old
witnessed three wars, this is normal. They get strength.”
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She has treated 34 children and 24 are cured of their
symptoms. She has a collection of 300
pictures and we sit with her piles of paper. She tells us of Mohammed, an angry
11 year old, aggressive gun play, doing poorly in school. He drew a child in bed, black shirt, jeans,
blood on his chest. He told her, “’This
is Ahmad [his friend]. I saw him on TV
he was killed.’ Now he is cured, at the last session he was playing with toys”
and doing well at school. “The stories are overwhelming. They taught me how to be strong.” A very gentle soul, Amal started as a general
practitioner but was drawn to psychiatry, trained at GCMHP and feels that she
is called to work with children on these challenging issues. She meditates to
reduce stress and feels that “in Gaza there are a lot of opportunities to
support people….I let go of hate. I have so much love. I love Moses. I love Jewish.”
Our next stop is at the extraordinary Atfaluna Society for
Deaf Children, a Palestinian NGO for Deaf Children in Gaza City working in the
field of deaf education, vocational and community training since 1992. Atfaluna is Arabic for “our children” and the
center focuses on academic education for deaf students who were traditionally
hidden away by their families and treated as mentally defective, and the
building of human and vocational skills to prepare students for productive and
independent lives. They are famous for
their gorgeous embroidery and furniture making program and we thoroughly
investigate their craft store and make our contribution to the Palestinian
economy and the school. They report a
dramatic increase in hearing loss in babies born since the last war. A
scientific study needs to be done, urgently I might say.
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The NAWA for Culture and Arts Association is a phenomenal
children’s art and culture program led by Reema Abu Jabir, a visionary force of
nature. She is the kind of person that makes me actually want to be a child in
Gaza! Started after the 2014 war, Reema created a center to support and empower
young Palestinians using traditional culture and arts, directed towards
families in the Deir El Balah area. They
provide psycho-social support, early childhood education, professional
development for educators, and preservation of Palestinian culture. As we
enter, there is an immediate sense of calm; they chose the wall colors “to
mimic a mother’s tummy” and each room is bordered in a traditional red pattern
evoking palm trees. We visit the children’s library (there are no electronic or
internet connections for the children per Reema), look at drawings and poetry
and sayings: The famous political cartoon character, Handala, “bitter
fruit,” with his back to the world,
Darwish and other poets, “You can’t find
the sun in a closed room.” At the end of
the morning and evening shifts, the children gather in a closing circle,
chanting phrases like: “There is no sun under the sun except the light of our
hearts.” “We need little things in life and if we are happy we will be kings.”
“You and me, he and she, we will all be different. There is a difference
between him and her though our lives are beautiful like flowers.” The children
do increasingly complex rhythmic movements to the chanting and singing,
engaging their minds, hearts and bodies fully. (I cannot resist pointing out
how monumentally inaccurate it is to say that Palestinians teach their children
to hate…just want this on the record.)
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Reema explains that the children participate in much of the
building with recycled wood, there is a lively art room, a family pays 10
shekels a year. Reema believes in
setting clear rules (these are children whose lives have turned upside down)
and providing a clean, safe space, and at the same time, this center is a home;
she is addressed as Auntie. The center
is open for all citizens, not just refugees.
We wonder how she keeps her focus and her strength, so much has been accomplished
in such a short time. She admits that
she does get depressed and angry, fights with her friends, shouting and then
apologizing the next day. She goes to
the sea to relax.
Reema’s next dream involves turning a 1700 year old
monastery with a mosque downstairs in Deir Balah into a garden and children’s
library. We drive to the ruin which is
in a very poor area and she is obviously animated and planning for the future.
The children have cleaned the ancient stones and arches, the Ministry of Tourism
has signed an agreement, money for restoration is being collected, and she is
in contact with UNESCO for the restoration. The major difficulty is the lack of
cement in Gaza which made donors a bit hesitant. Reema says defiantly, “I am stubborn like a
donkey, this is from my father’s side.” The
monastery is a mosque and a monastery and thus a reflection of the message of
tolerance at the arts center. Reema complains that UNESCO asked her to get the
building materials for the restoration. “Don’t ask me to get cement for Gaza!”
And you just know that she will make this incredible project happen.
We chat with the cab driver on our way back to the guest
house. He says, “Welcome to Gaza! Take
me in your suitcase to America!”
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