Meet Me in Gaza

by Louisa B. Waugh

  I’ve been sitting with Abu Nidal for a couple of hours now. Suddenly I need the bathroom. He points me in the general direction and I wander along the hallway, trying to find it. But this a big house with a lot of rooms. I come upon another, smaller, lounge, where a woman is lying on a couch, her eyes closed, breathing steadily. She must be Abu Nidal’s wife. I turn to leave her in peace, but she senses my presence in the doorway, gives a little shudder and springs upright, her eyes startled open.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want to wake you – I’m just looking for the bathroom.’

  ‘You are the writer who has come to talk with my husband?’

  ‘Yes, he’s been telling me about the train …’

  ‘Ahhhh, that train … did he tell you that I took it too, a long time ago?’

  ‘I thought maybe you had taken it together.’

  ‘Oh no! I took the train to Cairo alone. In 1959.’

  ‘Really? What were you doing in Egypt?’

  ‘I was studying English at Alexandria University. Afterwards I completed my teacher training. At first I was an English teacher here in Gaza, then a headmistress for many years. But I’m afraid that, after all this time, I have forgotten my command of English somewhat.’

  Her unhurried English is fluid and fluent. I haven’t heard anyone say ‘somewhat’ for years. She pats the couch. I perch on the arm.

  ‘What was it like, going to Cairo on the train?’

  Her small dark eyes light up as though suddenly switched on full beam.

  ‘It was really wonderful! In those days if you wanted, or indeed needed, to travel to Cairo, you just packed a small bag, walked to the station, bought your ticket and left. Even after my studies, when I was back home in Gaza, I would just say to my family, “let’s go to Cairo tomorrow” … and we could! Can you imagine?’

  The Haifa–Cairo railway survived the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Israel reoccupied Gaza and used the train line for almost another decade, to transport military goods and personnel to the Sinai, and Gazan labourers to work in Haifa and Tel Aviv. But the tracks suffered chronic neglect and were gradually abandoned. By the mid-1970s the railway line was a skeleton of its former self, a relic of another time, like Gaza itself these days. Who could have foreseen that eventually some of the wooden sleepers under the tracks would end up in Jawdat al-Khoudari’s mathaf, or that only elderly people like Abu Nidal and his wife, Umm Nidal, would be able to tell the story of catching the train in Gaza? How do we ever know what’s going to befall our country, our community or us?

  Umm Nidal shows me the bathroom, then she comes to the drawing room with me afterwards. She and Abu Nidal have been married a very long time. Their children have grown up and left home, and they are enjoying their retirement as quietly as you can in Gaza. I sit listening to their memories of Gaza because it’s a lovely way to spend a long, hot afternoon. None of us know that, in just a few weeks, Abu Nidal will die here quietly, at the grand age of 82. In my mind, he is still there, sitting upright, his left hand resting on his walking cane and his voice somewhat hoarse after all this talking, insisting that I come back on Saturday for a good Bedouin lunch.

  chance of rain: zero per cent

  I criss-cross Gaza, not by train, but by public taxi, spending hours gazing out of smeared car windows. I watch how the land and trees change across the Strip. In the far north, where the Swailams used to farm, the soil is rich and dense, and the fields lush and green. From the edge of Beit Hanoun until the beginning of Gaza City is mostly sprawling, ugly, concrete jungle, but threaded in between are the strawberry fields of Beit Lahiya, the ever-present glitter of the sea, and the quiet palm-and bougainvillea-lined streets of al-Rimal district where I am staying. South of Gaza City, the middle area of the Strip is also fertile, and wide avenues of palm trees – now laden with clumps of shining red rutab dates – lend an air of weathered calm to the towns of Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah.

