Fünjan Reader

Circle Of Health international: Midwifery co-existene

2009-06-29T03:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.dailymotion.com/aldermanjessica/video/16254185

The streets of Beer Sheva

2009-06-25T03:30:00.000-07:00

The Streets of Beer ShevaOrhan Pamuk writes in his memoirs about Istanbul, "Only one of the city's idiosyncracies has refused to melt away under the western gaze: the packs of dogs that still roam the streets. After he abolished the Janissaries for not complying with western military discipline, Mahmut II turned his attention to the city's dogs. In this ambition, he, however, failed. After the constitutional Monarchs, there was another "reform" drive. This time aided by the Gipsies, but the dogs they removed one by one to Sivriada managed to find their way truiamphantly back home. The French, who thought that dog packs were exotic, found the cramming of all the dogs into Siriada even more so; Sartre would joke aboutt this years later in his novel The Age Of Reason.."

Since I arrived to Beer Sheva three years ago, I have in vain searched for its past. Being a Palestinian from Jerusalem, I have come to breathe the same air filled history of my own city, an air that maintains my airways constantly open, and my mind alive, oxygenated. A dry air, void of the tracks of its past, hurts my lungs.

As a medical student in Beer Sheva, my way of meeting the past happens pervasively when interviewing my patients in geriatrics. In doing so, instead of meeting a city whose ruins and heritage I have been in seach of, I met Eastern European, North African and Asian history; some survived the holocaust, others had to leave Tunisia and further than both were those who escaped Moldova, and Tajakistan. On the other hand, I found few Bedouin patients in the geriatric ward, whether it be because they dont live long enough to be admited, or whether it be that they insist on getting discharged, the reason, epidimiologically speaking, remains unknown.

"The city is growing and in ten years, there will be a lot of history," a young student told me. Perhaps, I thought, keeping in my mind my beloved rich stories of Jerusalem of thousands of year. And yet, after having gone in search for a heritage whose existence I am not sure about, I come to appreciate Orhan Pamuk's words: anywhere that you go in Beer Sheva, dogs are ever present. Though I dont speak the language of dogs, a part of me wonders, where they have come from, if they always had been in Beer Sheva, and whether they can tell me the story of the ruins of the Turkish mosque and the Bristish cemetary in the Old City.

I have heard other new western comers identify Beer Sheva as the city of lights, the city where new restaurants are open and where new buildings in Ramot and in Vave are being built. As a traveller through this city, I call it the city whose story and heritage is entrusted to its stray dogs.

Jifna by me

2009-06-25T03:26:00.000-07:00

"Jifna," I thought to myself before saying out loud the name of this village located in the West Bank. We had been driving for an hour now from Afula, headed back to Beer Sheva. "We" were eight students doing a family rotation in the rural parts of northern Israel, which included Bedouin towns, the town of Afula, Kibutzes, a community clinic around Tiberias, and other community clinics around the Jezreel valley. My classmates were playing a game, whereby they thought of cities' and countries' names that started with J and ended with A. Names such as Java, Jaffa, Jakrata and Jamaica were already mentioned as the silence fell in the van. I searched my memory for more names, looking at the face of the driver in the bus mirror. His name was Abed, he was Bedouin from the town of Hura, in the south of Israel, near Beer Sheva.

Though I grew up in the city of Jerusalem, I spent parts of my childhood in Jifna because my cousins would come every summer from the States. Their father was from Jifna, and like many inhabitants of the village, he had inherited land from his family. His mother, Fatmeh, a woman in her 60s, was taking care of the land, of the harvests of olives, figs, lemons and almonds yearly as her son was away. Her husband passed away many years ago, leaving her with five young children to raise. Her son, my uncle, was a family doctor, practicing in the States.

Fatmeh always wore a traditional Palestinian dress, long and covered with embroidery. Her head was always covered with a white scarf. Around 5:30 in the morning, as I would be tossing and turning in bed next to my cousin on the second flour of the building where they lived, Fatmeh's voice and the rooster's became associated in my mind with having to get up, for a new day was here, and not a minute could be wasted. When evening came, there would be no more electricity, and it would be time to sit at the balcony, prepare dinner near the light, and chat.

Fatmeh held a respectable place in her community, having worked hard to raise her five children by herself. As I would accompany her and my cousins to run errands, to call people to fix things round the house and to help with the harvest, I saw the respect with which people of the village welcomed her. With her son the only doctor in town, many people would stop by, bringing in their prescriptions and their complaints to see him. She approved of the visits, seeing them as the duty of her son to the inhabitants.

The story had it that Fatmeh took my cousin, Fahed, when he was 8 years old to the fields she owned. She showed him the borders of the land. And according to oral tradition and a woman who was illiterate and hence could not entrust what is dear to her to paper and pen, only my cousin knew what his family owned. I had always wished that I had a grandmother from a village, whose power, influence, character and land ownership were recognized.Across one street from Jifna, on top of a hill, lied a Palestinian refugee camp called El-Jalzoon. Sometimes, some children from Jifna and I would go and play in the street between the refugee camp and the village with the children from the camp. The houses in the camp were cramped, and vehicles carefully and very skillfully passed through to reach Jifna.Walking down another street at the entrance of jifna and Fatmeh's house lead to Tabash restaurant, the church, the grocery store, the cemetery and the school. The owners of the restaurant were Fatmmeh's cousins, the priest baptized my uncle and his children, the sellers always wrote down what I owned them under Fatmeh's name, the cemetery was covered with grass and not well kept, and my cousins went to school during the summer when they would come to visit.

Twenty years later, with Fatmeh's children all highly educated and living abroad, my mother told me that Fatmeh had been found dead in her house at the age of 80, possibly due to a heart attack. Her neighbors missed her after not seeing her for a few days. Her son, the doctor, was not able to travel in time for the burial, and it was I who attended, and could say that I, unfortunately, had a family member buried in the cemetery in Jifna.

Whenever I go to the cemetery to visit her grave, I am reminded of the walk she took my cousin, Fahed, on, and showed him the limits of the lands she owned, and then I realize that I, too, have my own land, whose borders and limits I know. With the birth of my cousins in Jifna, our childhood years spent there, and with the death of Fatmeh, I found my own Jifna in people's families and life events, marking the limits of my land that I don’t trust to papers."Jifna," I said out loud in the bus. "It is the name of a village in the West Bank," I explained. The silence in the van was gone. My classmates chose to move to another letter of a city beginning with K and ending with A. I didn’t search for a name of a village or a city in my memory anymore, but rather for faces of a native American old woman I had sat with in her Navajo village, of a Bedouin woman called Um Salem, of a Russian grandmother called Anna, and of an Ethiopian grandmother, hoping that I would, then, remember the name of their villages, and join my classmates in the game of names again.

Coloring 101 by me

2009-06-25T03:25:00.001-07:00

Yellow French fries
next to a brown steak.
A white dish
Flowers drawn in blue
A room with white walls
Crayons thrown around
Dinner time. Parents return.
She is asleep
Crayons-are gone
And, The white walls-
no more.

From Najran by me

2009-06-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

As I stand at my grandpa's grave located in the catholic cemetery on top of a hill, I can see different parts of Bethelhem. The majority of names in the cemetery is Giacaman, my grandfather's last name. His family is one of the prominent families in Bethelehem; in fact, if I were to walk into anyone in the street, s/he would probably be a Giacaman. People live next to each other in a city and they also lay dead next to each other in its graveyard. This is the city where my family has lived for hundreds of years, where I know I have always belonged, so that moving to the cemetery is just another location, one of the many taken up by the same family.

Next to my grandpa's grave is another one with the engraving of Carmel Nassrallah Giacaman, who died thirteen years ago from breat cancer. I was nine at the time and only remembered vaguely her dying in her last few days. Is my baby sister going to remember anything of what we saw today of the funeral? She tells me not to worry, that I am going to see my grandfather in a few years, and that in fact, I am probably the first one who would see him out of the four siblings! Older than her by 14 years, surely I am bound to see my grandfather before anyone else.

The winds are roaming the valleys and hills, invigorating my tears. They don't seem to leave anything or anyone in their place, but they rather move them. I could not believe that my grandfather laid in the ground. What is a body? We, the medical students, work with it in our dissection labs, it is not alive. My grandfather is somewhere else, with that wind that has blown for two thousands years in this city where his family has always been after coming from Najran in Yemen. He is somewhere around those hills and this city of Bethelhem whose spirit and history he spent his life getting to know and finally joined it for eternity.

What is life and death anyway but points of beginning and ends, how often are points so important? Isn't it the process through which we go, through which we come to be or come to be undone, through which we come to know and to learn that stand time? I can almost hear my grandfather tell me in his Bethlehmite accent in Arabic, "Ma fee waket, mashghool." I smile because he is right: there is never a time to stop, never a time not to do something meaningful. I promised him that I would translate his books and he still had another volume prepared, to come out about Nazareth. He is right: our lives are too short, what are they? 80, 90 years? Ma fee waket.His words blow in the winds, and they need to be so that my grandfather's spirit is not in that grave, neither is anything that we do in life and that is worthwhile stagnant.

It is all blowing, blowing in the wind.

Anatomy class feedback by me

2009-06-25T03:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Prof. Ben Shalom,

I have wondered to myself as I read your name on our schedule where you last name came from: it means son of peace. Did your Palestinian Jewish family bring peace to the people around it during the Ottoman or British rule? Were they farmers that shared their produce with their neighboring Arab villages? And, why is there “son of” in your last name- was someone the son of a father? Were you a family with many cousins? My last name is Abu Ata, which means "father of giving". My last name comes from Arabic but the root is similar to that in Hebrew: latet.

I have wondered if an abu (father) gave (ata) a ben (son), as two family members share things, and so it came to be that I am Abu Ata (father of giving) and you are Ben Shalom (son of peace). I have wondered about the dead sea scrolls, the ones you and your ancestors have come back to be able to read. I have looked at them in the Israeli museum and have wondered how many times they were read on shabat in the synagogue, rolled out and put back in place by different readers and devout prayers- till the fearful day of destruction and uprooting of a people who were home. Now, having lost all sense of familiarity of home, even the temple of their God that called them out of Egypt, to pass (and hence Passover, pesach) to another country was no more.

I have always pictured Jerusalem torn, with each rock dispersed. Amidst the chaos, someone snatched the dead sea scrolls, ran to the desert, holding on so dearly to the only thing left of his place- those dead sea scrolls. Did that person walk around in the desert of the Dead Sea and stumble upon a cave and decided to hide the scrolls there away from all the fear and destruction he felt and witnessed? While rolling out the scrolls on the ground one last time, did he wonder, “Who will keep those possessions of my own people? Who will know of us? Will we read those scrolls again? We worked so hard to be in this land. He promised us this place. It is our home now, where else can we go? Where has my family gone? Were they killed? Who will keep those scrolls till we come back again?”

I picture that displaced refugee of more than two thousand years ago, in agony, not wanting to leave the precious scrolls but rather die with them- much like others behind him in Jerusalem had chosen to stay and die, rather than leave.

Did he stay near the scrolls till he died, hoping that someone will find them, know what they are, what their value was, preserve them and return them to their original owners and with them retell the story?

I have imagined that as this person walked out of the cave, because he heard noise, he saw shepherds with his sheep. They were nomads that he had never met because he lived in the city all of his life. The two shepherds spoke a language similar to his. Somehow the two nomads understood that the scrolls, he had hid in the cave, were important to that foreigner. So, they promised they would keep them and watch over them.

And that they did, until the 1960s, when a Bedouin boy revealed them again to archeologists. And, the scrolls went back to Jerusalem. That refugee’s pleas of more than two thousand years ago were answered, with the help of Bedouins.

To study the anatomy of the human body is illuminating because one realizes that each muscle, nerve, artery and vein are together needed to perform a task. When one member of this group is missing, the person feels the difference. What I learn to appreciate in studying anatomy is that every part, however small or insignificant it might seem, is needed in the body.

And yet also being a Palestinian whose family’s roots go back to the early Christian Arabs that lived in this land, I also realize how important it is to have all the people, however different they are, in one place,one land. The case is no different than what I study for my anatomy test- nerves, muscles, arteries, veins and bones exist in one body together. The median nerve innervates the abductor pollicis brevis, and thus moving it. And, a Ben Shalom might have well helped an Abu Ata sometime before walls were put up and funny colored papers given to one group of people, and not the other.I am glad that I, too, can read the Dea Sea scrolls.

I am also glad that my people were as intermingled and meshed in the history of this land as yours. Who knows how each people was needed throughout history, so that a function in the body of this land could take place. I think that two weeks are not enough to study limb anatomy.

We need more time to learn how all the different parts fit and work together, without over-riding one another, and thus we have abductor pollicis brevis, next to flexor pollicis brevis, next to opponens pollicis, an Abu next to a Ben, to abduct, flex and oppose the thumb, thus giving a signal of some sort.

Sincerely, Nisreen Abu Ata

Curtain #3

2009-06-25T03:16:00.000-07:00

Tired. I looked up to the window, hoping that the sun's rays would dissipate the water in my eyes, and below it I saw number 4. "Next, students, come to curtain number 4," the instructor said.

Dr. Moshe continued explaining how to read a fetal heart monitor, when to induce labour, when a latent phase labour was, what to do with a woman with constitional hypertension, and finally a woman coming with polyhdrominos and gestational diabetes. I moved with him and the other students removing one curtain, seeing another woman in labour, in pain, and then closing the curtain, and looking at another new monitor, with a different expereince of pains of labour. Each woman was placed next to another one with only curtains separating them, and the voices and motions of contractions painfully uniting women and newborn.

I stood in the back of the crowd of students, with my weight shifting from one leg to the other, and my head from the doctor to the window outside. The students shared the right answers to the questions. I usually paid attention and cared to share the right answers.

Not today- I desired the rare commodity of privacy in labour and delivery room.

Before joining the teaching round, I had helped a 19 year old Bedouin woman during her first delivery. I had hoped that the midwife would allow me to deliver the infant, and introduced myself. The answer to my request was no because this was the woman's first delivery. I introduced myself to the woman who did not speak Hebrew, and became her translator for the next two hours of her, her infant's and my life. As the contractions came, she climbed up her bed, closed her legs and screamed closing her eyes. Fighting, not surrendering.

"She does not know what is happening," said the midwife, callously, indifferelty. As labour progressed, and the same body language of the woman continued, the frusterated midwife said, "She thinks she is the only one delivering! We need to get done with this." And I wanted to tell the midwife, "You know, you see many deliveries and to you it is routine. But to this woman, this is her first delivery. Nobody explained anything to her about how it happens."

The woman looked more so like a young girl, having gotten married less than a year ago. After asking her if anyone came with her, she said her mother-in-law but she did not want her to come. Translating and yet also coaching a woman through her birth, while still shielding her from the screams of the midwife for her lack of cooperation was what perhaps brought tears to my eyes this morning as I joined the teaching round. "Breathe in deeply and then push," I told her, against her own and the midwife's scream. My voice was the only calming, gentle and still factor, against the sea of motion her body embraced going up the bed, against the sea of motion she created closing her legs, against the sea of motion my arms, and my classmates' created to keep her legs open.

The little girl finally came out around 945am. Indifferent, uninvolved, disconnected, oblvious, ambivilant, such were the two hands that I helped the woman place on her child. "She might fall, hold on to her tight," I said, without leaving her side, knowing that there were no hands that held the infant strongly. For how could one child, now called a mother, hold and take care of another child, now called a daughter?

The placenta was not completely removed according to the midwife who called the doctor to do a bimanual exam to remove the rest of it. The woman's body motion continued to escape like a tide that had just broken on the shore and now was retrieving. "Die (stop it in Hebrew)," screamed the doctor with frusteration. If he could not remove all of the parts of the placenta, she was going to be taken to operation, he explained to her. The higher his voice got, the deeper his hand went into her vagina and the more her body retrieved back up the bed, the more she closed her legs and screamed. My voice repeated calmly and gently to breathe deeply, to come back down, to open her legs to complete the retrieval of the placenta.

"Raw, unable to embrace her expereince of birth, her first born was a Bedouin woman behind curtain #3. Her name is Mariam," I thought, having closed the curtain and having joined the students in curtain #4.

The corridoes of pnmit chet by me

2009-06-25T03:13:00.000-07:00

Medicine teaches that asystole after doing effetive CPR with 15 compressions and 2 breathes with a lack of pulse means that the patient has expired. I have not yet been involved in this part of the physician's job for which I have been traied, dread and continously rehearse in my head in any uncertain situation, thinking that if a physician is there, s/he should know what to do and save someone's life.

The first time that I witnessed a death after a failed CPR was vicariously. I was on pnimit chet, in one room, waiting for a doctor to finish his round so that I could ask him a question about a patient of mine who was on that ward. I had been following that patient up since having seen him in the emergency room, and was told that he was a usual "chronic abdominal pain", possibly malingering. Still, I did not want to give up on my patient.

Standing near the group of doctor rounding, looking at an old patient in bed, listening to the discussion in Hebrew, behind me, another group of physicians dressed in white coats walked out. By the lifeless look on their faces and heavy footsteps, I intuitively knew something was different in that room. I was not familiar with the patients on the ward and was only there to check on my own patient. A few minutes later, two women ran into the room, passed me, removed a closed curtain, and one women threw herself on the floor, crying, sobbing, very loudly.

I finally dared to look beyond the curtain that was removed, a man in his fifties was dead, perhaps due to cardiovascular reasons, whether he also was an oncologic patient, I cannot remember. He lied there, at the corner of the bed, with blood still present in his own warm body, and yet, he was lifeless. The medical team had walked away from a failed resusiciation. And now the family members were mourning. I later went into the medical personnel's room, and heard small chatter, "He died too young, perhaps there was a mistake we made and we could have saved him." I write those words in one sentence today, and yet I heard them intermittently as I flipped through my own patient's chart.

I remember leaving the room where the man was pronounced dead very quietly, having collected myself, and taken in a deep breath in, hoping to protect my own breath from lifeless death. And, I never thought about it again, until today when my own parents called me, telling me that a family friend's mother passed away on sunday (today is monday).

I had known the family friend since coming to Beer Sheva three years ago. She is a mother of three, and I frequented her house, either to have a drink, to help with her child's homework, or to just chat. My last visit to her house, I remember her being not as lively and as optimistic as usual. And being the corward that I am, who is not able to bring things up to people, who is too afraid and too insecure to approach people's feelings and experiences, I sipped my coffee, and helped the mother with her homework for a test.

