Week Ending 31st December
I celebrated the birth of the New Year, standing in the darkness beside a canal which is close to our family home near Birmingham. I remembered how beautiful and dramatic the New Year fireworks were from the previous year, because many of them are reflected in the water.
How did you 'see in the New Year?' What were your thoughts.
In addition to the excitement and beauty of the fireworks, my heart was with the people of Gaza as their sky is lit up with bombs and more people are dying and being maimed.
So many conflicting emotions.
Below is a fragment of how I spent some hours of New Years Eve. It led to many significant conversations - with people from Iran, Azerbaijan and Pakistan among others. One has kept in touch and may travel to London later this month, to help with my next workshop.
Now it is 11th January and the Genocide Hearing will begin tomorrow. I am so grateful to South Africa for making this legal challenge. I pray it will force America to put pressure on Israel just to STOP bombing and begin to seek a diplomatic way forward.
I will add more later - but for now, just pray for a Cease Fire.
The following photo - A missile explodes in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike on October 8, 2023 [Mahmud Hams/AFP] is dramatic because of the silhouetted buildings of the city. But they have all gone now. Gaza city has been flattened
Let me share an account about 'fireworks' that I find both moving and insightful from Amira, a journalist in Gaza. I do hope that she and her family are still alive. https://amplifyvoicesalliance.org/ is a platform which shares stories of struggle from all around the world.
Ameera is a journalist working with foreign media and a mother of four. She’s struggling not only to see a future for her kids but to get her peoples story the attention they deserve.
How does she explain this to her children? That they can’t leave Gaza? That there is no where to run to when the bombs start?
Make Ameera's voice louder sharing her story
#AVA #AmplifyVoices #BeTheMegaphone #GazaUnderAttack #Gaza #FreePalestine
AVA's mission is to create a global community where we are our own megaphone.
A community where we can turn up the volume on those voices that need to be heard, stories that need to be remembered, experiences that need to be shared.
In Gaza There Is Only One Story To Tell
I can’t tell my kids it’s fireworks anymore. They are older now, my daughter is 15, my sons are 12, 6, and 3. Each time it happens, I can’t believe that we survived. This last Israeli bombing campaign, it shook the walls of our house. I hate that I cannot protect my children, I hate that I cannot tell them they will be safe and everything will be OK and not know if I am lying or not.
We don’t have air raid sirens here. We know that the bombs are falling once they have arrived although sometimes the Isrealis will text a warning, or send a smaller bomb before the big one arrives, they call that a “soft knock”. We don’t want war. We just want safety, but Israel punishes all of us, traps all of us.
I will never forget one specific moment years ago: I was on the phone with my mother, and the sound of explosions almost burst my eardrums as the smoke filled the room. I swung into action, telling my mother to take care of the kids, not knowing if I’d ever see them again. And yet it was just one of many days I had experienced before, and I would experience again countless times while covering the war in 2014.
People often ask me why I am doing this. The answer isn’t simple.
Every time, every job, every war, I keep asking myself if my work is worth dying for. But showing the world the cruelty of war and, most importantly, giving a voice and a face to the people of Palestine is what keeps me going. This is in spite of the terrifying dreams that invade my sleep and the utter terrifying reality of life in Gaza. Even in my sleep, I can not escape the reality we are living in.
My name is Ameera Harouda, I’m the first female fixer who’d worked with the foreign press in the Gaza Strip. Being a journalist was not a childhood dream of mine. As a kid, I dreamt of being a pilot. I was daydreaming about being close to the stars looking down at my country without seeing any borders, bullets, or bombs. But growing up, I realized that being a pilot is just a dream built upon clouds, not reality.
I faced reality, and despite all the obstacles, I became a journalist. It’s not a typical job for a woman in Gaza. But from the day I found my destiny, my father supported me. Later, my husband stood by my side no matter what challenges, persecution, or threat of prosecution transpired. I envisaged that being a journalist would give me the opportunity to fly all over the world and explore and tell the stories of the people. But soon, I found out that being a Palestinian journalist in Gaza means there is only one story to tell, and that is the horror of war.
My children are even more eager to explore the world than I am because I have encouraged their dreams. As a mother, what else can I do? But no matter how much I try to paint a picture of freedom, their daily life is lived through the lens of persecution, confinement, terror and war. Children on the other side of the imaginary border can travel across the country or fly to another one. My children can not walk safey down the street. They ask me why but I struggle to answer.