  There’s also rich farmland in the area of Mawasi, which lies south of Nuseirat. Mawasi was one of the locations where Israeli settlers spent decades spawning vast greenhouses to grow fruit and salad vegetables before being dragged – in some cases, literally kicking and screaming – out of the Strip in August 2005, when the Israeli government finally withdrew its settlements from Gaza. Now that the settlers have gone, the Gazan farmers have resumed their harvests, selling guavas, figs and lemons in peace, though they still cannot export their produce because of the siege. The guava plantations are built on land that looks almost as rich, green and moist as Scotland. One afternoon, near Mawasi, I visit a new seaside hotel built from traditional bricks of baked mud. It has spacious, loft-style rooms, a garden decorated with voluptuous mud statues … and a short tunnel leading from the hotel onto the beach: a wink to the local subterranean smugglers still working down at the border. It is a beautiful, audacious and optimistic setup, though I’m the only customer. The Mawasi guava plantations lie inland.

  But threaded in between them are tracts of empty coastline, with just a handful of lonely houses standing apart from each other as though they have no friends. Here at the beach front, the land is parched like sun-bleached bones, the soil crumbling into dust that sustains nothing. This is where Gaza kisses the Sinai desert.

  The BBC weather forecast I read before leaving Scotland stated that the chance of rain in Gaza was ‘zero per cent’. And there has been no rainfall since I came back. Everyone is complaining that the end-of-summer rains are overdue, the land is parched. I wonder whether the Sinai desert is stealthily encroaching north, like the foot soldiers of the British army before their battles for Gaza. If so, what will this do to the already dire quality of the water, which makes my guts ache and gives me the shits most mornings? Suddenly it feels important to know, so I arrange to meet Monther Shoblak.

  Monther is director of the unimaginatively named Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, which has overall responsibility for water and sanitation services across the Strip.

  ‘Welcome, my dear!’ he croons as I enter his presidential-style office. He directs me to sit at the top of a gleaming conference table, set opposite his expensive-looking desk, where a hefty gold plaque is engraved with his name in Arabic and English. His shining black hair carefully swept back, Monther flashes me a rakish smile.

  ‘Now, Louisa, what is it that I can tell you?’

  ‘I want to know about the water situation in Gaza. The drinking water, that is.’

  Monther leans slightly forward, his fingertips arched together, like a BBC correspondent.

  ‘Here in Gaza, we are completely dependent on the coastal aquifer, which lies 40–150 metres underground. The aquifer has an annual recharge of about 80 million cubic metres. The problem is that in Gaza we’re using 180 million cubic metres of fresh drinking water every year. And because there is no vacuum status in the aquifer, 95 per cent of our fresh water in the Gaza Strip has now been used up.’

  He pauses to let this fact sink in.

  ‘We also have serious problems with the water that is available, like problems with nitrate and chloride concentrations.’

  He stands and crosses the room, to a set of framed wall maps.

  ‘Look – the purple sections on this map, and the orange sections on this one – you see how they fit together? In areas of Gaza where you find a high concentration of nitrate, you also find low levels of chloride – and vice versa. High chloride levels can cause kidney problems – though these can also be due to the amount of salt in our diet. But nitrate absorbs oxygen and it can cause major health problems, including blue baby syndrome. Nitrate is a silent killer.’

  Because of the chronic shortage of fresh drinking water in Gaza, he tells me, many locals buy drinking water from the myriad private companies who run dozens of small desalination operations and sell drinking water from trucks. They don’t have the facilities to detect levels of nitrate, which has no odour, colour or taste. Some 80 per cent of private water sellers in Gaza are not
licensed or regulated, so these companies are no solution to the drinking-water problem, he adds.

  ‘Some of the water is also heavily contaminated with bacteria. But we can resolve the nitrate problem if we can lay out a new sewage system for Gaza.’

  The Gaza sewage system is, famously, a mess. There are just three sewage treatment plants in the entire Strip – each unable to cope with the volume of raw waste being pumped into it. Up in Beit Lahiya, the sewage treatment plant was originally built in a natural depression without a sea outlet. Consequently, untreated waste water flows directly from the plant into stinking cesspools built just above a local Bedouin village, Umm al-Nasser. On April Fool’s Day 2007 one of the cesspools burst, creating a 2-metre-high wave that engulfed the village. Five local residents drowned in shit. It was the second sewage flood to hit Umm al-Nasser in eight months. A new waste water treatment plant is planned for northern Gaza, and when it is completed the cesspools can finally be sealed.