Much like having collected the news about the patient that died on the ward in pieces, I also collected the pieces of informatiom about my friend's dying mother in pieces. She was diagnosed with colon cancer years ago, went into remission after therapy (which I am not sure which because i was afraid to ask), but now, the oncologist told my friend's mother that nothing could be done for her anymore. Since then, my friend noticed that her rmother changed, did not talk much on the phone, and did not cook as before, which she used to like. I have realized over the years that I lack the ability to listen to someone, and be silent, but also asking the simplest questions to understand. Much like having been trained in medeicine to expect myself to know the answers and only ask purposeful questions, I approached my friend's grief like that.

There is no place for a wandering question in search of understanding in my own world of medicine. I feel uncomfortable when people talk about their feelings, especially in critical moments, such as death and dying.

I left my friend's house thinking, "Well, perhaps her mother does not have to suffer. She told me her mother is in pain. What can I do as a medical personnel?" Memories of the suffering of both my grandparents, sitty Im Saleem and Sido, came to mind, and how I wished that we had been able to provide relief from their pain and suffering. I contacted a family doctor in the negev who does palliative care, met with him, asked him how to approach my friend, what to ask, how to help her mother who was in pain, in the context of the Arab culture.

Dr. Yoram sat in his chair in the faculty building, listening to me quietly. He, then, said that not everything is connected to culture, that each individual values certain things and would like to keep them, and about that he asked his patients. I left knowing that I also had those questions for my friend about her mother, and then from there, perhaps palliative care could be provided.

A few days later, after fearing the phone call with my friend, I called her, told her what the doctor told me, and she said that she was going to get back to me. I never called her back again, even though she and her mother came through my mind, but I was too afraid to ask again, in the face of my friend's overwhelming sadness and hard situation that I could not fix, or explain or change.

And today, my mother called me, reminding me of the never ending rehearsal of emergency CPR i do in my head and try to forget about, "Her mother's died. You are near Nazareth, you should go." In the face of a death and a loss that were so familiar to me on the hospital ward, I was even more afraid. Why didnt I call my friend over time? Why didnt I check on her mother? And, if i call her now, what will I tell her on the phone? I am still afraid of facing my feelings, and people's feelings and life-events.

"The burial is at 4pm in the Orthodox church in Nazareth," a family friend answered me on the phone. It is almost easier for me to remain far away, not to see my friend grief. Have I not stayed away the past few weeks? And, as I am doing a family rotation, I am coming to perhaps appreciate that death does not spare anyone, and that instead of walking away from it with cold feet like the medical team did on pnimit chet, I should perhaps approach it, silentely, in awe, and give myself to this part of life, and put my fear aside. In the face of war and conflict, courage is being afraid and yet not giving in to fear of the highly inevitable but still going through till the very end, regardless of the outcome, of the myriad of feelings that are hard to contain, comprehend.

I would like to be courageous, rather than have fear of what I dont understand and perhaps will never understand rule over me. I am going to my friend's mother's funeral, because I dont want to be afraid anymore and yet will forever embrace my feeling of awe and wonder. I am bold to say: I dont understand. Maybe I never will, but I am fully present, to tell the stories, hence by being a witness, becoming a story-teller.

The streets of Nazareth by me

2009-06-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

One day, I will be good at knowing what signs mean, which buses to take, where streets, places and cities are located. When that day will be, I dont know. For now, it would seem that I am best at remaining in a state of wonder, and awe, travelling on roads, reaching places, only by admitting that I am lost and asking people. Such was the state I found myself in trying to reach Nazareth for my friend's mother's funeral. I had asked which bus to take from Migdal haemek to reach Nazareth. I tried to get an exact address of where the church was and my friend's family's house. "Just get to el-ayn (the fountain). Ask for the family of Jareysseh.

"What do I do with such directions? No name of a street. No idea of where south, north, west and east where, or even which parts of Nazareth. The first van I took turned out to only go to Nazareth Illit, not Nazareth. "I will drop you off here, and you can take bus number 1," said the driver. Drop me where exactly? I thought. I sat at the other bus station, with cars filling the tight streets, storesof cars, tires and furniture with signs writen in Arabic, waiting, for a bus. Typical for families around the Nazareth area who pass their business to their children.

“Amarah,” answered the seller when I asked him the name of the neighborhood where I was waiting for the bus. I walked out of the store for furniture, thinking about the answers I told the seller, “Yes, I am not from here, so I don’t know what the name of this place is.” Bus number one arrived to the bus-stop. “Do you speak Arabic, are you going to Nazareth?” An old man in his fifties answered yes. I rode with a combination of frustration and faith. Nazareth is big, for someone who is not from there, and has no exact directions or name of a street.

The bus seemed to enter heavy traffic, and I remembered from my childhood years that driving through Nazareth took so much time because of the tight streets, the many cars, and people crossing in between. The bus stopped twice, and the second time, the bus driver got off, handing off the shift to another driver. “She is going to El ayn,” said the bus driver to the one replacing him. Was I in safe hands?

I remember a name of El Ayn since my childhood. There Mary, the mother of Jesus, and other women used to get their water, and thus the name fountain came. There used to be a Greek Orthodox church there that I had visited as a child, and used to listen to the ringing of the bells. The fountain and the church accompanied each other: There was a big courtyard in which the fountain was to believed to exist, and next to it was the church. I had always imagined Mary and the other women getting the water they needed, carrying it on their heads in jars to go back to their houses. On other days, the women may have also washed the clothes there, chatted, gossiped, the same way women do today at many social events. At the time, I had either gone there to visit the church as a historical site, or locate a restaurant near there. Now, twenty years later, I was going to the same place, for different reasons. Will I recognize upon reaching that this was el Ayn?The bus driver stopped and told me that I reached my destination.

Nazareth being on a hill, I trusted paths that seemed to go up. Walking I heard some bells ringing. I did not know how far I was from my friend’s house, where exactly I was, but I wanted to run to the safety that hearing bells brought. I stopped, asking the priest if I could ring the bell. The answer was no. “Where is the jaryessey house?” I asked a shopkeeper near the church. “Oh, you are asking because of the family member who passed away? Go up the hill a bit more, it is there,” the man answered. People usually want to stay with their own family in Nazareth, and hence end up building floors on top of each other. The hill up which I went was no different: how many siblings lived in the same building? I wondered.

The crowdedness of buildings on top of a hill reminded me of those in Bethlehem: in both cities families wanted to stay near each other but had no space to expand horizontally. I saw a paper hanging on a wall of a building, saying when Mary Jaraysee’s funeral was. I had found my sought building and went up two floors. Dressed in a pair of gray pants, and a button up shirt, not from Nazareth, I was not sure how the customs went. Women sat on the second floor, and men sat together on the first floor.

On the second floor, women were sitting on chairs, chatting, dressed in black and white clothes. I inquired where my friend was, and went into the kitchen to see her. She was dressed in black, introduced me to her other two sisters that I had long heard about. We then went to be in the sitting room, where she began telling me that her mother passed away on Sunday "even though" she had spent the weekend with her. Her mother was taken to the hospital on Saturday night where the family was told that her mother was dying but her death could happen from day 0 to a 100 days. So, she went back to be with her children and then come back to be with her mother. The time in between was when her mother passed away. “I was with her, and her hands were filled with water, and she was gasping for air,’ my friend said. “Why does water come out?” she asked, being a mathematician herself.

Not sure what to say or how to explain the path physiology of edema in a metastasized colon cancer mother, I opted for a simple answer, “There are many reasons why that could be.” The priest from the Orthodox church down the hill came up to the room. All the women stood up as he began to speak and pray. “ People live day to day, they have spirit but there is also the holy spirit that we cannot forget. Let’s pray for Mary’s spirit,” the priest said. It was the same priest that denied me the ringing of the bells, saying that I was not a priest myself. And after having heard about the last of days for my friend’s mother, and the suffering that she went through, I put on my own black dress that a priest wears- that of suffering.

Unfortunately, such a dress is invisible, and does not allow me to ring bells at churches. It was around 3pm, lunch time. It is customary to feed those who come to give their condolences. I stepped into the kitchen where the women were discussing how much rice and meet to hear, how much to send downstairs to the men, how many spoons and plates and yogurt were needed. There we stood in Mary’s kitchen, though she was not present, her cooking utensils and oven were.

And even though I had wanted to ring bells at churches, listening to the women organize the meal, I knew that I was not different than those women at El Eyn who met Mary, cleaning, collecting water, organizing matters. Hearing the clatter of the spoons on the plates, and then women discussing what temperature the oven should be on to heat the food, I knew that I will always ring a different kind of bells, at a different kind of church.

Medical professionals take comfort and pride in their competence and expertise. I highly doubt that with any kind of training and education, I will be able to read maps well, navigate in towns through street names, and explain that A leads directly to B. It seems that I will always be present amidst loss, chaos, and seem like a visitor from another town, asking the inhabitants where I am at.

Medicine is no different for me: I take comfort not in my own expertise or competence but rather in my continuous state of wonder, and hence collecting waters from fountains and ringing bells of stories at churches of people’s life, while wearing the invisible embroidered dress of suffering.

May Mary's soul rest in peace.

Clinica day patient exposure and sampling by me

2009-06-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

Dr. Orez brings her in from the internal ward, one more patient to be interviewed by the eager first year medical students. They call themselves by now 1/8th MDs.

Around the conference table sat the eight students in their white coats, with a clinical book passed around to read about the previous patient and her case: scleoderoma.

Um Salem walked in, a short lady, with her head covered, not wearing the regular hospital gown, small arms and feet, round trunk, low voice. She sat at the edge of the chair, put her elbow on the table across from me. There was an air of loss around her: the world barely seemed to exist. The other 10 persons in the room were almost not there to her. She was only brought in to leave as soon as she could.

I speak Arabic, surely, the only Arabic speaker in my group. Shouldn't I be the one to interview her? There is no language barrier and I should be able to understand what Um Salem says.

What steps to keep in mind? At this point of our training, it is supposed to be history of present illness, social and medical history, allergies, medications, family history. Drugs. Okay, I can do this. I think to myself.

After slowly explaining who I am, who the students are, the purpose of our interview, I ask what her name is.Does she understand my accent? Does she remember my name? Is she curious about where I come from? Why I speak Arabic and why my accent is different? None of this seems to matter to Um Salem- she is barely with me in the room as I would ask her questions; she barely maintains eye contact, as she looks throughout the window, around the room, and mutters a few words repeatedly: diabetes, high blood pressure and pain. Do I make my questions more specific? Do I leave it open ended? None of the techniques seem to work and I have no idea what kind of a person is sitting in front of me.

For the first time, I realize when a patient walks into the room, s/he brings more than a disease, a complaint or a cough. S/he brings in a story of the environment of where s/he lives, other people's stories, behaviors and cultures. Pain. Diabetes. High blood pressure. Tin houses. Yes, tests. Then she began coughing.

A classmate tells me, "Ask her for long she has been coughing."A week. The logs....she says. And then our doctor explains what was known as the "Bedouin lung", that because women cook using logs, they breathe in different chemicals, rendering them susceptible for pulmonological complications. Um Salem lives in a tin house, cannot use the logs to stay warm, cannot cook, and has people bring her food. She has been to the hospital before because of breathing problems.

The many words that I have used in Arabic trying to understand her story are not going to provide me with the picture of where Um Salem lives, nor is she going to explain to me about her environment. We come from totally different worlds- and even though I have explained who I am, who the students are, I am not sure that it make any sense to her. I am not sure that my questions about her health, my description of her pain, and her condition make sense to her, at all.

We both speak Arabic and yet the language seems to be common symbols for different meanings, worlds, experiences and lives. After seeing other Israeli patients who are active, who exercise, who do folk dancing, who wanted to get better- Um Salem highlights a complete opposite of the previous realities. Living in a tin house, with no electricity, no running water, not being able to cook, at the age of 70, with certain diseases. How did the world come to be to her?

Another classmate says, "Ask her, Has she been to a local healer?"But, how do I ask her this? It seems that even though the Bedouin population is different than the people in the city, they always use the health care system. She had given birth to all of her children at the hospital. What would I ask her? Do you go see a sheikh so that he makes you feel better? Does he do seher (magic)?

There is no way to translate the question applicable to parts of Africa or South America to Um Salem's situation and language. When you started feeling bad, who did you see first?Kopat Chulim. el mirpaha. Sounding the most awkward and the craziest perhaps to Um Salem, I ask her if she saw a sheikh, knowing that my question does not ask about the same idea that my classmates have in mind.As the interview ends, we, the medical students, have an idea of what her medical condition is and what it is induced by perhaps.

Yet, as she left, I am not sure that I completely understand what Um Salem's diseases is, what she thinks it is, how she comes to see it and experience it. Her lung case, if that is the case, seems to be as unimportant to her as the entire interview. I see her walk out of the room, realizing that though we seem to communicate, I do not know or understand the first thing about her, that though the doctors might give her antibiotic, she probably does not have any idea about what is injected in her and why. If I countmy days by numbers and calendars, she might count hers by the time left for her in the hospital before she leaves. Or, she might never count anything at all. To live in world with no numbers- Possible. I smile As Um Saleem walks away. Um Salem: Sometimes, the spirit of the desert cannot be captured in words, understood or felt. And the grains of sand are not perhaps meant to be measured and counted. Pain. Diabetes. High blood pressure- this is all there was to it. She is right. And I am humbled for expecting myself to know her entire story and understand her. She still has much to teach me.

The streets of lower galilea by me

2009-06-25T03:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Roxana and I just packed our not too sophisticated equipment to measure blood pressure, change bandages and som alcohol and left the clinic to do a house call. Sohpia is an 82 Russian immigrant that medicine desribes as a classic picture of a diabetic patient: diabetic neuropathy, diabetic retinopathy, and now having had her right leg ambuted below the knee two weeks ago. She lives with her brother who is taking care of her. We drive through the durved streets in the neighborhood of Givat Hamoreh, as the Jezreel valley faces us. "Here is Beit Or, where Down Syndrome patients and mentality retarded peopel are dropped off by their family members at the beginning of the day, to be taken care of, to do many activities, and then at the end of teh dya, their famillies come to pick them up," pointed Dr. Roxana to a house on top of one of the hills. "Here, is a beit noar. Boys that came from Russia, Ethiopia and other countries without their parents from a young age until they are teenagers stay here, study until they graduate," was her comment five minutes later.

Dr. Roxana pulled the car on the side of the road, and we walked on the street olazanarov, an old buildling number 26, down the stairs two floors, an man in his 80s welcomed us in Russian. I followed Dr. Roxan, looking at my own lab: the house. There is a sitting room, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen, very little furniture and old frabric covering the couches. We make it to the room of Sophia, and she is laying in bed, saying hello to Dr. Roxana. I continously hear the one word I recognize in Russian "Da", as the doctor puts on her cloves, changed the bandages, adds antibiotic to the woung, and chats to the patient. I take a look at the room, in front of me is a tank of oxygen near a plant, a poster of "Duet" (they must be a couple from the picture), and behind me is a closet with things packed on top of it. Da. Da. Da. Da. I take a look at Sophia, speaking to the doctor, and yet no focused gaze, a gace I am used while talking to people. The ceiling and the doctor seem to be the extent of her view. She passed chocolate to the doctor. "Practica" is another word I catch. I wonder what they are saying about me. I smile. She passed another paper to the doctor who is still busy with changing the wounds. "Diabetic retinopathy" is the first words that I read.On the way out, the brother shakes hands with the doctor, "Davina," he says. I smile, following the doctor on the way out, who chats with another lady who just came out from the apartment next door.

We walk to the building next, and go up to the second floor. Ethiopian children open the door for us, and the doctor walks purposefully to the room at the end of the house, without giving me time to eye my own lab. We see a lady in her 80s, dressed in a white dress with a pillar of color of blue and red in the front, her head is covered, and she is staring at the wall. We stand there and the granddaughter comes, speaking in Hebrew to her grandmother, asking her to lay down to be examined. The doctor was called because the grandmother was complaining of leg swelling. The grandmother does not move, the daughter comes and speaks in Amaheric to her. Having moved the wheel chair away, we approach her, taking a look at her right foor, always fearing a DVT in an old lady who does not walk much anymore. There is swelling but there is also redness- a skin infection. The doctor asks the daughter to come by the clinic to pic any fungal and steroid antoiment. The grandmother's blood pressure is 130/80. I follow Dr. Roxan, and only eyeball the three little children on the couch, watching TV.

Outside of the dark old building I am faced again by the beautiful shades of green and yellow in the jezreel valley. We drive back to the clinic in Givat Hamoreh that has been there for the past thirty years, serving its low socioeconmic population mainly made up of immigrants. Today, I saw immigrants from North Africa, Russia, Ethiopia but because of passover coming up, the busy clinic was quieter, giving me time to absorb the beauty of the Galilea that was imprinted in my memory when I was a child. I sit back and continue reading an article from IMAJ, "Chossing Primary care? Influence of Medical School Curricula on Career Pathways."

The abstract reads..."in countries in which a primary care-oriented system has developed, general practioners, family physicians and other primary doctor are the keystones of an approach that waims to achieve high quality and satisfction with relatively low cost. Despire this new trend, medical schools still produce execessive numbers of subspecialitists rather than primary care physicians. Among multiple reasons influencing a career choice either towards or away from primary care) instittiona, legislative and market pressures), the present article discusses ways in which medical school curricula may affect students in their preceptions of the role of primary care physicians. Since students are greantly influenced by the cultures of the instutions in which they train, the negative attitude of univeristy towards family medecine may negatively affect the number of students going into this speciality.

Dr. Roxana welcomes another patient, complaining of fever and a sore throat. We take a look at her throat- swallen tonsils and a stong smell comes out, indicating a bacterial cause.

My day is over, and I take a walk back to Afula, with Nazareth on top of a hill behind me, the Jezreel valley to my right and egged buses passing by. That is my lab: an Ethiopian grandmother, a Russian sister, a North African Immigrant, living in old buildings, accompanied by the flowers of april, facing the Jezreel valley. I contemplate whether I am going to walk the Afula curves I had driven through when i was a child to reach Nazareth, if I want to go to Haifa, or if I just want to lay in the grass in Migdal ha emek.

Lasote Chaim to make life by me

2009-06-25T02:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, there becomes a gap of awareness in one's memory, between what one once experiences and leaves an everlasting impression on one, and what one actually rememberes. What seems to outlive one's cognitive memory and make it to one's deepest of selves and its formation is what makes its way to inspire me today through watching the Bedouin old ladies in their traditional embroidered dresses going about doing their business, whether it be in the mall, or at the hospital.