My family and I, we can not travel or see other countries. If we want to leave Gaza, we have to apply for permission. One option if from the Eraz crossing, that the Israeli’s control. I was actually able to cross through it twice before, but then the third time I applied it was rejected for “security reasons.” The other crossing is Rafah, controlled by Egypt. Hundreds of thousands apply to leave through there, but only a handful are let through everyday. And then there is the question of where to go, which country would grant us asylum, how do we start over, and how can we leave out country? We are imprisoned by so many factors within our own land, there are more than two million of us here, in this tiny piece of land. It is only my work, my reporting that can reach beyond this open-air prison and show the world what life is like for us.
It is hard to think of normal life while drones observe every single moment of your life, sending messages that we can not escape the reality of being under occupation no quiet night or day.
Currently, the situation here has become even more volatile, with talks of a new extreme escalation being expected. Being a mother, I have to balance between being an impartial reporter and having emergency escape bags at the ready. What are your children’s school bags filled with? Books? Lunchbox? My kids’ bags have emergency first aid kits and clothes to facilitate their survival in the event of missile strikes. What do your children dream about? My kids’ dreams aren’t as ambitious as mine were – they want to go to the zoo to see giraffes, elephants, and crocodiles, counting clouds from inside an airplane. Not too hard to fulfill you’d think? Still, for kids in Gaza, it is impossible.
The children of Gaza are used to the sounds of drones or missile strikes that could change their lives in a fraction of a second. All their dreams are bound with chains and padlocked shut with no key to be found.
With my work I’d like to give my kids a better future. It’s something I keep in mind every day. Working with different political currents and working with foreign journalists. It’s not the easiest job. You don’t know who can be trusted, and you need people to trust you. My work is showing the world what’s happening in Gaza. But a lot of journalists come here having their own ideas and narratives – that are often contrary to reality. And that’s why it’s my responsibility and dare I say unshakable duty to explain the situation with visual evidence and without being biased. Having the truth as my guiding light.
When the bombs fall, everyone looks for safety, but I – I go to those hottest spots to be the impartial eyes and ears for the millions. While ensuring the safety of the teams I work with, I rely on my husband to protect our kids and on God to protect me so that one day I can make my children’s dreams come true.
I hope one day I’ll be running to report about the celebrations of freedom and peace, but for now, I will always go wherever I am needed, no matter the danger.
Updated as of 22 December 2023
Following the 7 October 2023 brutal attack by Hamas on Israel, and the ensuing Israeli military bombardment of Gaza, UN Women has worked to analyse the differentiated impact on women, men, boys, and girls, to ensure adequate responses to their needs.
The above statistics are from 22nd December. With two mothers killed every hour, on average, work out how many more have died since then.
How can anyone even think of having a 'Happy New Year' with this going on?
I know bad things always happen in war - and they are continuing in Ukraine and Myanmar and Sudan and other parts of the world, but this is on such a massive scale and our government is supporting it.
All I can do is - remember. Refuse to look away or forget what is happening. I can talk to people and pray and use my voice / power to protest in the strongest way I know and not stop until this madness, ends.
This blog is just part of that.
Two texts. This time not starting with a poem...
Slowly — but steadily and unerringly
Millions and millions of years our mother earth Basundhara was in one body with Savita, the Sun. Our mother on whose lap we are born, grow, play and retire after finishing our part has taken millions and millions of years to be what she is now.We should remember what the world-famous poet, Tagore, once sang with so beautiful and sweet voice, “I know well, very well, the river that has lost her flow in the desert-way has not lost herself nor her way.”Banaspati, the King of the trees, hides himself in a tiny seed. With the help of light, air and food gradually it becomes a huge tree. Who will believe by seeing a little particle of seed that it will grow one day a gigantic banyan tree and will live thousands of years?
A time may come when a weakling of today may, gathering courage and strength, become a Timur or Hitler before whom nations trembled in horror. Or an ordinary child of today may grow up as Christ, Ramakrishna, Buddha, or Sri Aurobindo through whom God will reveal Himself to the Earth. Even if we see no mark of progress, no appreciable change, progress and change are going on. Unnoticed yet, under the secret guidance of God through nature.
We should remember
One’s endeavour is not finished even when one’s days are numbered with the dead.
Death is nothing but changing one flow of life for another. Man is going on slowly, but steadily and unerringly to fulfil his mission, to be the Divine. The finite is going to realise the Infinite hidden in its core. Seeming weal and woe, seeming light and darkness, seeming success and failure are the process through which the Incarnate Supreme is becoming the Transcendent. Everything exists, nothing does perish. What is within, under the pressure of the omniscient and omnipotent is becoming what is above — slowly — though it may seem — but steadily and unerringly.
AUM 935. 26 April 1949
Sri Chinmoy
Aum Vol 8. No 5, December 1972
sometimes I have to remind myself that death is not the end and
spring will come again.
Hope-trees,
Not even for hope-plants,
But only for a few
Tiny hope-seeds!
Sri Chinmoy
Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, No 16658, Part 167, 1992