  The Al-Sheikh Ejleen sewage plant, just south of Gaza City, lies close to Wadi Gaza, once an ancient settlement with clean water wells and a pristine natural wetland populated by migrating birds. Now it, too, is a series of stinking, foetid pools. The birds have fled and the sewage plant is spewing 20 million litres of raw and partially treated sewage straight into the Gaza Mediterranean every day, poisoning the coastline. But dozens of local fishermen still dock their boats on the beach opposite Wadi Gaza. Shoals of fish come to shore to gobble up the shit.

  Monther acknowledges that there has been mismanagement of local sewage plants. But he reminds me that water treatment cycles are constantly being interrupted by Israel’s continuing to restrict or deny essential operating materials and spare parts, and the frequent power cuts. Suddenly he seems a little deflated and we both fall silent. I remember the empty houses on tracts of wasteland in south-eastern Gaza, and the weather forecast predicting no rain.

  ‘Is the rainfall decreasing here?’ I ask him.

  ‘Ten years ago we received up to 600 millimetres of rain per year in Gaza,’ he says. ‘But in 2007 the rainfall was around 400 millimetres, and for the last two years it has been just 250–300 millimetres.’

  Most of the rain falls in northern Gaza, around Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun – one of the reasons that Beit Hanoun used to be the garden of Gaza. The south-east of the Strip, which is classified as semi-desert, receives the lowest rainfall, sometimes just 70 millimetres a year. In spite of the increasing drought, Gazans have not managed their water resources very well. Less than half the rainfall is harvested, yet harvesting rainwater is simple: it involves setting aside tracts of land, removing the top layers of mud and replacing them with sand, to create porous infiltration basins which help to recharge the depleted aquifer. In the past, this would have been useful. Now it’s vital. But a lot more has been happening here.

  ‘What we need is a strategic solution,’ says Monther. ‘And we don’t have much time: by 2015 Gaza will be deprived of good-quality water.’

  ‘You mean drinking water?’

  ‘Yes, I do. In five years, the Gaza coastal aquifer will almost certainly be dry.’

  ‘So what needs to happen now?’

  ‘Either we have to build desalination plants or we will have to import our water.’

  ‘Which do you think would be better?’

  He tilts his head to one side and casts me a final smile, but it’s not a happy one.

  ‘Frankly, my dear, I really don’t mind which. But we only have until 2015. That is our deadline.’

  When I leave Monther’s office, I go to meet Saida. When I see her, she beams and kisses me on both cheeks. We’ve arranged to have lunch at one of our old haunts, the Haifa Restaurant. I tell her about the meeting with Monther as we take a taxi from the city centre. She listens intently, as she always does. We ask the taxi driver to drop us off beside the beach just outside Gaza City. It’s mid-afternoon, sunny and perfectly warm. We take our shoes off and stroll along the shore. We have plenty of time and a good lunch is waiting for us at the restaurant. We choose to forget about the water crisis and enjoy the moment.

  Saida is in an unusual mood today; she gaily wedges her black heeled sandals into her bag and skips playfully along the beach. The tide is going out and she stops to draw on the wet sand with her fingers.

  Life is beautiful, she writes in a big, curling script. I’ve never seen her quite like this, apart from the evening we danced with her sister and her mother, more than two years ago. She looks almost radiant. In these last couple of weeks, something inside her has been released. We collect shells from the sand and shallows, exclaiming over their beauty, laughing at everything and nothing.

  ‘You know, when we were little we used to tell the shells our secrets,’ she says, running her finger along the whorl of a perfect white shell. ‘Ummi and my father would bring us to the beach, my brother Muhammad too, and we would pick up shells and take them home and whisper to them. And hide them to keep the secret safe.’

  ‘Do you remember the secrets you told your shells?’

  She laughs again, a lovely, uncontained laugh. But she does not tell me what they were. I know Saida very well by now: she’s the kind of woman who tells her secrets to shells because they will never talk. But she has just told me why she’s so light of heart. Three years after returning home to Gaza, Saida (whose name means Happy) thinks that maybe she has finally just found love.