I grew up in a buildling where the woman living on the second floor was the owner of the four comound appartments, and was herself, a fallaha, a peasant who wore similar traditional dresses as the Bedouin old ladies I saw today. The lady, Um Unis, had inherited the buildings and the land from her husband who passed away. Her chilren had immigrated to the States and she would often visit them in Cleveland and then come back, still dressed in her tradiational dress and with her head covered with a white scarf.

It was always a mystery for me to see what kind of hair she had under the white scarf, but since I did not live with her, I never saw her take off the scarf. I remember Um Unis going about in Beit Hanina, the neighborhood where we both lived, attening to her business: builldings, payments from people who owed her rent, the olive harvest of the lands and of course came her health. She never seemed to quiet understand why certain medications were given to her, or why she was sick. So, she would often come see my mother, with whom she was close, bringing a bag of mediations, taking each drug out, asking my mother who could read unlike Im Unis and who also was a medical secretary, what each drug was for, when she should take it and so on.

She would also complain to my mother about those who did not want to pay her the rent they owned, physical pains, her family issues and so on. I was little, perhaps about 6 or so, watching the two women, one skinny and one overweight, talk about a world I did not understand. What lingered with me was not logic or words, but rather colors of Im Unis' embroidered dress, the color of the henna she had on her hand, the white scarf covering her head, the hidden papers and docurments that seemed to always emerge out of her chest, the color of the different medicatation boxes, her placing her hand on her heads, signifying pain and the tone in her voice and my mother's.

I dont remember how Um Unis died because we moved out of the apartment while she was in the States, but a woman in her 60s seems to have inspired me as a woman in my mid twenties to be strong, to carry on with daily tasks, to take care of the land, of the appartments rented out and one's health, somehow. Um Unis comes from my forgotten past back to my cognitive memory through the embroided dresses that I see Bedouin women wearing them today. It wound seem that often one lives in a disposable world, where the old dont matter as much anymore, where cars will drive past them, and nobody will wait for them and their sticks to cross the streeet, and where at a certain age for the sake of productivity and rush in one generation, that younger generation places an older onelin nursing homes and then does not visit them as much anymore.

As a young person, one lives with a feeling of potentual abandonnement, for one does not trust one's age, and somehow know that in old age, one, too, might end up in a nursing home, after having fought life's battles like Um Unis. Much is lost when the older generation is forgotten about. They carry the invaluable wisdom of time, that the young can only attain when they reach the grandparents' age, and their level. The ability of one generation to carry on, to continue to fight, to be reminded of their impernance and yet of their strength to overcome is inspirational to a young person. Grandparents, though wrinkled and disjointed with osteoarthritis, are not fragile. They need to be handled with care, though.

At the sewing machine by me

2009-06-25T02:56:00.000-07:00

I dont remember her, though the city of Haifa and she have become associated in my mind. She was named after one of the mountains in Haifa, Carmel. Having been in Afula for the past three weeks, and driven past Haifa and then been to Haifa, she came through my mind. While my grandfather, Abu Abdo, was from Bethlehem, a city in the West Bank that is close to Jerusalem, and he lived there almost all of this life, the story with my grandmother, Im Abdo, was different.

The only remenant connection to her home, the north, nanely Shfa Amer, remained through her cousins who would occastionally come visit her and her family in Bethelhem. Still, till today, her family of Nasrallah is prominent in Shfa Amr. By getting married, moving to a husband's house, and starting a family, I had the feeling that a part of a woman's story, at least my grandmother's story, becomes blurry, and in time, forgotten. Mother's stories are passed down, sometimes through their daughters, especially when they only have daughter. Wisdom leavened a mystery in women, their bodies, their stories.

The story has it that my grandmother, Carmel, escaped in 1948 with her family from Shfa Amer to Lebanon where she lived until she moved back to Bethelhem having married my grandfather, Abu Abdo. I still have cousins living in Lebanon, part of the Nasrallah family. But with no internet and the dispersed letters and pictures sent of the news of cousins, my grandmother's family, story and so on seem to have gotten lost somewhere between Lebanon, the north of Israel and the West Bank, on this very mountain in Haifa after which she was named: Carmel.

My aunt gave my mother some pictures that my grandfather, Abu Abdo, had taken throughout his life. My grandfather was a historian who continously documented everything from family life, religious celebrations and so on with his camera. Posing for the camera was annoying, especially during winter time when I would have to look at his head and the warm hat he always wore. The pile of pictures left in my mother's drawer had some dates, but not all.

Family from Lebanon, grandmother and daughter in Iraq, more people I did not know, black and white pictures. And then came the picture that remained imprinted in my memory, leaving its effects without remembering the story, much like Carmel's story was also fogotten. The picture was taken around the early ninties, and I must have been 10 or 12. Carmel was lying on the couch, dressed in her PJs, looking at the camera, at my grandfather, Abu Abdo. I was sitting accross from her at the couch, and we were playing tunj, a card game she would always beat me at! It was a family tradition to play tunj, and Carmel was known to win. I looked at the cards on the couch, remembered my evident defeat, despite my deterimination to win. Carmel was a master at tunj!

The next picture, she had drawn me near her, standing, with wraped gifts, and we both posed to my grandfather for yet again another picture. It was christmas time, the exciting time to get gifts, and yet a fear lingered inside of me at the time, among the pile of cards on the couch next to my grandmother, Im Abdo. It was cold and rainy in Bethelhem and I had somehow known that it might be her last christmas with us.

She had been diganosed with "that disease whose name we cannot mention", a few years ago, and went through surgery. She was in her early 60s, about twenty years ago, when breast cancer and its treatment were not that well known or even accepted in the community in Bethelhem. She refused to have chemotherapy and had a bilteral mastectomy in Augusta Victoria hospital in Jerualem. At the time, it was easy for people living in the West Bank to reach Jerusalem.

What remained with me as a child of Im Abdo was her look, her smile and her hands. She was a tailor who learned it from her sister, Rose, who took lessons for it. Im Abdo owned a sewing machine that she kept in the bedroom of my aunt, and she would often sew my own clothes. She was the first one to introduce me to velvet fabric, having made me and my sister our dresses.

Sitting at her sewing machine, she would take out her measuing meter, wrap it around my waist- the way I do it with my patients to measure their waste. She then would measure the length from my waste to my feet, the length from my chest to my arms and write down the measurements. It was a delight to get a new dress that she had made. She was not much of a story-teller like my grandmother Im Saleem, but the noise of the sewing machine, while i rocked my baby sister in her pram, remains with me till today.

Her fine eye for detail, her soft hands that measured my 6 year old body remained with her on that christmas eve as we both posed for the picture. "You have grown so much," she said, having been 10 and yet with a body of an older teenager. She turned me around for the picture but this time, she was not eyeballing my size to make another measurement for another dress. My grandfather, Abu Abdo, took another picture.

Today, I am a tailor myself, constantly eye balling people's bodies, doing measurements and sitting at my own sewing machine like Carmel Nassrallah, Im Abdo, used to do.

Queues by me

2009-06-25T02:53:00.000-07:00

I had never really lived in Israel proper until I moved back to Beer Sheva to attend medical school. Experiencing the negev with a mixture of Americans (Jews and non Jews), Israelis and the occasional Arabs (be it from the north, or from the negev) seems to have left me many a time in a state of wonder.

For example, I have long wondered what a bomb shleter is, where it is at. "The dancing class is at the bomb shleter in the neighborhood gimel...My room in the dorm is in the bomb shelter, it has a double door..." That is as far or as close as I dealt with bomb shelters. Of course, there is the occasional flight of helicopters, and shelling that I might hear accross from the not so far away border, Gaza.

Growing up in my neighborhood in Jerusalem, I somehow understood that to be respected, to be considered to have accomplished much in life, one has to be able to build. That applied to most Palestinians living in East Jerusalem or in the West Bank. And to build, one also had to have a land. Building a house, which takes time and effort, is a family event, a right of passage, of perhaps moving out of parents' houses, or of building more of a permanant house so that children and their spouses could move in some day. I dont remember any of the building that I had been to having to have a special or a certain room.

I do remember, however, the need for a permit to build in East Jerusalem. Permits are very hard to grant, and thus prices of lands, of rent and anything to do with building goes up. Of course, there is always the person who had been waiting for a permit for years, and then would finally give up on getting it and build anyway. Such a person was a neighbor once, and it was horrific to wake up one morning and realize that the building where he lived was gone while he was at work, with his wife outside, sobbing, and the army in its jeep also outside as rocks and bricks were now in no certain structure except for chaos. Of course, there also would be another reason for a building to be destroyed, as a punishment for an entire family if their son was found to be a suicide bomber. The family near us at the time said that they did not know their son was involved in such events, and only woke up to a man, knocking on the door, telling them to evacuate.

All this is say that I have never known what a bomb shelter looks like but only heard about it from people. I live in neighborhood in Ramot in Beer Sheva, on the third floor. The other day, with the windows open, the door of my office room was slammed shut while i was inside. The door knob for this door, which I had never paid attention to until I had to open the tighty jammed door, is different than the other door knobs in the house. It is metal, and can be turned up and so lock the door without having a key. I struggled to turn the door knob down, to come out of the room. Feeling sealed inside of my own room, wondering how i could reach someone to help me if I did not have a phone in my room, I finally thought, "Oh, I must have set up my office room in the bomb sheleter all of these years. This is why when I go study there, I cannot hear a voice, a sound or anything. I wanted to be the isolated when I was studying!"

Many a time I think to myself that I have preserved being Palestinian, my story and so on. And yet it is at times of discovery like these that I realize that by moving here, many parts of me are changed beyond awareness, beyond negociations, beyond a doubt, and beyond an argument. Yesterday, was Israel's independence day. I had gone out to have a meal with a friend that I had not seen for a few years. We went to Naffi's, and had to wait in a queue because of all of the people waiting to be seated. "Strange," I thought, "I had stood in queues, on this same day, but showing my papers to soldiers and policemen to allow me to pass, or trying to perculate through demonstrations back to my own house."

"Chag Sameah," said the waitress as I left with my friends. I smiled wondering how many more bomb shelters I do live in without knowing. Queues have mysterious reason and timing to be formed, to be joined and to be passed through.

A Letter to a psychotic patient by me

2009-06-25T02:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Mister,

If I knew your pshcosis and Russian, I would write this letter in Russian. Our instructor decided that a so called "dip" into the men's locked ward is a good way of initiating medical students into psychiatry. I accompanied my classmates, as the doctor unlocked and locked the first door. We enetered to a second door, which he unlocked and then locked the door behind us. He directed us to a courtyard where the male patients were present. There was about 25 male patients, and we were six female students, and three male students. Much like when a piece of bread is thrown in a late, and then all the ducks gather, most of the patients flocked us at the entrance, and I immitated my peers. They shook hands, and so did I, not knowing where those hands were before.

It seemed that shaking hands was going to save me from drowning into the world of the mad, repel many of the curious looks, questions, stares. I stood in the corner, watching my classmates interact with all the patients, mainly talking and sitting on benches. Are my classmates the crazy ones? How can they just start conversation with people whose history they dont know, neither will they know by the end of the conversation? Or, are the patients crazy talking to us, complete strangers? I was not mad. I just observed, much like one of the patients who was walking around in circles, with curely hair, minimum eye contact, hunched back, in his twenties. I did find someone who was on my same level of craziness! We stared at one another, shook hands. He went on to go around in circle in the courtyard, and I went back to the corner to watch people. There is comfort in company!

After a few minutes, a patient came to me, started a conversation about how he locked himself up in his room for six months, only left to buy cigarettes, and learned English on a computer, but now he forgot it! Attempting at some medical thinking, I wondered, "Hm, did he become psychotic to learn English? Does he have antisocial behavior personality?" The shield of medicine that protects medical students, namely the thoughts about diagnosis, was stripped away from me. And as I thought about how bare I stood listening to this patient, he started screaming, at apparantly someone who was standing right behind me. I understood that my Englih speaking patient wanted to prevent the one behind me from harming me. They started to argue, walked a bit away from me, and I also walked away from them. The patient standing behind me was you.

I took a further look a few minutes later and saw that you were drinking water and spitting it out. Was that what you were going to do standing behind me? I did not know. I proceeded to do what my peers were doing, chatting with other patients. I sat at a bench, started talking, babbling, just like the patients were also talking and babbling. You, then, came up to me at the bench, with your belly hanging through your unbottoned shirt, with some sort of fluid spilled on your pants, and you bent down and also started talking. I would have liked to also talk to you, but you were speaking in Russian. And, I dont speak that language, unfortunately.

You stared at me, speaking, and I wondered to myself what went on in your head, what kind of reality you lived, what your story was, how you changed, why you were speaking Russian to me, how I came to be part of your psychortic world? I remained quiet, and you continued to stare and talk. I stared back.

When we were told the time was up, I quickly slipped through a crowded door, wanting to be safe, and saved, having recognized that inside a men's locked ward, I had no shield and no protection, except my diagnosis and differenetial diagnosis. I raced to reach to my world and shield- my books, my writing.

Dear Mister, this is a letter to you, to answer your psychotic questions. I dont know what you were talking about. Here, I speak in my own psychotic language.

Sincerely, A medical student.

Differential Diagnosis by me 5/31/2008

2009-06-25T02:24:00.000-07:00

An English speaker in her forties and admitted to the dual diagnosis rehab three weeks ago, she agreed to talk to us, three medical students visiting the ward for the day. A 160cm, about 80 kg, dark skinned, dressed in a black shirt and a black pair of capri and a flipflop walked in heavily. Her hair not well kempt, she seemed to sink into the chair, without holding her own stature. Her name cannot be revealed and yet her story was shared with many, including myself. But, by the nature of the medical profession and of being uni-lateral healers, the stories of the medical personnel fade into the background, including my own.

Today is the story of Oshrat.

As medical students, we were expected to do a so called medical interview, to come up with a differential diagnosis and treatment plan. We took turns, talking, perhaps for the first time, to an alcoholic of five years. By so doing, giving the well famous exam questions about alcohol addiction a face, at last.

She was dating a man younger than her for ten years, and who was a drug addict. It was during dating him that she began to drink excessivly. The drinking increased when she was robbed in the post office where she used to work. She, then, continued to have nightmares at night about the robbers. Later, she was fired from her job. With that, her drinking increased from that in the evening, to that in the morning, finishing one bottle of vodka a day. She did not take drugs. She had tried to commit suicide twice. She became appologetic with her frowning face, admitting that she did not know what else to do, that she found herself alone. She could not stop drinking and told her mother to admit her to the detox program, to take her away from her abusive boyfriend.

She had been married previously, with two sons. An older one who was travelling in the States and who told her he never wanted to talk to her, because she lied every time she said she was going to quit drinking. Her younger son, who was still in the army, still talked to her. Occasionally, she talked to her ex-husband. She spoke good English because she had left to California with her ex-husband and children twenty years ago, where she was not able to work initially, and then as her children began to go to school, she joined a culnary school. Here, at the mention of the study of the culinary arts, her faced lightened up for the first time, and she smiled.

When she was going to leave, she was going to move to a place far away from home so that her boyfriend was not going to find her. Her dream was to join a cosematics course, where she could learn to do manicure and pedicure. Here, also, her face lightened up for the second time, and she smiled. She explained about what her day looked like in the detox program- getting up in the morning, having a meal with everyone else, sitting around and talking for a bit with others in a group, doing some arts, and with that were the other two meals. She said that she felt different in the program, that she was not alone.

We thanked Oshrat as she left. The doctor teaching us said, "Well, it is nice what you asked, but you did not ask psychiatric questions. You have not formulated a differential diagnosis." During my first year of medical school, upon every patient encounter, I wrote about their story, just like I had writen the story of Oshrat. During my second year of medical school, I wrote about working with cadavires. During my third year of medical school, I initially wrote about the story of every first patient encounter in each ward. By the end of each rotation, talking to patients became about formulating a differential diagnosis and a treatment plan, and I myself lose my sense of the whole story of a person. There will be many Oshrats that I wil interview, formulate a differenetial diganosis and a treament plan, and with that, I will not be able to write about their story the same way I have writen about Oshrat here.

"I formed my own differential diganosis," I thought to myself, in reply to the doctor teaching us. "Differentual Diagnosis one: we all struggle (some with drugs). Differential Diagnosis two: we all struggle(some with alcohol). Differential Diagnosis three: we all struggle (some with relationships). Differential Diagnosis four: we all struggle (some with self-esteem). Differential Diagnosis five: we all struggle (some with the meaning of life). Differential Diagnosis five: we all struggle (some with our past). Differential Diagnosis six: we all struggle (some with a physical disease). Treatment plan: grace."

Grace (u2)She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name
GraceIt's a name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything
Grace, she's got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She's got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition

What once was hurtWhat once was frictionWhat left a markNo longer stingsBecause grace makes beautyOut of ugly thingsGrace makes beauty out of ugly things

Return by me

2009-06-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

I interviewed a few days ago a Bedouin lady in her thirties, who complained of gernalized pain and inability to move. Coming from a biologial approach, I asked the questions of when the pain was worst, where it started, how long it lasted, and its nature. I pondered all the possibile organic causes of a 10 year history of pain and looked at the lab results that were normal.

"She perhaps suffers from depression with a major psychotic episode. She had lost three childen and her husband married another woman," said the psychiatrist,"You missed it. This is what I call the kulo buga syndrome (it all hurts, in Arabic)." Back in the days, before having started medical school, I met an Um Unis whol also talked to my mother when I was a 6 year old. She, too, was a fallaha, and she too complained of generalized pain.

Western medicine takes me to the far edges of my mind. And then comes in someone who speaks Arabic, and reminds me of a culture I had long left behind, in order to embrace the fields of mind and cognition.

I cannot diagnose yet, but in the process of my own medical inadequacy, my patient brought me back...home. She was right- kulo buga. (It all hurts.)Which Western medical textbooks talk about the kulo buga syndrome?

Change by me

2009-06-25T02:17:00.000-07:00

Are you single?" the man on the second floor said. I had come in to renew my Jordanian passport, and for that, I had to go to the legislative court mainly to get a bunch of signatures, moving from one clerck to the next, until I was stopped by this man.

"Why you want to marry me?" I thought.

"This paper is missing a signature. If you are single, you have to have your father sign this paper, or bring a paper from the church. Otherwise your husband should sign it," he explained.

"I am 24 years old. I live by myself. I know how to handle bills, groceries, cars and pretty soon people's lives, is this not enough to be considered an adult?"

There was no arguing with law. In the States, I was considered an adult many years ago. In East Jerusalem, until I am married, I belong to my father. After marriage, I belong to my husband. I sat on the side, waiting for my father to arrive.

