Contemplating Coffee In Gaza

June 1, 2008 - It became a torment to think of getting outside the house. The moment you do, you start smelling the stench of burnt cooking oil coming from cars. You feel that it sticks to your skin.

If you do leave the house, you look at your parked car, grab your kids' hands and start walking. And I am tired of walking! I do decide how to dress my kids and what to feed them. I can control that, but I cannot control the polluted air they breathe. And how do you think this makes me feel?

“It became chronic. You can beat an acute disease, but you cannot beat a chronic one," my brother, who is a physician, told me. The ceasefire just fell flat on its face and people function or malfunction within very hard circumstances.

I thought, we should have all stopped moving instead of moving on cooking oil. I just look left and right and I cannot see an exit. I see people suffering everyday, not only because of lack of fuel, but because of being imprisoned inside these giant invisible walls. I wish I could see the horizon line!

I liked it when Ghada Al Samman, one of my favorite writers, wrote that we should have some individual silence instead of chaos of the mob to think about how to save ourselves. I think we in Gaza should stop talking about crisis management and be silent for a minute to think about how to stop our problems from becoming chronic.

I questioned the whole idea of blogging over the weekend more than a hundred times in my head.