  We wander past rickety fishermen’s huts, where they store their gear, and snooze in the shade. We watch young men with gleaming, salt-caked skin dunk themselves in the sea as they watch us too. A small fishing boat glides into shore, and as it lands the fisherman is joined by a man driving a donkey and cart along the beach. He hitches the boat to the cart, and the beast drags it along the sand towards one of the huts. Sunlight amuses itself on the waves. The soul-destroying situation inside Gaza grinds on, but this afternoon it seems that everything is bright. Including us.

  ‘Will you come back here, habibti?’ she asks me suddenly.

  We are both standing barefoot in the shallows, the sun warming our faces.

  ‘Back here to Gaza? Yes, of course I will.’

  It has never occurred to me that I won’t come back here; Gaza has seeped into me, like the sea.

  ‘Come back soon,’ says Saida. ‘Meet me in Gaza. Because I cannot come to meet you.’

  the Wadi of Pleasure

  A few days before I leave Gaza once more, I take tea alone on the al-Deira terrace, then find myself slowly strolling towards the beach once more. I have an hour or so before I have to go and meet someone, and the beach is always a good place to dawdle. The fishermen are out at sea, children are swimming and two men are playing an energetic game of paddle in the shallows. I glance over without really looking at them, lost in my own thoughts.

  ‘Marhaba, we thought you had left for good,’ one of them says to me.

  Startled out of my reverie, I glance up at him and only half-recognise his face. But when I look over at his partner, I am suddenly delighted because I never expected to see the bearded beach acrobat ever again. He’s not wearing the stripey bathing costume I first saw him in, but modest shorts and a loose white T-shirt. He still has the thick grey beard though, and the look of vitality about him. The acrobat nods me a greeting, but does not say anything.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask, conscious that I’m grinning at him.

  ‘I am fine – how are you?’

  He is gazing at me from the side, without making direct eye contact, the way a cat sizes you up. I know this gaze: it means he is a pious man who doesn’t look women outside his family in the eye, for fear of some impure thought entering his head.

  ‘Are you still doing …?’ I stall because I don’t know the word for ‘acrobat’ in Arabic.

  ‘Acrobatics?’ he says. ‘Yes, sometimes I still do acrobatics.’

  ‘Where did you learn?’

  ‘On the beach.’

  I can already feel our conversation coming t
o a close. I don’t want to embarrass him. But there is one more thing that I want to know about him.

  ‘Excuse me, but what’s your job?’

  ‘I am an accountant.’

  A religious accountant from Gaza who performs acrobatics on the beach. You really couldn’t make it up.

  This final story is not the last one that I heard in Gaza; it wasn’t like that at all, of course. Whenever people told me their stories I wrote them down in my notebook, to be rearranged later in some kind of order. But this story belongs at the end. So for now let’s assume that I heard it during my last couple of days in Gaza, as I was packing my bags and saying my goodbyes.

  Abu Baha lives with his wife in a neat bungalow with a well-tended garden, just outside the centre of Gaza City. He is the uncle of one of my old colleagues from the Centre, and has agreed to tell me his story of fleeing from the Negev desert to Gaza in the summer of 1948, in the violent wake of the creation of the state of Israel.

  When I arrive at his bungalow, I find a small elderly man, dressed in a well-cut beige safari suit. I greet him in Arabic and he replies in English as perfect as that of Umm Nidal.

  ‘I was an English teacher for many years,’ he says, by way of explanation, leading me into a lounge with low, soft-looking armchairs. We settle down. Abu Baha clears his throat and begins to speak.

  ‘I am a Bedouin, my family is from the al-Tarabin tribe in the southern Negev. I was born in 1939, in a beit shar, a wool house: it’s our traditional black Bedouin tent, always made of black wool because the sun is so strong it will spoil and fade any other colours. My birthplace, Wadi al-Baha, means ‘the Wadi of Pleasure’ because of the small yellow baha flowers that covered it in the springtime. Wadi al-Baha was 13 kilometres [8 miles] north of Gaza. I took my first steps there, just outside our beit shar. My father was Sheikh Hassan Jouma al-Farangi. He was a farmer, and my family grew wheat and barley and maize. We had a camp with two other Bedouin families and my father looked after all of us because he was the sheikh. Our tents faced east towards the sunrise; they were divided into a section for the men, and the women’s section next to the kitchen.’