The room had women, in their thirties and forties perhaps, with their heads covered, wearing jilbab, and holding children, or screaming at other children. Their husbands were with them. It would seem that my role as a woman is to have my head covered, be married, raise children while my husband signs papers for me.

Men younger than me got their signatures quickly and moved to the next clerk. Apparantly, I can do many things by myself, but I dont have a penis. Should something be changed in the Jordanin law? Or should I get married to fulfill the expected role?

Gallstones for car pulleys 21/6/2008 by me

2009-06-25T02:12:00.000-07:00

The preoccupation in medicine with technology, clinical trials, evidence-based medicine and high degree of specialization have created in me a new version of Hippocratic Oath- If I wanted to be so technical and so gadget oriented, I would have become a car mechanic, or any sort of engineer. Instead, I wanted to work with people, their perceptions, behavior and bodies in relation to that.

Sometimes there is a gap of realization between the analogies and metaphors one gives and real life situations. And, my car was soon to prove the realization of my new oath. I was driving from Beer Sheva to Jerusalem on road 40, with a 32 degrees celesius weather and my AC on. Thirty minutes into the drive, the AC stopped working, and a bit after that, I began to hear a squeaking sound. I looked at the my engine temperature reader, which was normal. I stopped to check if I had flat tires, and then opened the hood to see smoke coming out of the “engine.” I blindly put in more water and oil into the car, and chose to drive it to the next town- Ahuzzam. I find that when I stop by the side of the road with a broken car, people seldom stop to help me.

With a steering wheel stuck in one place, unable to turn a complete left or right, I pulled into Ahuzam, a town I knew nothing about apart from its sign. Couldn’t my car have broken near Rahat where I spoke the language and knew that I could manage with the inhabitants there? I parked my car under the shade near the very entrance of town, took out a neurology book, read a case about essential tremor. Thinking about tremores, my car was shaking by when it made the noise, and as I pulled up, it also shook. The only number that I had to call to tow my car was back in Beer Sheva, a 45 minute distance traveling by car. Some cars drove past me, and when I rolled down my window to ask for help, none of the drivers seemed to respond. I went back to reading about essential tremor. Even if I figured out what was wrong with my car, I did not know how to fix it. Perhaps I should call the towing truck back from Beer Sheva, and pay the 500 or 600 shekels for the task.

I put down my case files book and decided to ask for a towing truck near Ahuzzam by going to a house that was right across from where I parked my car. It was a one floor house, with a garden that was not well kept. Two men were sitting in the yard, one with a kippa in his 40s, and another one in his 20s. Shabbat was approaching, as it was around 3 pm. A woman inside the house was cleaning the floor at the entrance, pushing water out to the stairs, down to garden. Another man pulled up in his peugot white car, and dropped two young women in their late teens and a boy around the age of 11. The man was in his late thirties, well built. The boy wore black pants, had a black kippa, had “dangly shreaded pants” and “two long side burns.” Was this town religious? Was this family religious? Was I going to get help as an Arab woman?

“Go talk to Yoram, he might be able to help you,” said one of the two men sitting in the garden. Yoram was the father who dropped his three children off, and he came with me to check my car. I opened the hood, taking a look into the car. After a few seconds of having his body bent into the hood, he took out a torn belt on the sides. he said, “It is the belt, it is torn, see? It is connected to your AC and cools the AC off,” he explained. “No wonder,” I said, “My AC stopped working before the car begin to make the strange noise.” I asked if there was a car mechanic that I could call to help me out. “Why? It will cost you so much money, all you need is to buy a belt and replace it. We will go buy from Kiryat Gat, it is not far from here,” Yoram explained.

Was I going to trust this man with my car? Or was I going to pay 600 shekels to have my car towed to Kiryat Gat? It was easy to go back to my car, sink into my case files book about essential tremor while waiting for the towing truck to come. I went in the car with Yoram instead, trusting that he was going to take me to Kiryat Gat, and that we were going to buy the right belt to put it in the car. What followed was my usual fear of being asked where I was from, and who I was. Yoram was surprised to find out that I was not Russian, in fact, I was Arab. And, I was equally surprised that he was half Arab and half Jewish. His mother was Moroccan Jewish, and his father was from Lod, where he was born and raised. He spoke both Arabic and Hebrew, and while his father called him Yousef, he went by Yoram from the Torah. He was a truck driver who delivered commodities to stores in Jerusalem and previously, the West Bank. He had three children, the oldest of whom was studying in college to be a teacher and to be married soon.

“Do you have children? Are you married?” Yoram asked, as I timed how much time it took us to reach Kiryat Gat. “No, I am not,’ I said, taken aback by suck a personal question to me, feeling now that I was more vulnerable without a husband, with a broken car. I could feel my body tensing up. Thankfully, we arrived to Kiryat Gat, and went into a store where I paid around 30 shekels for the belt and then borrowed two “English keys” from a friend of Yoram’s, who was a car mechanic.

“It is so easy to fix, it should take a few minutes and then you can go back on the road,” he said. He sounded optimistic and that gave me hope to reach Jerusalem rather than return to Beer Sheva. He then continued to add, “Ihna Fallaheen (we are peasants), we know how to fix cars.” What followed was a about thirty minutes of me bending down into the car’s hood, placing the belt on the bigger pulley, while Yorm, placed under the car, struggled to place the belt around the second pulley that I could see from the top. It did not work, and Yoram’s optimism and determination to fix a minor problem seemed to wane.

An 18 wheeler truck driver pulled up- a man in his mid forties, well built, with a white beard, came to the car as Yoram stood up to explain to this friend what happened. The old man, who told me his name was Marco, got gloves from his truck and another tool and directed Yoram who was once again sitting under the car how to place the belt.

“You speak Arabic?” Marco asked me after I said my name. “Yes, I do.” “You are Christian?” he asked in Hebrew. Again feeling vulnerable, I said, “Yes.” “Tu parles Francais?” he asked. “Oui, ma famille est francophone. Comment ca ce fait que tu parles Francais? (Yes. my family speaks French, howcome you speak French?)” I asked. He answered my question with a question in Arabic, “Sho bitfakrey be el wadey ( what do you think about the situation?” “Well, I hope I can get the car fixed to get back to Jerusalem,” I answered, not sure what kind of situation he was referring to. “La wadey el bado wow el yahood ( the situation of the Arabs and Jews)”, he clarified in Arabic.“I am going to be a doctor and like you are fixing my car, I fix people’s bodies, regardless of who and what they are,” I answered.

He leaned forward against the hood again, screamed at Yoram in Arabic, “La ya ahbal mish hek (No idiot, that is not the way to do it). You need to pull it stronger.” The instructions continuesd with a high tone, “No place the belt here, I will put my hand on the small pulley. No stupid, not like this. No the belt is the right size.”

The roughness of Marco’s instructions reminded of my rotation in surgery. I once scrubbed with a surgeon who I knew loved to teach students and residents. And I got to be part of an appentectomy with a first year resident doing the operation under this surgeon’s guidance, much like Yoram was trying to fix my car under Marco’s guidance. I remember the older surgeon screaming at the young one, “No that is not how to tie the knot, now that is not how you cut, you need to learn to do the operation with your right hands eve though you are left-handed.” Teaching how to do surgery in medicine and how to fix parts of a car were very similar. At the time, I appreciated how the senior surgeon was willing to teach, and how the young surgeon was willing to take the instruction, no matter how rough it might have sounded.

“Well we disconnected the AC from your engine, you can drive home and try fix the belt there. It is not fitting here,” Marco concluded to me. “I am driving a bit up north till Kiryat Gat, you can follow me with you car,” he explained.

How does one leave a gift to Yoram, to a fallah? I did not know but Shabbat was near, and I had bought a bouquet of flowers in Beer Sheva to take back to Jerusalem. I left it for his wife, and followed Marco on road 40 until we parted ways. “If the car breaks down, you can call me,” he said, giving me his cellphone number.

Thankfully, the car drove slowly but surely back to Jerusalem. And later the next day, as I took it to the car mechanic, he pulled a pulley from under the car, “This is broken and will have to be changed.” Yoram was not wrong- there was a reason why the belt could not fit from the bottom. I took home with me the broken pulley and placed it on my desk. Some patients take back their gall stones once their gall bladders are taken out.

I find it easy to take a car apart, to take a pulley back home, to replace a belt in a car because it has very little meaning and is replacable. What I cannot get over in medicine and what I find most challenging is the humanity of both I and my patients- we both have feelings, and unlike a car, I cannot map out what goes on in the mind of my patients. That might be the essence of the healing art of medicine.

I remember reading once a book about emotional intelligence, and in it, Daniel Goldman, explained that based on the latin root, “E-Motion meant to move away, that our emotions moved us, to fight, to flee, to love, to hate and so on.” In medicine, those deeply rooted biological e-motions, are numbed during procedures, and yet it is because of those e-motions that a patient feels something is wrong and comes to see the doctor. Medicine defines this as “symptoms”.

I would like to take home with me more than broken pulleys, torn belts, and I want my patients to take home with them more than gallstones extracted from their gallbladders.

Medicine Humus and Falafel by me 02/07/2008

2009-06-25T02:09:00.000-07:00

I remember being in the States and meeting Israelis and feeling an unexplicable kindship of love and hate. On the one hand, an Israeli met is one ocean closer to my own home, as compared to North Americans. And yet, on the other hand, such an Israeli met is many walls and checkpoint away in my own homeland. And, which language was I going to use in communicating with such a close cousin, when I did not speak Hebrew, and the Israeli did not speak Arabic? So, I found myself opting for communicating in English, feeling angry and betrayed that an Israeli could claim falafel and humus as his/her own national food, because it was mine; it was Palestinian. The dispute over food ethnicity made no sense to a North American who might have visited the region, and yet would push a North American who lived in Israel/Palestine take sides on the ethnic nationality of humus and falafel.

This is how I remember being a Palestinian in North America: I lived with turmoils of feeling betrayed and cheated. I would meet the American who would praise Israel and say how much s/he loved it, and mention parts of Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Israeli culture that I did not know about. I lived with an unsettling feeling- have I left this country prematurely? Should I have stayed longer? Should I return? Why didnt I speak Hebrew?

So, I returned, not as a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, but as a foreigner, communicating in English, muttering my name in encounters hoping that I could make it a step beyond the usual question of, "Are you Arab? Are you Muslim?" to living my life like everyone else around me. I lived as one of the new North American immigrants to Israel, occasionally told that my accent in Hebrew sounded American. I rarely spoke Arabic or went to familiar Palestinian places. And, if I felt too ostracized for not fitting the classfication of a Russian jewish immigrant, or an Ashekanzi immgrant, I would resolve to being a Jewish spherdi immigrant from Tunisia.

I leave this country having enjoyed my falafel and humus, having decided that there is no sense in arguing over the ethnicity of gourmet, if it brings two people together and gets them busy eating rather than arguing. Medicine has done the same for me as humus and falafel- it separated me from arguments, and brought cooperation in other areas. A fourth year medical student

A letter to a T cell by me

2009-06-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

This letter is from an MS patient to her T-cells in the immune system.

Dear my T-cells,

Medicine seems to be at a loss, filling each moment of unknown with yet again another theory, yet to be proven, and then handed down to the unbelievers among the patients. I, too, have taken to books, journal and randomized control trials to find the answer to my question: why me? The doctors explained to me that the reasons for your behavior is not completely understood- perhaps an aggravation by an infection, or moved from one side of the globe to the other. I was labeled like a food product is labeled in a factory, and sent home with beta-interferon weekly injections, and for discount, I could also get corticosteroids. The trial was over, and I, and you, were found guilty: the medical verdict was Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Next.

Next was a woman in her mid twenties. The pap smear cytology showed abnormal cells, and the jury met to decide on the next tests to be done. The woman’s fear was cervical cancer due to HPV, a sexually transmitted disease.

Oy, but then again, life is not fair, I thought. I would rather be an oncology patient than a neurology patient! At least with cancer there is home for treatment, and there is so much research going on to fight that disease. And for the most part, maybe even at the beginning, it does not affect things people can see, deal with or live with- such as speech, walking, sensation, vision, hearing, balance and so on.

Another accused was waiting for me outside of the court- we both are neurology patients, constantly looking over our shoulders at those cancer patients. What do THEY have to complain about? We both say to each other. We would switch places in a heart beat. My friend has spinal muscular atrophy type three, which is the mild type but still affects her movement, speech, swallowing, walking.

One of the many books on the subject of MS conjures that T-cells become sensitized to the myelin sheaths in the central nervous system. They are able to cross the blood brain barrier that is only crossed by very nutrients and immune cells and attack the nervous tissue in the central nervous system. The disease has many faces- one where the body’s function is completely lost, one where the function is slowly lost over time. The body sometimes recovers from each attack. Sometimes it goes back to it basal function and sometimes it loses a bit of its function The loss of function in medical books has meant losing my ability to dance. With that came the loss of my friends who also dance. Another theory that has not made it into medical student’s textbooks about why you, my dear T cells decide to cross the uncross able blood brain barrier and attack the myelin sheaths, is food. (Medicine eloquently calls it nutrition). The theory says that you, my dear T cells, are too sensitive to handle certain proteins that come through the food in the intestine (gut). And, you seem to take out this intolerance on other proteins in the body, and it so happens, that since skin color is universal, so is protein structure. You don’t seem to be able to differentiate between the protein in the food and that in the body.

Perhaps you also carry the same lineage as the body of the person you live in: you are Palestinian. Palestinians are sensitive against any kind of barrier (Politics calls it checkpoints, walls, blocks). Like you, my dear T-cells, some Palestinians take out their intolerance on other people in the land, and so it happens that since skin color is universal so is hate.

My dear T-cells, I pass to you a pearl of wisdom encoded in your and my genes, and in the literature of sayings and stories: for everything there is a season under the sun, and wise is the man, woman and cell that recognize when it is time to belong, and when it is time to fight, when it is time to respect barriers, and when it is time to tear them down, when it is time that all skin color is universal, and then it is that protein structure is unique and different.

My dear T cells, are you able to create a dynamic balance between what you are sensitive against, where you should cross, and when. Perhaps then, in this dynamic equilibrium within the biologic and diplomatic immunity of the body, you can regain your steps, and I, too, will be able to dance again.

Sincerely, The person in whose body you live and make it also possible to live.

The jury concurred by me 01.07.2008

2009-06-25T02:05:00.000-07:00

"Seventy five percent!" proclaimed Mary. Her neurology professor confirmed the verdict, "Correct, 75 percent of patients with optic neuritis develop multiple sclerosis later.

"I bent my head down, added another note to today's lecture. My eyes closed, "Say it is not so, Mary! If only you knew the weight of your words."

I had been suffering from a so called "loss of vision" for the past two weeks. The family physician referred me to the emergency room to eliminate a papilledema and increased cranial pressure.

"The classical referral to the emergency room is by family physicians, to rule out increased cranial pressure," my neurology professor explained. He is slowly building the evidence for my case, as the medical students take notes. Node their heads.

The physician at the emergency room saw no papilledema and reassured the family physician. " I don't see anything in your eye," he reassured me. "But, I still cannot see in my left eye clearly," I repeated as he sent me away.

The neurology professor now put up some slides of a fundoscopy, "In multiple scleorosis, the patients cannot see, and we, the physicians, cannot see anything in their eyes."

The lecture about multiple sclerosis was over. "Somatization disorders," read the next lecturer on one of his slides. "Most of medical students diagnose themselves around the time of your study!" he said, joking.

Yet, every doctor that I had seen to check my eye relaxed after I told them that I was a medical student. Somehow, no harm was going to happen to me, I was invincible to disease because I was part of the medical personnel. How long will my diplomatic immunity hold? Was I really I sick? Was I imagining my sickness- somtization, as this new lecturer mentioned just now!

Still, I went to another clinic. Maybe another doctor would be able to explain why I could not see in my left eye. At that clinic, there were other medical students, like me. The diplomatic immunity against disease, and vulnerability was shattered in the presence of my own peers. The doctor examined my eye. I had become the "sick" one, to the other medical students, the accused and now, the "guilty".

The medical students nodded as the doctor who examined my eye explained about the differential diagnoses. They took notes. And, I waited for my verdict as the jury of medical students and doctor concurred.

halcha 101, shareeah 101 by me 7/7/2008

2009-06-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

When I was studying in the States, I had my Palestinian friends choose to settle in the States and some of them by now got married to Americans. I remember being unable to reconcile letting go of one’s own country, mother tongue and people. I chose to return to Israel and by so doing, hoping to find the answer to the question, “Can I stay here? How is it that others are leaving?” My last shabbot dinner at a professor's house who taught me my first year in Beer Sheva seemed to offer the long sought answer.

The directions I was emailed were for someone who was walking to my professor's house and not driving. He lived behind a synagogue. The result was that I got lost in a religious neighborhood, asking about the synagogue by the name Kipa. Apparently, there were many synanogues in that neighborhood and subsequently, on the evening of Friday, there were many religious people walking to the synagogue. I asked for directions to the synagogue. One of the most interesting and yet least helpful comments was said by a man that peaked into my car through the car window and said in Hebrew, “Lady, when it is shabbat evening, you don’t stop religious men and ask them how to get to a synagogue.” Why not? I thought. It only made sense, who else would know how to get to the synagogue- the liberal neighbors that don’t live in the religious neighborhood?

Eventually, after discovering a few more synagogues and hearing more comments that were interesting but not helpful, an American Jewish lady recognized the name of the American professor and his wife and showed me how to get to their house. Was it okay to be 30 minutes late to a shabbot meal? I have learned that there are many synagogues, mosques and churches in those two countries or one country or country and a half. But, I have one life to live, against years of traditions and stone buildings that outlive me. Perhaps the religious man was right- one does not ask him about how to get to a synagogue on motsey shabbat, neither does one ask one's traditions, mosques, churches and religions how to get to live life.

Maybe halacha and shareea only belong to the religious people of this country, or country and a half, or two countries, after all.

Is that why my friends did not come back from the States?

Homeless treasures by me 26/8/2008

2009-06-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

There is a world that nobody knows about in the dark alleys of streets, be it in East Jerusalem, West Jersalem, Beer Sheva, Istanbul or here in New York. It is not writen about in Lonely Planet books. New York city seems to hold out its dearest treasures, not in museums, old buildings, or the tourist sights that people sitting in their New York sight seeing bus view and take pictures of. The city holds a secret part of herself late at night, not in times square that never seems to go sleep, or 5th avenue or columbus circle, but rather in the dark streeets of Harlem, and the darkness of Central park.

