My work in Palestine

too many airports

Is there a point when you see too much to make anything really stand out?

In the past month, I have been to 15 countries and stayed and met people from all walks of life.

It has been exceptionally interesting, yet also schizoprehenic.

I signed up for, much like I have signed up for a job and lifestyle that involves foreign travel and residence for the long-term.

I sat in my room this morning, in a bed and breakfast in Reykajvik, and I looked out the window (it was pouring rain exceptionally hard) and I cried.

I don’t really know why.

Something just didn’t feel right.

I was alone. But that was nothing new.

Was this what a modern woman does?

Is it healthy for someone to travel into peoples’ lives, across the world from her own, and meet them and make them like her, and learn about their lives and worlds, and then leave?

With no real control or agency to promise any material assistance or support.

Is that normal?

I ask myself, what am I waiting for?

This summer I went to a photo exhibit on Srebrenica in Sarajevo, a Holocaust museum in the old Jewish quarter in Krakow and little gallery in Bethlehem. In all three, Edmund Burke was quoted;

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”

any place, any time, any language, this is confrontationally true.

This is to say, I suppose you leave any place where conflict and discrimination are daily practice feeling inadequate and potentially harmful.

While I’ve spent most of the past four months in the West Bank, I recently had a chance to go to the Gaza Strip. I wanted to go because I thought it would be more ‘black and white’. Life and death. Not as much political posturing bullshit.

You hear, if you follow media from the U.S. or Canada, that Gaza is a hot-bed of terrorism, and the poor civilians who find themselves locked there live in misery, poverty and destitution.

But it wasn’t like that.

It was actually awesome.

I should I guess preface that with letting you know that I like mid-sized, semi-rural cities, where people use donkeys and fruit stands outnumber ATMs.

Gaza is a complex place. Life is not easy. Living there requires defiance, hope and perseverance. We can’t say life is unequivocally better in one place or another. Obviously there are standards, limits and markers. Basic rights we all need to live full lives and realize our potential.

But I could not help but feel that in this discourse of indicators (economic, medical or otherwise) we lose the ability to talk about certain intangible things that make life in Gaza what it is.

This posting comes at the end of an amazing and confounding journey. I don’t want my reflections and writings to end once I return to Toronto.

My learning certainly will not.

I suppose the implications of this for those of us working in the global health field are that we are in great need of being grounded, whether that is in our spiritual faith, personal relationships, or physical retreat. Places like Gaza can easily become buzzwords for all things dangerous and exciting, if we are only able to see them from afar and scurry away to write about them for our colleagues.