It is this darkness that protects, even chaperons, those places from the daylight and its regular tourist, middleclass visitors. I have walked back around 6 o clock in the morning to my apartment, and on the stairs of a st John the divine church, i saw a man, covering himself up with a white sheet. A bit down the street, in another corner, near a bus stop, I saw another black man, sleeping on a hard card board, with no sheet.

He will have frost bites in the winter time or be drunk, fall and pass out, and then be brought to the emergency room where a doctor or a medical student or a nurse would have to start him on thiamine, glucose and possibly benzodiazpene. Still, I somehow cherish this abandonned, homeless street life in New York, perhaps because I recogize how universal it is, how I long for it, and yet how much I fight to escape it every day.

One of my heroes, by me 2/11/2008

2009-06-25T01:59:00.000-07:00

St Luke hospital, there is a historical church called St John the Divine. I often cannot go there because I am on the floor, but occasionally, when I lean my back against the window during morning rounds with patients, I glance at the statue of Michael the archangel, and think to myself, "Sanctuary." Part of that church burned down almost a year ago, and it was the homeless in the street that noticed that the archangel Micheal was not lit as he usually is. In many ways, he is the sanctuary for the homeless that sleep on the streets, by being lit every night.

The archangel accompanies my other patients, as I come in with my white coat, wash my hands, before the crack of dawn, and then slowly remove the curtains in a patient's room, perhaps after a long night of pain, or being awoken by the nurse to measure the temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, or by a roommate in the same room who is moaning and groaning. Sometimes, my patients are deep in sleep, when I stand there, silent, for a few seconds, collecting my thoughts, remembering why the patient came in intially, what we did for him, what I am supposed to follow up, what new complaints might have arisen, and above all, i collect the snapshots in time if the patient had been a the hospital for more than two days. Other times, when I remove the curtain, the patient is already awake, and if s/he is near the window, and is looking out, where the archangeal statue is. In my white coat, and struggle to understand the pathology of disease, its nartual history, points of intervention, treatment, I provide a sanctuary for the physical experience of a disease by the patient.

In ways that I cannot explain through medicine, my patients are my heroes. I do not speak of the passing infection that we can treat with antibiotic, but I speak of the chronically ill, the ones undergoing surgeries, those with TB, HIV, cancer, heart and neurology problems. I know that they struggle, I think particuarly of a patient with recurrent bladder cancer, a previous drug addict, now relapsed into use of heroin, with constant pain. Coming to grips with taking his first steps towards accepting healing, accepting his value to heal, even if it involves losing his sexual function, his bladder and so on, without returning to using heroin again. He is off the internal medicine floor, and in other words, off my responsibility, and yet I followed him up as he moved from one floor to the other, and as he is now preparing to get discharged. When he stopped being in my care, I stopped being his sanctuary, for there were other doctors in other teams taking care of him. In my short few minutes visits, I saw him entubated, on SIMV, taking artifical breaths, and then I saw him on another ward, walking with this illocecal bag. I last saw him on another floor in his bed, by the window, staring into the air, without speaking to me. As he moved out of my care, the only scantuary that remained was the window, the white curtains, and the archangeal statue accross from St. Lukes.

This man, with all of his past and present struggles, is one of my heroes.

A preposition for a new country: Palisrael..by me

2009-06-25T01:57:00.000-07:00

Recently, after constantly explaining to whoever I am speaking to that I am from both Israel and Palestine, that I speak both Arabic and Hebrew, that I can somewhat move around in those two places and yet not quite, I decided to call where I am from Palisrael.

Of course, the majority of people shot the idea of this dream down. "Impossible. People cannot forgive, then they forget, and nobody can forget, anything."

Maybe, I think to myself, I am too progressive, and too much of a dreamer, as I always have been, in anything that I do. Still, most of my life, I have never fully known what rights and basic existence taken for granted by others mean. Hence, much like most of my life has been spent in dreams about what it would be like some day, I add another dream to the pile: Palisrael.

The citizens of this country, that is for now a one person country, had to have sat with Jewish settlers, Palestinian Hamas supporters and members, gone to settlements, to refugee camps, celebrated passover, el eid and easter, had shabbat meals, did iftar, learned to speak both Arabic and Hebrew, found themselves the only arabic speaker amongest a group of hebrew speakers, found themselves the only Hebrew speaker amidst a group of Arabic speaker, and if not either, found themselves to be minority at any event. had to listen without giving final solutions, observed and watched silently, or actively taking pictures, writing or buildling, felt a deep sense of injustice and yet frusteration, anger and yet continued to dream, of something beyond borders and pragmatisms, felt rejected at one event or the other, and constantly felt had to prove they belonged.

So this is where I am from: life experiences are the passport that anyone can bring to this country of mine.

Maine 30/12/2008 by me

2009-06-25T01:55:00.000-07:00

By me I knew three important facts about Maine: it is cold, near Canada, and the Seeds of Peace held their peace summer camps there.

After being in Portland and Augusta for two days: I know two more facts: we are all cousins and there is so much land.

I had seen pictures of Portland during my teenage years when a young 17 year old man my age was shot, and subsequently died, by Israeli soldiers when demonstrations broke out in his village, Aarabeh, in the trinagle area of the Gaillea. That young man, my same age, had participated in a peace camp with the Seeds of Peace a year before. Having come back from spending a summer in Portland doing outdoors activities and communicated with other Israeli and Arab teenagers, he made friends and encouraged "leading both sides." A year later, he was killed, and seven years later after his parents went through trials of the Israeli army, there was no explanation for his killing as an Israeli citizen.

In many ways, Asel Asleh represented my generation, or at least, I myself as individual who also went to another summer camp, Building Bridges for Peace, in Denver, Colorado, the same year he went. I, too, believed in "leading sides", even after the second camp David failed the summer of 2000. And now, another peer was killed for no justfication. "Leading both sides" never meant anything more than then, amidst the second Intifada breaking out, the loss of another peer, the meanindlessness of killing, the struggles to have a normal life, to be a 17 year old, not older.

Eight years later, I found myself in the same city that Asel Asleh was in, Portland. Two grandparents brought their granddaughter to the bus station to go to south station, in Boston. "Where are you from?" I asked the grandparents. "Augusta, but we are with our grand-daughter. Where are you from?"

"Israel-Palestine," I answered. The older gentleman answered. "Well, a lot is going on there." I nodded. There was silence."Maine is very close to Canada," I said, "Yes," said the older women, "We speak French." I spoke French with the older couple, knowing that I was going to hear a Canadian French accent. The couple warmed up to me. It was time to board the bus. They helped their grand-daugher with her lugguage, introduced themselves and shook my hands. "On est tous cousins, eh?" said the older woman.

"Of course, we are all cousins," I said, smiling. On my bus ride, I thought about it again, watching the snow in Maine, the lakes, the bare trees, the spread out houses, the huge amount of uninhibited land.

Is that what Asel saw eight years ago in Portand, and was that what I saw eight years ago in Denver, that there was so much land, that we were all cousins in the end?I am not sure. He is dead. Many others are dead as well. But there is so much land.

Childhood games by me

2009-06-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

War is senseless, and it doesnt matter which side it is on, because guess what?A missile never stops, knocks at your door, checks your ethnicity and then decides to kill you!

Quite the opposite, it is you, the civilian of any sort, who travels in his or her memory before every missile falls, knocks on each door, checks who the person is, and then prays, believing whole heartedly and magically, that your wishes are answered by the missile. "Surely, he is a friend, he will be spared. Surely, she is an enemy, and she deserves that. Surely, he is an ally and would not send you there."So often, I played those games as a child, during the first gulf war, as I heard the sirens in Jerusalem, knowing that it was time to go to the special room, and place that heavy mask on my face, waiting. And while I waited in that special room for the sirenes to go away, and I did not go to school, I played the "missile game." Surely, Iraqis wont kill Palestinians, only Israelis are their enemies...Well, not really, missiles visited everyone, lethally.

The game I played with missiles never changed. They, the missiles and the games that is, came back two years ago, up north. Surely, they can tell who is Palestinian and who is Israeli...Not really...But it was one of my childhood games. Sometimes, though, I never seem to grow up out of that game, as I hear the missiles coming again, old memories, and yet so alive, so fresh, so real. And the missiles never seem to grow out of their game either. Strange...those childhood games.

The Ways in India, by me

2009-06-25T01:52:00.001-07:00

By me. not to be taken seriously, meant to entertain, not offend or document or impress! This is not a travel guide!

Jan 21, 2009 Being the professional travelers that they are, my classmates loaded their one piece small suitcases on the cart, while I thrust my 20kg lugguage on my cart. The security officers pulled me aside, while the rest of my travel buddies continued through the gate. The security officer flipped through my laisse passé, asked me about my parents, about living in East Jerusalem ( even though I moved out almost four years ago to live in Beer sheva), my studies in the States, in Beer Sheva, reason to my departure to India. My group had arrived to the airport later than we expected, and there was only one hour left before the departure. Was I going to catch the flight before telling my life story!?Two security officers escorted to me to the departure area; one of them talked about how hungry she was, how much she wanted to eat Hummus. I, too, was hungry, so we continued the conversation to topics of falafel and shawrmah, laughed and I went through the gate. Technically, this is my first trip to a third world country. I count being in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as third world country set up, but perhaps it is not. And yet, isn’t India a world on the way to being considered developed? Anyway, whether it be developed or developing or in transition, it will be my first time there! I have two things i want to do: to go to an Indian wedding, to learn to dance like an Indian.

Jan 22, 09 Well, my classmates and I exited Chennai airport to set our foot on Indian soil, to a different world…of cars, cars that I only saw in movies back in the 1920s! The hospital sent a driver to pick us up. I never thought that being jet lagged is something to be thankful for, and yet I actually was today in the car! I don’t understand how people drive here, there is no two lanes, or three or four. It all depends on who decides when to over take the other car, autorickshaw, the motobikes, bicycle or bull pulling a cart. I was asleep on the way, and was sure that the next time I was going to open my eyes, I was either going to be in the hospital, and not as an observing medical student, or in heaven, or hell. This ride could be a swift introduction to emergency medicine or the ICU in Indian hospitals! First impressions: there is more than one way to get anywhere here, not just vehicle wise! There are cows in the street. Women wear saris. If you are a passenger, not a driver, it is better to travel with your eyes closed while also praying to your god.

Feb 2, 2009 They are hills people"They are hills people and are stubborn," the intern explained to me, rushed to see the other children on the ward, before the pediatric morning rounds. 24 beds, one intern, and a long list of pneumonia, nephrotic syndrome, malnutrient, meningitis, gastroentertitis at this community health hospital. I had asked her about a 4 year old was malnourished, he looked like he was 2, what his mother fed him, if it was explained to her what he should eat. "Where did the baby go?" I asked another intern in the labour and delivery ward after he delivered the mother. I did not see any pediatricians to take the babye to weigh him. "The mother in law took him outside to show him to other family members," a nurse explained. "Well, I thought you would give the baby to the mother to see," I said. "It is hills people, they proud its a son," was the explanation I got. I am still not sure I know who the hills people are. They have sons, and they are malnourished.

From A in Israel, where are you now? by me

2009-06-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

I was called to translate for A., a Sudanese refugee.

Palestinian Arabic is very different than Sudanese Arabic, but the dialects are similar. Oblivious to his culture, his understanding of who I was, I introduced myself, constanlty checking for his facial expressions. Did he understand me? Five minutes of his answers mounted to a few minutes of my translation into English. He barely responded to me and stared straight ahead at the walls. He was dressed in a jogging suit, sitting outside in the heat of beer sheva. Wasn't he a little bit hot?
I nodded, as I let A. finish his meal. I did not shake hands with him when I introduced myself; was it acceptable for me to shake his hand? As he held the fork to eat, I wondered if his skin infection on his hand was contagious. I sat a little further from where he was, watching him eat some meat and rice. He offered me the fruits on the table. Martin, the man A. is staying with, was concerned for A's medical condition. "He is itching. He is always sleepy. He does not want to be in the sun. We need to know about his medical condition."

The task of why I was called began, and the skills of the medical interview I learned my first two years of medical school were used. Does the skin rash hurt? When did it start? How long has been for? What makes it worse? better? Do you have any other pains or aches? Did you get previous treatment? Do you have any kind of papers with you that I can take a look at? A. took several trips to his room, each time producing a different paper, as the interview progressed. When he stood up for the last trip to his room, I glanced at his feet. They were swollen. His legs and arms were very thin, and he had an enlarged belly. A refugee admited to Israel in June, said the paper published by the UN. His official documents expire in three months.

The hospital discharge report explained that he has anemia, hypolabunemia and psiorasis. He was briefly treated for psiorasis only and discharged prematurely, and sent away with some weak steroids to apply on the lesions. After having studied about chronic and terminal diseases that cannot be cured, I was disturbed to see A. who could be helped and even cured from anemia and hypoalbunemia. He continued to explain to me that he ran away with his family from south Sudan, to Khartum where he worked and saved up some money. He sent his family back to go through Kenya to reach south Sudan again. He was going to catch up with them after he saved up some more money.

However, the borders of Kenya were closed and his attempt to go through Ethiopia failed as they, too, closed their border. He, then, left to Egypt where he stayed seven years, working in a superamarket and there his skin condition began. "If you are sick, you dont want to go to hospital in Egypt. They steal your organs," he explained, when I asked him if he was happy to be here. He was happy with the hospital treatment that he recieved here, for they did not steal his organs. More phone calls to doctors followed my interview of A.

Sadly, most of the doctors refused to examine him. Finally, a dermatologist granted us 30 minutes of his time. As he took his shirt off to be examined, the dermatologist explained that now he has exfoliative psiorasis, a progression of psiorasis. "Would you like some water?" I asked A." No, the water is too cold. The room is too cold," he answered. "It is becase of his hypoalbunemia. He is not able to maintain his temperature," explained the dermatologist.

We left with a referal paper to the hospital, and the hope that he will be admited and cured from some medical conditions induced by malnurtient. Somewhere accross many borders from here, A. has a wife and two children that I never felt the courage to ask him about. He still stares at the wall when I go visit him. Is he thinking about his children, wife and the rest of his family? This letter is meant for them: A. is alive and is being taken care of, here in Israel. Where are you now? Have you made it back to south Sudan? Hope that you are well.

Letter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani

2009-06-25T01:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Mustafa,

I have now received your letter, in which you tell me that you've done everything necessary to enable me to stay with you in Sacramento. I've also received news that I have been accepted in the department of Civil Engineering in the University of California. I must thank you for everything, my friend. But it'll strike you as rather odd when I proclaim this news to you -- and make no doubt about it, I feel no hesitation at all, in fact I am pretty well positive that I have never seen things so clearly as I do now. No, my friend, I have changed my mind. I won't follow you to "the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces" as you wrote. No, I'll stay here, and I won't ever leave. I am really upset that our lives won't continue to follow the same course, Mustafa. For I can almost hear you reminding me of our vow to go on together, and of the way we used to shout: "We'll get rich!" But there's nothing I can do, my friend. Yes, I still remember the day when I stood in the hall of Cairo airport, pressing your hand and staring at the frenzied motor. At that moment everything was rotating in time with the ear-splitting motor, and you stood in front of me, your round face silent. Your face hadn't changed from the way it used to be when you were growing up in the Shajiya quarter of Gaza, apart from those slight wrinkes. We grew up together, understanding each other completely and we promised to go on together till the end. But... "There's a quarter of an hour left before the plane takes off. Don't look into space like that. Listen! You'll go to Kuwait next year, and you'll save enough from your salary to uproot you from Gaza and transplant you to California. We started off together and we must carry on. . ." At that moment I was watching your rapidly moving lips. That was always your manner of speaking, without commas or full stops. But in an obscure way I felt that you were not completely happy with your flight. You couldn't give three good reasons for it. I too suffered from this wrench, but the clearest thought was: why don't we abandon this Gaza and flee? Why don't we? Your situation had begun to improve, however. The ministry of Education in Kuwait had given you a contract though it hadn't given me one. In the trough of misery where I existed you sent me small sums of money. You wanted me to consider them as loans. because you feared that I would feel slighted. You knew my family circumstances in and out; you knew that my meagre salary in the UNRWA schools was inadequate to support my mother, my brother's widow and her four children. "Listen carefully. Write to me every day... every hour... every minute! The plane's just leaving. Farewell! Or rather, till we meet again!" Your cold lips brushed my cheek, you turned your face away from me towards the plane, and when you looked at me again I could see your tears. Later the Ministry of Education in Kuwait gave me a contract. There's no need to repeat to you how my life there went in detail. I always wrote to you about everything. My life there had a gluey, vacuous quality as though I were a small oyster, lost in oppressive loneliness, slowly struggling with a future as dark as the beginning of the night, caught in a rotten routine, a spewed-out combat with time. Everything was hot and sticky. There was a slipperiness to my whole life, it was all a hankering for the end of the month. In the middle of the year, that year, the Jews bombarded the central district of Sabha and attacked Gaza, our Gaza, with bombs and flame-throwers. That event might have made some change in my routine, but there was nothing for me to take much notice of; I was going to leave. this Gaza behind me and go to California where I would live for myself, my own self which had suffered so long. I hated Gaza and its inhabitants. Everything in the amputated town reminded me of failed pictures painted in grey by a sick man. Yes, I would send my mother and my brother's widow and her children a meagre sum to help them to live, but I would liberate myself from this last tie too, there in green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils. The sympathy which bound me to my brother's children, their mother and mine would never be enough to justify my tragedy in taking this perpendicular dive. It mustn't drag me any further down than it already had. I must flee! You know these feelings, Mustafa, because you've really experienced them. What is this ill-defined tie we had with Gaza which blunted our enthusiasm for flight? Why didn't we analyse the matter in such away as to give it a clear meaning? Why didn't we leave this defeat with its wounds behind us and move on to a brighter future which would give us deeper consolation? Why? We didn't exactly know. When I went on holiday in June and assembled all my possessions, longing for the sweet departure, the start towards those little things which give life a nice, bright meaning, I found Gaza just as I had known it, closed like the introverted lining of a rusted snail-shell thrown up by the waves on the sticky, sandy shore by the slaughter-house. This Gaza was more cramped than the mind of a sleeper in the throes of a fearful nightmare, with its narrow streets which had their bulging balconies...this Gaza! But what are the obscure causes that draw a man to his family, his house, his memories, as a spring draws a small flock of mountain goats? I don't know. All I know is that I went to my mother in our house that morning. When I arrived my late brother's wife met me there and asked me,weeping, if I would do as her wounded daughter, Nadia, in Gaza hospital wished and visit her that evening. Do you know Nadia, my brother's beautiful thirteen-year-old daughter? That evening I bought a pound of apples and set out for the hospital to visit Nadia. I knew that there was something about it that my mother and my sister-in-law were hiding from me, something which their tongues could not utter, something strange which I could not put my finger on. I loved Nadia from habit, the same habit that made me love all that generation which had been so brought up on defeat and displacement that it had come to think that a happy life was a kind of social deviation. What happened at that moment? I don't know. I entered the white room very calm. Ill children have something of saintliness, and how much more so if the child is ill as result of cruel, painful wounds. Nadia was lying on her bed, her back propped up on a big pillow over which her hair was spread like a thick pelt. There was profound silence in her wide eyes and a tear always shining in the depths of her black pupils. Her face was calm and still but eloquent as the face of a tortured prophet might be. Nadia was still a child, but she seemed more than a child, much more, and older than a child, much older. "Nadia!" I've no idea whether I was the one who said it, or whether it was someone else behind me. But she raised her eyes to me and I felt them dissolve me like a piece of sugar that had fallen into a hot cup of tea. ' Together with her slight smile I heard her voice. "Uncle! Have you just come from Kuwait?" Her voice broke in her throat, and she raised herself with the help of her hands and stretched out her neck towards me. I patted her back and sat down near her. "Nadia! I've brought you presents from Kuwait, lots of presents. I'll wait till you can leave your bed, completely well and healed, and you'll come to my house and I'll give them to you. I've bought you the red trousers you wrote and asked me for. Yes, I've bought them." It was a lie, born of the tense situation, but as I uttered it I felt that I was speaking the truth for the first time. Nadia trembled as though she had an electric shock and lowered her head in a terrible silence. I felt her tears wetting the back of my hand. "Say something, Nadia! Don't you want the red trousers?" She lifted her gaze to me and made as if to speak, but then she stopped, gritted her teeth and I heard her voice again, coming from faraway. "Uncle!" She stretched out her hand, lifted the white coverlet with her fingers and pointed to her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh. My friend ... Never shall I forget Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh. No! Nor shall I forget the grief which had moulded her face and merged into its traits for ever. I went out of the hospital in Gaza that day, my hand clutched in silent derision on the two pounds I had brought with me to give Nadia. The blazing sun filled the streets with the colour of blood. And Gaza was brand new, Mustafa! You and I never saw it like this. The stone piled up at the beginning of the Shajiya quarter where we lived had a meaning, and they seemed to have been put there for no other reason but to explain it. This Gaza in which we had lived and with whose good people we had spent seven years of defeat was something new. It seemed to me just a beginning. I don't know why I thought it was just a beginning. I imagined that the main street that I walked along on the way back home was only the beginning of a long, long road leading to Safad. Everything in this Gaza throbbed with sadness which was not confined to weeping. It was a challenge: more than that it was something like reclamation of the amputated leg! I went out into the streets of Gaza, streets filled with blinding sunlight. They told me that Nadia had lost her leg when she threw herself on top of her little brothers and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames that had fastened their claws into the house. Nadia could have saved herself, she could have run away, rescued her leg. But she didn't. Why? No, my friend, I won't come to Sacramento, and I've no regrets. No, and nor will I finish what we began together in childhood. This obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza, this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you. It must expand, you must seek it in order to find yourself, here among the ugly debris of defeat. I won't come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.

Damascus what are you doing to me?

2009-06-25T01:45:00.002-07:00

1My voice rings out, this time, from DamascusIt rings out from the house of my mother and fatherIn Sham. The geography of my body changes.The cells of my blood become green.My alphabet is green.In Sham. A new mouth emerges for my mouthA new voice emerges for my voiceAnd my fingersBecome a tribe

2I return to DamascusRiding on the backs of cloudsRiding the two most beautiful horses in the worldThe horse of passion.The horse of poetry.I return after sixty yearsTo search for my umbilical cord,For the Damascene barber who circumcised me,For the midwife who tossed me in the basin under the bedAnd received a gold lira from my father,She left our houseOn that day in March of 1923Her hands stained with the blood of the poem . . .

3I return to the womb in which I was formed . . .To the first book I read in it . . .To the first woman who taught meThe geography of love . . .And the geography of women . . .

4I returnAfter my limbs have been strewn across all the continentsAnd my cough has been scattered in all the hotelsAfter my mother's sheets scented with laurel soapI have found no other bed to sleep on . . .And after the "bride" of oil and thymeThat she would roll up for meNo longer does any other "bride" in the world please meAnd after the quince jam she would make with her own handsI am no longer enthusiastic about breakfast in the morningAnd after the blackberry drink that she would makeNo other wine intoxicates me . . .

5I enter the courtyard of the Umayyad MosqueAnd greet everyone in itCorner to . . . cornerTile to . . . tileDove to . . . doveI wander in the gardens of Kufi scriptAnd pluck beautiful flowers of God's wordsAnd hear with my eye the voice of the mosaicsAnd the music of agate prayer beadsA state of revelation and rapture overtakes me,So I climb the steps of the first minaret that encounters meCalling:"Come to the jasmine""Come to the jasmine"

6Returning to youStained by the rains of my longingReturning to fill my pocketsWith nuts, green plums, and green almondsReturning to my oyster shellReturning to my birth bedFor the fountains of VersaillesAre no compensation for the Fountain CaféAnd Les Halles in ParisIs no compensation for the Friday marketAnd Buckingham Palace in LondonIs no compensation for Azem PalaceAnd the pigeons of San Marco in VeniceAre no more blessed than the doves in the Umayyad MosqueAnd Napoleon's tomb in Les InvalidesIs no more glorious than the tomb of Salah al-Din Al-Ayyubi . . .

7I wander in the narrow alleys of Damascus.Behind the windows, honeyed eyes awakeAnd greet me . . .The stars wear their gold braceletsAnd greet meAnd the pigeons alight from their towersAnd greet meAnd the clean Shami cats come outWho were born with us . . .Grew up with us . . .And married with us . . .To greet me . . .

8I immerse myself in the Buzurriya SouqSet a sail in a cloud of spicesClouds of clovesAnd cinnamon . . .And camomile . . .I perform ablutions in rose water once.And in the water of passion many times . . .And I forget-while in the Souq al-‘Attarine-All the concoctions of Nina Ricci . . .And Coco Chanel . . .What are you doing to me Damascus?How have you changed my culture? My aesthetic taste?For I have been made to forget the ringing of cups of licoriceThe piano concerto of Rachmaninoff . . .How do the gardens of Sham transform me?For I have become the first conductor in the worldThat leads an orchestra from a willow tree!!

9I have come to you . . .From the history of the Damascene roseThat condenses the history of perfume . . .From the memory of al-MutanabbiThat condenses the history of poetry . . .I have come to you . . .From the blossoms of bitter orange . . .And the dahlia . . .And the narcissus . . .And the "nice boy" . . .That first taught me drawing . . .I have come to you . . .From the laughter of Shami womenThat first taught me music . . .And the beginning of adolesenceFrom the spouts of our alleyThat first taught me cryingAnd from my mother's prayer rugThat first taught meThe path to God . . .

10I open the drawers of memoryOne . . . then anotherI remember my father . . .Coming out of his workshop on Mu'awiya AlleyI remember the horse-drawn carts . . .And the sellers of prickly pears . . .And the cafés of al-RubwaThat nearly-after five flasks of ‘araq-Fall into the riverI remember the colored towelsAs they dance on the door of Hammam al-KhayyatinAs if they were celebrating their national holiday.I remember the Damascene housesWith their copper doorknobsAnd their ceilings decorated with glazed tilesAnd their interior courtyardsThat remind you of descriptions of heaven . . .

11The Damascene HouseIs beyond the architectural textThe design of our homes . . .Is based on an emotional foundationFor every house leans . . . on the hip of anotherAnd every balcony . . .Extends its hand to another facing itDamascene houses are loving houses . . .They greet one another in the morning . . .And exchange visits . . .Secretly-at night . . .

12When I was a diplomat in BritainThirty years agoMy mother would send letters at the beginning of SpringInside each letter . . .A bundle of tarragon . . .And when the English suspected my lettersThey took them to the laboratoryAnd turned them over to Scotland YardAnd explosives experts.And when they grew weary of me . . . and my tarragonThey would ask: Tell us, by god . . .What is the name of this magical herb that has made us dizzy?Is it a talisman?Medicine?A secret code?What is it called in English?I said to them: It's difficult for me to explain . . .For tarragon is a language that only the gardens of Sham speakIt is our sacred herb . . .Our perfumed eloquenceAnd if your great poet Shakespeare had known of tarragonHis plays would have been better . . .In brief . . .My mother is a wonderful woman . . . she loves me greatly . . .And whenever she missed meShe would send me a bunch of tarragon . . .Because for her, tarragon is the emotional equivalentTo the words: my darling . . .And when the English didn't understand one word of my poetic argument . . .They gave me back my tarragon and closed the investigation . . .

13From Khan Asad BashaAbu Khalil al-Qabbani emerges . . .In his damask robe . . .And his brocaded turban . . .And his eyes haunted with questions . . .Like Hamlet'sHe attempts to present an avant-garde playBut they demand Karagoz's tent . . .He tries to present a text from ShakespeareThey ask him about the news of al-Zir . . .He tries to find a single female voiceTo sing with him . . ."Oh That of Sham"They load up their Ottoman rifles,And fire into every rose treeThat sings professionally . . .He tries to find a single womanTo repeat after him:"Oh bird of birds, oh dove"They unsheathe their knivesAnd slaughter all the descendents of doves . . .And all the descendents of women . . .After a hundred years . . .Damascus apologized to Abu Khalil al-QabbaniAnd they erected a magnificent theater in his name.

14I put on the jubbah of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-ArabiI descend from the peak of Mt. QassiunCarrying for the children of the city . . .PeachesPomegranatesAnd sesame halawa . . .And for its women . . .Necklaces of turquoise . . .And poems of love . . .I enter . . .A long tunnel of sparrowsGillyflowers . . .Hibiscus . . .Clustered jasmine . . .And I enter the questions of perfume . . .And my schoolbag is lost from meAnd the copper lunch case . . .In which I used to carry my food . . .And the blue beadsThat my mother used to hang on my chestSo People of ShamHe among you who finds me . . .let him return me to Umm Mu'atazAnd God's reward will be hisI am your green sparrow . . . People of ShamSo he among you who finds me . . .let him feed me a grain of wheat . . .I am your Damascene rose . . . People of ShamSo he among you who finds me . . .let him place me in the first vase . . .I am your mad poet . . . People of ShamSo he among you who sees me . . .let him take a souvenir photograph of meBefore I recover from my enchanting insanity . . .I am your fugitive moon . . . People of ShamSo he among you who sees me . . .Let him donate to me a bed . . . and a wool blanket . . .Because I haven't slept for centuries

Stories in medicine

2009-06-25T01:45:00.001-07:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1480863

Lessing wins Nobel Laureate price

2009-06-25T01:43:00.000-07:00

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2189458,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2189004,00.html

A letter from Muslim religious leaders to Christian leaders.

2009-06-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/11_10_07_letter.pdf

Jerusalem Welcomes Ramadan

2009-06-25T01:41:00.001-07:00

http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2260&ed=146&edid=146

The surprising Power of the Aging brain

2009-06-25T01:40:00.001-07:00

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1147163-1,00.html

Becoming a physician

2009-06-25T01:39:00.001-07:00

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/352/19/1943

Poetry is Politics

2009-06-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/741/cu2.htm

Arab poetry's sometimes subversive answer to "American Idol"

2009-06-25T01:37:00.000-07:00

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9009.shtml

The Code

2009-06-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/13/1273?query=TOC

Haidar Abdel Shafi Obituary

2009-06-25T01:32:00.000-07:00

Brittain Wednesday September 26, 2007

The Guardian Dr Haider Abdel-Shafi, who has died at the age of 88, was a towering figure of the Palestinian national movement for more than half a century - not only one of the fiercest critics of Israel, but also often of the Palestinian leadership. He had a commanding presence, equally at home in an Oxford college as on the crowded streets of Gaza, and his integrity shone out in any company.

Abdel-Shafi was born into an illustrious religious family in Gaza, just at the end of the Ottoman occupation. After boarding at the Arab College in Jerusalem, he studied medicine at the American University of Beirut. There he joined the Arab Nationalist Movement, which backed the founding of a Palestinian state and the growing Arab revolt in British-occupied Palestine.

In 1944 he joined the British Jordanian army, then part of a new British Ninth Army intended to open a second front (which never materialised) in the Balkans. Instead, he spent the war in Palestine, and then set up in private practice in Gaza. Wounded Palestinian guerrillas were brought to him as clashes escalated between Jews and Arabs following the 1947 UN partition resolution. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, he ran a medical clearing station in Gaza as the territory was flooded with 200,000 refugees.A

fter studying surgery at the Miami Valley hospital in Dayton, Ohio, he returned to the Middle East in 1954, by which time Gaza was under Egyptian rule, and worked as a surgeon at the Tal Zahur hospital. Israel invaded and temporarily occupied Gaza in 1956, installing a municipal council, on which he refused to serve. The following year he married Hoda Khalidi, daughter of a prominent Jerusalem family who, since 1948, had been refugees in Alexandria. The Egyptians appointed him head of medical services in the Gaza Strip (1957-60), and he became a personal friend of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Abdel-Shafi was chairman of the first Palestinian legislative council in Gaza (1962-64). He was also a delegate to the first all-Palestinian conference, which convened in Jerusalem in 1964 and established the PLO. He became a member of the first PLO executive committee (1964-65), and by 1966 was the leading PLO figure in the Gaza Strip.

During the 1967 six-day war, he worked as a volunteer at the Shifa hospital in Gaza, as Israel again occupied the area. Suspected of supporting the military activities of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), he was detained by the Israelis - he always denied membership of the PFLP, but expressed sympathy for its radical stand. In 1969 he was expelled for three months to the isolated Sinai village of Nahal. He was deported again in 1970, this time to Lebanon for two months, with five other prominent members of the Gaza leadership, in retaliation for a PFLP hijacking.Abdel-Shafi was founder and director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in the Gaza Strip from 1972, providing free medical care and a forum for cultural activities. This provided the bedrock of his later grassroots political support.

In 1978, he denounced the Camp David accords as an Egyptian sellout of the Palestinians to get back Sinai. In retaliation, Israel confined him to Gaza, and threatened the Red Crescent with closure. In May 1988, during the first Palestinian intifada, he went on US prime-time television with Saeb Erakat and Hanan Ashrawi. It was the first time that Palestinians had directly addressed an Israeli and western audience, and the three achieved a turning point in western perception of the PLO.

Abdel-Shafi became a world figure when he led the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, where his moving and eloquent speech set a tone that no other Palestinian leader has ever risen to. For the next 22 months, he headed the very difficult negotiations with the Israelis in Washington. He left the delegation once over the issue of settlements, and even after he was persuaded to return, urged the Palestinians to withdraw from a process he believed was doomed by bad faith on this issue. Like the writer Edward Said (obituary, September 26 2003), he forecast the failure of the Oslo peace process long before it became obvious.

Abdel-Shafi was overwhelmingly popular in Gaza, and in 1996 was elected to the Palestinian legislative council with the highest number of votes, becoming leader of its political committee. Three years later, his disagreements with Yasser Arafat (obituary, November 12 2004) came into the open when Abdel-Shafi walked out of the Palestine National Congress meeting, arguing that Arafat should not amend the Palestinian national charter to recognise Israel until reciprocal recognition was achieved.He announced his intention to resign from the PLC in October 1997 on the grounds that it did not have any real power to change the Palestinians' situation; he also called for more democracy within the Palestine national authority (PNA), and a national unity leadership. The following April he initiated unity talks for all factions in Gaza - Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the leftwing PFLP and DFLP.

Abdel-Shafi described the Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000 as a spontaneous rejection of 10 years of fruitless negotiations that Israel had used to create facts on the ground; he supported the right of the Palestinians to fight, but opposed suicide bombings. Even as the splits in the Palestinian political class deepened, he continued to call for a government of national unity, even if this meant the PNA would be allied with groups unacceptable to the west, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It was symbolic of his unique position that his funeral procession yesterday was accompanied by representatives of all the factions in Gaza.He is survived by his wife, four children and seven grandchildren.· Haider Abdel-Shafi, doctor and politician, born 1919; died September 25 2007

Sudanese Refugees

2009-06-25T01:31:00.001-07:00

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D0B401A0-A76B-43F8-8A04-64C63AE8547B.htm

ER Gaza

2009-06-25T01:30:00.000-07:00

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2844029351631328516&q=the+tea+boy+of+gaza&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Prayer by Alice Oswald

2009-06-25T01:29:00.000-07:00

Here I work in the hollow of God's hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
Isense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.

And all I ask is this - and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish -
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it's done.·

From The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile by Alice Oswald,

Rababa

2009-06-25T01:24:00.000-07:00

Translated from the Arabic by Taline Voskeritchian

With the arrival of the first signs of spring at the end of the second month of the year, on the third day after the rains had stopped, the rababa1 appeared at the military checkpoint, and what is meant here is not the white cloud, the classical, linguistic meaning of the word, whose appearance did not catch anybody’s attention. Winter’s spring is more pristine and beautiful than spring itself. The wash of the world has dried, but it is still fresh, soft, fragrant, free of the dust that will induce allergies. The bedouin rababa appeared in the hand of a man from the city, who had turned it into a performance instrument in a public place teaming with throngs of people. The musician was begging for money, as they do in European city centers where young and old, panhandlers and non-panhandlers alike play their fiddles, guitars or saxophones, the instruments’ black cases at their feet and open to meager metal pieces thrown in. But the rababa is a naked, homeless instrument, and that is why, like beggars who do not have a rababa, the man used a standard tool for panhandling, a plastic plate.

With the rababa appeared an old, absent friend—the small chair, whose return, unlike winter or spring, is not seasonal. At the beginning of the reign of chairs and benches, the stool had dominated the scene: four wooden legs, a height not exceeding thirty centimeters, and a seat made of caned bamboo or rope. Toward the end of the era, the caned material had evolved into plastic rope, a harbinger of the plastic chairs to follow.

The stool became popular in gatherings and coffee shops, and on verandas. It was particularly suitable for the shishbesh game, in which the board was placed on a third chair between the two chairs. The stool is for sipping coffee, for smoking cigarettes, for conversation. It is not suitable for contemplation unless the personal and public tragedy is so great that brooding becomes a real possibility, even if the brooder, like a hermit, sits in emptiness, on top of a pole. Today, young people cannot understand how the sons of that generation could sit for long hours on a stool, without suffering backaches: the position is the same as that of the athletic squat, or the crouch, in precivilized times, to relieve oneself.

These little chairs disappeared and were replaced everywhere by plastic ones—among the wealthy, on the veranda only, if at all; among the poor, on the veranda and inside the house, and in their coffee shops everything was plastic, except the walls.

Between the stool and the rababa—both of them worn out and obsolete—sat a silent human being, insistent on staying. He played the rababa but did not sing, his gaze fixed on the ground, and at an angle from which he would see only the feet of the passersby, and perhaps their legs. His eyes did not meet anyone else’s. The kaffiyeh covered his head and chin, exposing the mouth and mustache to people’s gaze. His features were pleasant, his body skinny, folded in on itself and in no way suggestive of the proud, prominent posture of the rababa players in the bedouin television series that became popular with the domination of the desert on the mass media. In these series, bedouin songs were sung in bedouin dialect by blonde women who were not bedouins themselves, without a rababa.

At most, the rababa is fit for what is known in English as “sound effect”; it merely accompanies the singing but is not itself music, while the singing—by itself often a lament—tries to mitigate the rababa’s monotonous drone. The blame for the monotony should not be placed on the man seated between the rababa and the stool, the man who refused to sing, who was on strike like other people in this place who refused to even talk. It is rather the result of the fact that the rababa is made of one string only, pulled tightly over a leather sheath, which in turn has been pulled over a rudimentary wooden box. The musician carries this small instrument as though it were a misshapen cello, supported on the knee. It is played with a bow made of a horse’s tail, the source of all bows. The string is usually made from the intestines of cattle. (There is also no relationship between this source and the effect of the playing on the intestines of the listener.) One string is enough for half an octave. That is why the possibilities of the rababa are few and barely enough for one fourth of the dolorous oriental scale. The octopus, or the akhtabout in Arabic, is derived from octave, and the number of its feet exceeds the sounds of the rababa. But all this has nothing to do with the octopus engulfing the checkpoints and the laments of the rababa.In these lands, people do not usually use a musical instrument to panhandle with. It is not customary for musicians to appear on the side of streets or in the public square (if there were any), nor in train stations that have not been operating since the establishment of the country of checkpoints, nor in the central bus station which has been overtaken by the barrier, nor even as a way of having some fun, or making people feel better. That is why the rababa player attracted the attention of the passersby; they gave him a surprised, amused look. If he had played a fiddle or guitar, he would have attracted the same degree of attention, but the sight of the rababa, and its sound, on the checkpoint, parallel to the lines of people trying to cross, mixed well with the scene, and only the sun of winter’s spring a background of joy to the sorrows of the rababa.—Like, you could say, a kind of "contrast."

1Rababa: part of the lute (oud, in Arabic) family of musical instruments. Usually single- or double-stringed, it is played with a bow and has been popular throughout the Middle East. In the Arab world, the rababa is played primarily in bedouin societies.

From Al-Hajiz (The Checkpoint), Volume I. Copyright 2004. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2006 by Taline Voskeritichian. All rights served.

The comic is Palestinian, the jokes bawdy

2009-06-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

The comic is Palestinian, the jokes bawdy
November 21st, 2006

ROYA HEYDARPOUR, THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAYSOON ZAYID grabbed her audience's attention immediately as she limped into the spotlight wearing a green T-shirt with a plunging neckline that advertised her one-woman show, "Little American Whore."

"For those of you who don't know me, I am a Palestinian-Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy from New Jersey," Ms. Zayid, 30, told the packed house recently at the Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea at the fourth annual Arab-American Comedy Festival.

Women and men alike howled as she made raunchy jokes about the trials and tribulations of menstruation and sex for a Muslim woman. They chuckled when she talked about her father's resemblance to Saddam Hussein. "When they hang Saddam, I'm going to be like, 'Daddy!' " she said.

Ms. Zayid's road to comedy was a detour, as she started out wanting to be an actress. But after getting work as a contract extra in shows like "As the World Turns" and "Law & Order," it became clear that her career in television as a disabled and "not-so-skinny" woman was not going anywhere. She realized that many successful actresses who did not fit the typical look for television and film, like Roseanne Barr and Whoopi Goldberg, got their start in comedy.

So Ms. Zayid started doing stand-up in 1999, performing free in dive bars and taking early slots at comedy clubs all around New York City.

Her Palestinian parents were concerned at first. What if she had fallen into a dishonorable profession? Then, after seeing a story about her on Al Jazeera, the Arab cable network, they were relieved. "They saw I was legit and not wrapped around a pole," she said.

Ms. Zayid's popularity and schedule of appearances soared after the first Arab-American Comedy Festival, which she helped found, in 2003. Instead of working only on weekends, she performed in 40 cities in 3 nations in 3 months.

Although a lot of her material is about being Arab, her act is just as much about having cerebral palsy, which some in the audience do not immediately realize. She constantly trembles and the left side of her face sags. "People think I'm nervous or they think I'm drunk," she said.

Ms. Zayid, who has a home in Cliffside Park, N.J., recently returned from Hollywood, where she lived while working on developing her one-woman show. She hopes it may end up becoming a movie.

While the night at the Gotham club was full of jokes that are more easily understood by Arabs and Muslims, few performers spoke much Arabic on stage, except for Ms. Zayid.She ended with a joke that her father told her. "For those of you who don't speak Arabic -- find a friend," she said. The audience roared -- it was a dirty joke.

Artas Lettuce Festival 2007

2009-06-25T01:18:00.000-07:00

Established in 1993, Artas Folklore Center was the first cultural center in the Bethlehem area to be licensed by the Palestinian Authority under the Ministry of Culture. This gave formal recognition to twenty years of work by its founder, Musa Sanad. The founding board was composed of several illustrious figures such as Sameeha Khalil, founder of In’ash il Usra, Sharif Kanaana, Abdel Latif Baghrouti and Abdel Aziz Abu Hadba. However, as the years passed Artas Folklore Center became increasingly associated with its driving force, Musa Sanad.

Located in a historic building just near the village’s Mosque of Omar and the Artas Spring, it offers a spectacular view of the Artas Valley and the shrine of Hortus Conclusus, or the Enclosed Garden below. Its main objective is to preserve and promote the especially rich tangible and intangible heritage of the village, whose unique, lush ecosystem, traces of a large number of successive civilizations, and the diverse body of knowledge and lore culled over the last century-and-a-half by foreigners and Palestinians make it “the most studied village in Palestine,” as well as encouraging the study of Palestinian folklore and traditions in general.

Architectural preservation is an essential part of the work of the center, which is responsible for preserving several important buildings. Next on the list is the endangered Baldensperger house, where two foreign women lived and studied the village during the Mandate period.

In the forefront of innovative tourism and recreation projects, the center is known for its festivals, especially its annual April Lettuce Festival, the typical rural village house/museum, its folklore troupe which has remained true to authentic forms, its innovative nature and heritage itineraries, its traditional Palestinian meals offered in a setting to match, and the individualized experience it offers its visitors, whether one or a hundred.

A key institution in the village, the Artas Folklore Center not only works in preserving the village’s past, but has been instrumental in attending to the needs of the villagers, such as roads, garbage collection and schools. In addition, in advance of its much coveted community center, it is acting as a de facto community center with special programs for youth and women, for instance.

The Artas Folklore Center is run by an elected Board and has 96 members. The current President is Fadi Sanad.Previous funders have included the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, UNDP, United Arab Republic, British, Dutch, French, Belgian and Canadian Consulates or NGOs, the Finnish Institute for the Middle East, the Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation and Juzoor. Partners have included the Arab Educational Institute, the Palestine Wildlife Society, YMCA, Center for Women’s Affairs, and Sharek Youth Forum. In addition, the Artas Folklore Center has worked in close cooperation with a large number of institutions and individuals in both public and private sectors.

http://www.palestine-family.net/index.php?nav=223-222

Un Cahier du Retour Au Pays Natal- Aime Cesaire

2009-06-25T01:16:00.000-07:00

Il me suffirait d'une gorgée de ton lait jiculi pour qu'en toi je découvre toujours à même distance de mirage - mille fois plus natale et dorée d'un soleil que n'entame nul prisme - la terre où tout est libre et fraternel, ma terre. Partir. Mon coeur bruissait de générosités emphatiques. Partir... j'arriverais lisse et jeune dans ce pays mien et je dirais à ce pays dont le limon entre dans la composition de ma chair : « J'ai longtemps erré et je reviens vers la hideur désertée de vos plaies ». Je viendrais à ce pays mien et je lui dirais : Embrassez-moi sans crainte... Et si je ne sais que parler, c'est pour vous que je parlerai».Et je lui dirais encore :« Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n'ont point de bouche, ma voix, la liberté de celles qui s'affaissent au cachot du désespoir. »Et venant je me dirais à moi-même :« Et surtout mon corps aussi bien que mon âme, gardez-vous de vous croiser les bras en l'attitude stérile du spectateur, car la vie n'est pas un spectacle,car une mer de douleurs n'est pas un proscenium, car un homme qui crie n'est pas un ours qui danse... »

The streets of Beer Sheva

2008-04-09T21:38:00.001-07:00

At the via Dolorosa

2008-04-09T21:36:00.003-07:00

And these are ways I love Jerusalem: I love her the way I love myself, sometimes with unexplicable hatred, and other times with complete longing, and a sense of amazement.

Here is the way I love Jerusalem; I love her the way I discover a new corner inside of myself.Accross from Jaffa Gate is a nice shady area where one can have picnics.

Here is the way I love Jerusalem; I love her in the way I put on my make up, getting ready for a party, unsure of what I will wear and trying on different dresses. And, in this way, Jerusalem is never too sure what she will wear, to welcome and celebrate each occasion, each group of people.

Here is the way I love Jerusalem; I love her in the forbidden, surreal way of two young soldiers at the corner of the road of via de la rosa, sitting near their jeep. A young man, from Bab Hatta ( a neighborhood in Jerusalem), working as a waiter in a Pizza place at the corner joins the two soldiers as he pulls his own chair. And a crowd of religious Jews pass on the road of via de la rosa, dancing, celebrating purim. And a few hours ago, in the early morning, other crowds of Christians had passed the same road, to celebrate good friday. The soldiers and the waiter share together their maintenance of peace and quiet, having served the customers, of whom I am one, the travellers and pilgrimes.

I mourn slowly but surely my never ending departures, my becoming an anonymous woman with plain make up, if at all, with no new discoveries, no occasions to dress up for, no familiarity of the present, no dignity of my past, and above all, no comapany of soldiers and waiters.

Jifna: from the womb to the tomb

2008-04-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

By me ( to be taken with all due respect)..."Jifna," I thought to myself before saying outloud the name of this village located in the West Bank. We had been driving for an hour now, having left Afula, headed back to Beer Sheva. "We" were eight students doing a family rotation in the rural parts of the north of Israel, which included Bedouin towns, the town of Afula, Kibutzes, a community clinic around Tiberias, and other community clinics around the Jezreel valley. My classmates were playing a game, whereby they think of citys' and country's names that started with J and ended with A. Names such as Java, Jaffa, Jakrata and Jamaica were already said as the silence fell in the van. I searched my memory for more names, looking at the face of the driver in the bus mirror. His name was Abed, he was Bedouin from the town of Hura, in the south of Israel, near Beer Sheva.

Though I grew up in the city of Jerusalem, I spent parts of my childhood in Jifna because my cousins would come every summer from the States to their house. Their father was from Jifna, and like many inhabitants of the village, he had inherited land from his family. His mother, Fatmeh, a woman in her 60s, was taking care of the land, of the harvests of olive, figs, lemons and almonds yearly as her son was away. Her husband passed away many years ago, leaving her with five young children to raise. Her son, my uncle, was a family doctor, practising in the States.

Fatmeh always wore a traditional Palestinian dress, which is long, covered with embroidery. Her head was always covered with a white scarf. Around 530 in the morning, as I would be tossing and turning in bed next to my cousin on the second flour of the building where they lived, Fatmeh's voice and the rooster's became associated in my mind with having to get up for a new day was here, and not a minute could be wasted. The reason being that when evening time came, there was no more electricity, and it became time to sit at the balcony, prepare dinner near the light, and chat. Fatmeh held a repectable place in her community having proved it by her hard work to raise her five children by herself. As I would accompany her and my cousins to run errands, to call people to fix things round the house and to help with the harvest, I saw the respect and recepetion with which people of the village welcomed her. With her son the only doctor being in town, many people would stop by, bring in their prescriptions and their complaints to see him. She approved the visits, seeing them as the duty of her son to the inhabitants.

The story had it that Fatmeh took my cousin, Fahed, when he was 8 years old to the fields she owned. She showed him the borders of the land. And according to oral tradition and a woman who was illitrate and hence could not entrust what is dear to her to paper and a pen, only my cousin knew what his family owned. I had always wished that I had a grandmother from a village, whose power, influence, character and land ownerwship were recognized.

Accross one street from Jifna, on top of a hill, lied a Palestinian refugee camp called El-Jalzoon. Sometimes, some children and I would leave the Jifna, and play in the street between the refugee camp and the village with the children from the refugee camp. The houses in the camp were cramped, and vehicles carefully and very skillfully passed through to reach Jifna. Walking down another street at the entrance of jifna and Fatmeh's house lead to Tabash restaurant, the church, the grocery store, the cemetry and the school. The owners of the restaurant were Fatmmeh's cousins, the priest baptized my uncle and his children, the sellers always wrote down what I owned them under Fatmeh's name, the cemetry was covered with grass and not well kept, and my cousins went to school during the summer when they would come to visit.

Twenty years later, with Fatmeh's children all living abroad, highly educated, my mother told me that she had to go to Fatmeh's funeral in Jifna. She had been found dead in her house at the age of 80, possibly due to a heart attack. Her neighbors missed her after not seeing her for a few days. Her son, the doctor, was not able to travel in time for the burrial, and it was I who attended, and could say that I, unfortuantely, had a family member burried in the cemetry in Jifna.

Whenever I go to the cemetry to visit her grave, I am reminded of the walk she took my cousin, Fahed, on, and showed him the limits of the lands she owned, and then I realize that I, too, have my own land, whose borders and limits I know. With the birth of my cousins in Jifna, our childhood years spent there, and with the death of Fatmeh, I found my own Jifna in people's families and life events, marking the limits of my land that I dont trust to papers.

"Jifna," I said outloud in the bus. "It is the name of a village in the West Bank," I explained. The silence in the van was gone. My classmates chose to move to another letter of a city beginning with K and ending with A. I didnt search for a name of a village or a city in my memory anymore, but rather for faces of a native American old woman I had sat with in her Navajo village, of a Bedouin woman called Um Salem, of a Russian grandmother called Anna, and of an Ethiopian grandmother, hoping that I would, then, remember the name of their villages, and join my classmates in the game of names again.

The Streets of Beit Hanina

2008-03-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

By me...(to be taken a with a grain of salt, laughter and some Arabic Coffee)She puts on her helmet in the main street of Beit Hanina. It is around 8:00pm and people are going out to shops and restaurants with el madfa– the Muezzin call for iftar after a day of fasting during the month of Ramadan. The neighborhood is coming to life after a long day, waiting hungrily, with its empty streets to again be filled and nourished by the treading of purposeful feet.

Today is Yom Kippur and all of Jerusalem is closed, especially those roads leading to and from the Arab neighborhoods – security reasons. It is also her twenty second birthday and she is back in this land of contradictions, two nations, fasting on the same day, for different reasons, blocking the roads that might bring them together.It is her birthday, but celebrating with old friends, just ten minutes away, is impossible. Confined to her small neighborhood, she blew the candles at home. But she can meet Sama, a high school classmate who lives in the neighborhood.

Their time apart passes between them like a short movie: her female classmates, the society, the injustices here, the dreams lost on the streets of Rammallah, stopped at checkpoints. The stories of the young western Arabs, coming back, believing they could build their society and yet realizing they have undertaken the impossible. Other usual stories of East Jerusalem: she, she and she got married. She, she and she had children. She and she were working around here.

“I honestly believed things might have changed, or could change” she said to Sama, sitting on the second floor at Izhiman café, looking out the window at her yellow motorbike. She had to know what it was like to be back, and for some time she was back, back to the Arab poetry and songs, to the stories of people here, her old classmates, believing she belonged. But she did not belong, not without a husband, not in half a city with limited resources, imposed curfews, blocked roads. It is her twenty second birthday and she is back to the place she vouched to leave ten years ago. She is twelve years old again, thinking it is time to leave, soon. “I was crazy to have come back to Beit Hanina.”

She is most comfortable now, only when she rides her small motorbike. Still, she had to say goodbye to the rugged, sewage filled roads, the new shiny shops opened next to the old ones covered with graffiti. She had to see the ghost city of East Jerusalem, one more time, sadder, emptier, not as busy with the hustling and bustling of the falaheen, selling their produce, bargaining with shoppers coming from Rammallah or Bethlehem or Nablus, shoppers now blocked behind walls, and the fallahat behind the walls of the Old City, unable to sell their produce. She also feels herself behind walls of some kind, blocking her from her homeland, unsure on which side she belongs.

The waiter, in his early twenties, places two Turkish coffees on their table. He looks familiar. Did she volunteer with him at one of the summer camps when she would return on summer breaks? She cannot remember. “Here in East Jerusalem,” she turns back to Sama, “a woman will not have her pap smear until she is married, so you don’t discuss a woman’s reproductive health with her until then. In America, I have to take a patient’s sexual history and discuss reproductive health. You become a physician of two cultures,” she explained to her friend, “while still unsettled in either.” “You become a physician who has to write an Arab woman a paper testifying that you have examined her. The result: not that she is healthy or has Candida, but that her hymen is still intact. I would think it is ridiculous, but the woman’s life and marriage would depend on the results of that examination. I don’t agree with it, but it saves her life,” she seemed to search Sama for answers.

Sama is quiet as she takes the last sip of her Turkish coffee. The café is filled and she cannot differentiate the sound of Sama’s cup as she sets it back on its saucer from all of the other clatter of cups and plates. She pivots her own cup, watching the swirl of the remaining sips and listening closely for its distinct tone against the saucer.“And, in another society,” she continues, “I am faced with a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl. You are a physician of different cultures- walled in, walled out of both.”Her chair gates against the café’s piled floor as she stands and says goodbye to Sama, kissing her cheeks.

Now here, she longs to be away again from curfews, expected marriages, children and husbands. She unlocks her motorbike and places the heavy yellow helmet on her head. She has to condense this entire place into something she can carry with her, beyond the walls, through the checkpoints

Return to Haifa

2008-03-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

by me! (To be taken with a grain of salt, lots of sugar, tea and laughter!)

Mahmood Darwish, a Palestinian poet, writes, "All the people's hearts are my identity...so take away my passport!"

His words have continued to carry some truth. I used to believe in his poem, by choice, but continued to live his words, by force. I am a woman who was born in East Jerusalem 30 years ago and who holds only temporary documents that identify my name, place of birth and my nationality as Jordanian. Nonetheless, I hold no official passport of any country.
When I was younger, believing Darwish's words seemed to be a matter of default and fate of being Palestinian. What else can one do but have people's hearts for a passport if one does not have one? And yet embedded in Darwish's poem is a continous struggle: that of belonging, home and love, somehow pervasively connected to a passport.

I come from a culture that strongly believes in fate, like many other cultures around the world. And sometimes, one learns as one grows up which parts of one's fate to accept, and which ones to reject. I would like to reject the part of my fate Darwish talks about: the reason being that people's hearts dont allow me to cross checkpoints, enter countries, study at universities and be employed. They leave me outside of the Old City of Jerusalem, at refugee camps, at ministries of interior affairs, at embassies, or demonstrating at closed off zones. With the feeling of being stuck, waiting and angry.

Yes, I choose to reject this part of my fate by proposing to any guy to marry me, provided that he is not Palestinian, and that he holds a passport. He could be called Israel, having been born anywhere in the world, even Haifa, and then decided to return to his birth place with his passport. And when I would get married to such a guy, finally having obtained a passport, I would like my children to have a normal life: without a past, filled with the future of possibilities, options, no borders. And, if my children were to ask me where I have come from, or why my name is what it is, I would say that there is no story, no past.

I only would hope that my children would have blond hair, blue eyes and no tint of dark skin, curely hair, accent and above all a memory.

And only, then, we would have returned to Haifa with a passport, having left people's hearts that Darwish writes about.

Excerpts from "A Fortunate Man" by John Berger

2008-02-13T07:40:00.001-08:00

It is true that my questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. But I was asking them to try to lead you to the point of realizing that we in our society do not know how to acknowledge, to measure the contribution of an ordinary working doctor. By measure, I do not mean calculate according to a fixed scale, but rather take the measure of. It is not a uqestion of comparing the doctor with the artist or with the airline pilot or with the lawyer or wirh the political stooge and then arranging them in a winning order. It is a question of comparing themso that in th elight of the other examples we can better appreciate what the doctor is ( or is not) doing.
When we hear of a team of ctors or biochemists discovering a new cure, we can acknowledge their achievements easily. A new cure contributes to "the advance of medicine." The acknowledgement if eay because the promise of the discovery remains abstract. It can be subsumed under "science" or "progress."
It is a very different matter when we imaginatively try to take the measure of a man doing no more and no less than eaying- and occasionally saving- the lives of a few thousand of our contemporaries. Naturally we count it, in principle, a good hting. But fully to take the measyre of it, we have ot come to some conclusion about the balue of these lives to us now.
The doctor is a popular herp" yu have only to consider how frequently and easily he is presented as such on television. If his traning were not so long and expensive, every mother would be happy for her son to become a doctor. IT is the most idealized of all the professions. Yet it is idealized abstractly. Some of the young who decide to become doctors are influenced by this ideal. But i would suggest that one of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because when the abstract idealism has worn hin, they are uncertain about teh value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is beacause they live in and accept a societywhich is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
If cannot afford to. If it did, it would either have to dismiss this knowledge and with it dismiss all its pretences to democracy an dos become totalitarian: or it would have to take account of this knowledge and revolutionize itself. Either way it would be transformed. Let me be quite clear. I do not claim to know what a human life is worth. There can be no final or personal answer- unless you are prepaed to accept the medieval religious one, surviving from the past. The question is social. n individual cannot answer it for himself. The answer resides within the totality of relations which can exist within a certain social structure at a certain time. Finally man's worth to himself is expressed by his treatment of himself.
But since social development is dialectical and there is always a contradiction between the existing social relations and what is becoming possible, one can sometimes preceive tha the existing answer is inadequate for quesitons raised by certain new developments of activity or thought.
I have never forgotten a paragraph in an essay of Gramsci's which I first read years ago He wrote the essay in prison in about 1930. " Thus the problem of what man is always posed as the problem of so-called "human nature", or of "man in general", the attempt to create a science of man- a philosphy- whose point of depature if primarily based on a "unitary idea", on an abstraction designed to contain all that is "human". But is humanity, as a reality and as an idea, a point of departure, or a point of arrival?"
Is humanity as a reality and as an idea a point of departure or a point of arrival?
I do not claim to know what a human life is worth- the question cannot be answered by word but only by action, by the creation of a more human society.
All that I do know is that our present society wastes and, by the slow darining process of enoforced hypocrisy, empties most of the lives which it does not destory; and that, within its own terms, a doctor who has surpassed the stage of selling cures, either directly to the patient or through the agency of a state service, is unassessable.

Ishe Ishe: ode to my Ethiopian patient

2008-02-09T11:12:00.000-08:00

By now, I have given up remembering the new patient’s name from Gaza. Or maybe, without even trying, I remember the name: Atallah. Is it a curse to remember names, faces, and above all stories? I am not sure.

A 7 month old child transferred from Gaza after convulsions was the brief description given to me, while I was in the ICU about to begin interviewing my Ethiopian patient’s mother. I was asked to translate for the father, Mohammad, who did not speak Hebrew. I looked from far at the child laying in bed, unable to examine him or take a look at his folder only provide the immediate assistance of translation.

The child and father needed to be transported to another hospital to provide care for the child. The ambulance was going to leave from Barzilai hospital, instead of waiting for the ambulance from Gaza to arrive to Barzili. I accompanied Mohammad, the father, as we obtained his ID papers. He had to deposit them at the reception before entering the hospital.

On the way to the reception, he told me his story. He is 28 year old married to a 20 year old, with their first child being Atallah. Before knowing that she was pregnant, the mother had undergone some sort of imaging study after abdominal pain, underwent surgery where they found a “bag of water”, a “pregnancy out of the uterus” and then told the father, “Congratulations, you are expecting a child!” The parents are first cousins. The child is the product of full term delivery. The child was born vaginally but was told that he “drank the water in the uterus”.

He went home and a few days later, he turned blue and could not breathe. The parents took him back to the hospital and was hospitalized for two months. Since then, he has been home, not feeding well and had many seizures. The father was told at the hospital in Gaza that there was nothing more they could do for Attallah. He applied for a permit to come to Israel two months ago and only obtained it a few days ago.

For some reason, whoever gives permits to patients from Gaza brings them first to Barzilai where not much could be done to complicated cases and then the patient is transferred to another hospital. Sometimes, this process wastes valuable time, as is the case with one six year old who came from Gaza with neuroblastoma. By the time she was transferred to Dana hospital, three weeks had passed since her departure from Gaza. The girl’s name was Shireen. Occasionally, I wonder about what happened to her as I realized that she perhaps had a stage four neuroblastoma.

“It was easy to get from Gaza to here,” Mohammad told me. And I wanted to ask him more questions, “Really? But on the news, things look really bad. How did you manage to come? Tell me more about life in Gaza, about your life. Here, I will buy you tea, and we will sit and chat.” But, the guard came and gave him his green ID papers, and with that I accompanied him back to the ICU where the ambulance driver, a doctor and a nurse were going to accompany him to Ichilov. Yet again, another patient from Gaza that I will not see again, I thought.

As I walked back into the ICU, I remembered that my patient of the day was an Ethiopian having presented with acute gastroenteroritis, and with maple syrup disease in the background. His 50 year old mother was sitting next to her, and so was the aunt. The mother had her head covered with a scarf with the colors of dark yellow and read. She also wore a dress that had a thick fabric, with dark colors of red and yellow. And behind the mother, in the sink, there was a pot of tea, golden. A clown was standing next to the crying child, trying to play a game with him.

I, the medical student with my white coat and stethscope walked into that small space of Ethiopia. Having realized as I began to interview the mother, that next to her lied another little space of Gaza, with the father, Mohammad, standing next to his son’s bed, ready to leave.

The intial interview began with the distance that I, as a medical student, have noticed I learned to have. From across the bed of a patient, I usually interview a patient or a mother. With Israeli patients, the distance is usually well appreciated and I am able to get answers to my questions. Not with the Ethiopian mother.

Conducting the medical interview has been quiet hard for me, as my medical education gives me all of those tools that I always feel are too strict, that don’t give me space for creativity. Seeing the pot of tea at the sink, the aunt sitting across from the mother, I knew that I could claim a chair all too familiar for me to obtain the patient's story- the chair of humanity, and not that of distance and professionalism with a list of questions to ask.

Parallels of being Palestinian and what I had always wished that someone would say when communicating with me went through my mind as I wondered how I could obtain the information I needed from the mother. I did not speak Amherek, neither did I understand the Ethiopian culture. Story telling is part of most cultures, cultures that are not western. “Tell me, about his birth, your pregnancy,” I said.

The mother’s story began to flow, interspersed with her suffering while caring for her child. I knew that even though we both spoke Hebrew, we did not really understand each other. Some questions I asked, she would say yes, even though I knew that the answer would be different. A lecturer once told me that in Ethiopian culture, the speaker gives options for the answers to obtain an answer, especially if the speaker is in a position of authority, such as a medical personnel. I gave more option in my questions and the mother’s patient seemed to give other more expected answers of his case.

“Ishe, ishe,” I said, agreeing with what she said. And the ice broke between us! I made it into that little space of Ethiopia, after having been in that little space of Gaza a few minutes ago in the ICU. There is still much that I am sure that I have missed in my interview, and yet, herein lies the art- the art that enchanted me to study medicine: story telling, story interpreting, story collection.

When a Palestinian woman falls in love.

2008-02-09T10:02:00.001-08:00

I have never fallen in love, or at least, I dont remember that I have. If I have, the feeling did not linger with me for long.

Today, taking the van from East Jerusalem to Bethlehem, while I waited for the van to fill up, a man in his 40s, got into the van, gave a cup of Arabic coffee to the driver while they chatted. The smell of smoke, and not the coffee, being shared with the rest of the traveller waiting for the van
to fill up.

Outside of the van, the hussle and bussle of East Jerusalem remained, though not as much as before in terms of numbers of people, but never in the quality of such a state. A woman with their head covered, wearing a jilbab, dragging one child by one hand, and the other following them, while she carried another bag after shopping. Young female high school students, dressed in their school uniforms unique to the Schedemit girls school, were in the streets, after having finished a school day. The young boys from Frere High school, in their own uniforms, had their backs against the walls, watching the school girls, saying some comment about the girls. The busy father, dressed in his warm coat, talking on the cell-phone, planning what to bring back to his home in Beit Hanina. And, fallahat (peasants) were still at the sides of the roads, with their produce, having brought it from far away villages around Jerusalem and even from the West Bank, were still hoping to sell parseley, prickey pears, apples and bannanas, even though the evening was soon coming. Young sellers never failed to also put their goods out in the streets, bras, underwears, next to plates, glasses, batteries, razors, children clothes. And, women bargained for the best deals on those "bastat", the mobile small markets. Has East Jerusalem changed since I last visited her, last left her, for visinting and leaving seem to be the same many a time?

It is me who changed at each encounter. When I first returned as westernized Palestinian, having been educated in the United States, filled with the mixture of nostalgia for what I had left behind, and yet rejection of what is still present and has not changed, I remember having been in love, with the garabage filled alleys of the Old City, the crumbling roofs of the small houses in the Muslim and Christian quarters in the Old city that always seem to welcome all members of a family, however that number might be, the unattended to children that play on the roof tops of the Jewish quarter in the Old City, the old men who were selling the same goods in the market of the spices, the meat.

And yet those markets came to be the hallmark in the Old City directing any inhabitants, and with that were the sellers- Abu Muhammad (what a man would be called with an older son whose name is Muhammad), Abu Ramzy. Toursits navigate through the Old City with their maps and names of roads that the inhabitants of the Old City dont know, and for a good reason, too. For the inhabitants live there, and have a different way of marking, locating and directing travellers: their way is- people, relationships and stories. The most precious commodity that I have taken away with me from East Jerusalem to wherever destination I find myself headed: in the Old City, a road had a historical name, probably named by a western archelogist who knew the history of every rock, but not its personal story. Yet on the other hand, a road in the Old City had a personal name, probably named by an infamous indigenous person who knew the stories of the people living on that road. The stories have been passed down, and so the inhabitants navigate by the remembering the stories, the heritage, the generations- all hidden in the name of Abu Muhammad.

Yes, I have never fallen in love with a person, but rather with Ibn Abu Muhammad, who lived on the street of Abu Hamza, near the seller Abu Marwan, where my grandma used to buy us candy.
Thus, I have fallen in love with an entire city, an entire people, and an entire nation.

Love is a blissful curse for a Palestinian woman. Necessary, and yet never easy. ...

An imprint

2008-02-01T04:06:00.000-08:00

Quick, no time.

Leave for your life.
The warning crept up

like a thief, unexpected,

startling my little girl's heart.

Quick, the next station.

Hop on.

All must be left behind.
The train started moving,

your face was the last memory

imprinted in my childhood memory

of my home.
Trains stop at stations.

I embrace cities and towns.
Quick, no time. Leave for your life.
The warning crept up

like a theif,

unexpected,startling my little girl's heart.
Quick, the next station,

hop on.

All must be left behind.
The train started moving,

your face continued to be

the last memory that I take away,

anywhere that I leave,

Anywhere that I go.

Hoping it will lead me

home, to you.

A Taste of a vision

2008-02-01T04:05:00.000-08:00

This is the story of a little girl
Who daily woke up to sounds of bullets
Who heard ambulance sirens
When her classmates were in class
Who saw black hawks in the skies
And who, unlike other children in the world,
Did not wish to have a tank for a toy
Because she knew the size of a real one
And the marks it leaves in the streets
On the roads, and on cars
She did not play with a toy gun
Because she saw what it does to real people
This is the story of a girl who knew
That the house door was the limit
Anything beyond was not safe
And, when she made it to the Mediterranean shore
She was told that was the limit of this world
A shore that held attacks, a sky that embraced black hawks
A house that contained halted bullets,
Streets that were crushed with remains of small toys
A big wall to continue the separation between cities
And to announce the introduction of a new limit
A story whose heroes are constantly covered with blood
With an endless end to this odyssey
The heroes never win or lose
The limits continue to increase
Until breathing becomes almost impossible
Suffocation becomes the only option left
After house ruins and broken window glass
She stared at the skies at night,
Looking for a star that she can call her own
That she can leave to and live there, forever
Yet, even in her search, she remained disturbed
The skies lightens up, but she knows it is not fire works
She sought a vision, of a better world, a different one
A bullet is the limit of a heartbeat,
The Mediterranean brings different sounds
Sounds of a far away world, a different world
Shooting stars move beyond the sky's red colors
She stared at the Mediterranean and the skies
So long that she heard and saw nothing else around her
With the rising and falling of the tide,
With the sudden appearance of shooting stars,
She became part of that sea and that sky
And somehow, the sound and smell of a bullet Vanished into the new possibilities.

Sound of a bullet

2008-02-01T04:03:00.000-08:00

She laid beautifully, peacefully on the meadow
She was at her home
Where she belonged to the den
As much as it belonged to her
Watching diligently her children
One by one nurturing them
To grow strong
To be the lions they are destined to be
The ones nature calls upon
To raise a new life, a new generation
Only to continue the circle of life
Which their ancestors have long known
They play with one another
And sleep securely with their mother
Laying eyes on them for the last time
For tomorrow, her eyes were not to see light
In the early dawn did our eyes meet
I was looking for a new home
And theirs was to be mine alone.
The redness in her eyes still hunts me
As I put my own children to sleep
Pierces my soul in the stillness of the night
Asking where her children are at
Who woke up to nothing and perhaps even less
I alone hold the answers
As to why now the circle of life stands disturbed
Vanishing into the sound of a bullet
The very last of a heart beat
Announcing violently the beginning of the end
What becomes of lions with no mothers?
My door is always locked.
My gun replaced my wife
What becomes of children
Raised in the place of lions?
Underneath, a den still lies
Mixed echoes of lions roaring
And children crying take shelter in one anotherAt the echo of a bullet.

The Matador

2008-02-01T02:35:00.000-08:00

He glanced at me
with his sad hazel eyes
With blood drooping
on his forehead
And remains of a greasy,
dry and sandy hair
He looked at me
from top to bottom
Calm, serene, cold and sad looks
Looks of a wise man
who has seen all
His mouth was dry
and bleeding
He was thrown on the ground
With no energy to move
and stand up
Very thin legs with no shoes
Flies resting on his wounds
with no bandage
A little piece of cloth
covering his belly
His ribs almost showing
under the skin
As he breathes slightly
and slowly His arms
almost non-existent
So weak he could
not put them together
He stared at me
without moving
His eyes said the entire story
The story of being in the wrong place
At the wrong time
for the wrong purpose
Falling a victim in a world
he never chose
A world that promised
rainbows and sunshine
And could not grant him food,
water and shelter
His family was killed in mobs
sweeping the streets
And all is left is the remains of a house
A shelter he once lived
in with his mother
A small neighborhood
he used to play in
All in the name of freedom
and liberation
That only brought him starvation and pain
Our eyes met and I wished I could answer him
Explain to a child why he was there
Yet, all he needed was not love or political stand
He needed food, shelter,
water and a hospital
I walked away with millions of people
Turned my back to a child's cry for help
A child who was not part of a war
But who had to pay the price
Without ever knowing why or what for.

Aya Zman- another yerushalim

2008-02-01T02:31:00.000-08:00

Jerusalem,
Alquds,
Yerushaim,
Everyone has one,
to protect them,
to yearn for her,
to fight to reach her,
to let go in her arms,
to see the birth of dreams,
the resurection of hope,
and sometimes,to fight with her.
To abandon her,
To cheart on her,
and to regret it all
when realized
that there is no
other lover like her.
As Naive. As honest.
As sincere .As open.

Some will sayit is the mosque
that holds her heart beat.
A church quivers
in the shadows of the previous,
and what is to come.

Others will say that it is the temple
that makes her whole.

Ruins is what she has become
in my heart, and
so have her memories.
I no longer journeyTo see her.
I search for love, and
another beautiful
Jerusalem,
Yerushalim,
Alqudsto hold me,
again.

In a casket for two

2008-02-01T02:27:00.001-08:00

Wherever she goes,
I follow.
It doesnt matter to me,
the color of your skin,
the name my tongue distorts,
the passport, power, and
reputation bestowed on youor stripped away.

Have you played with a sick child?
Planted a tree in a waste land?
Banadged a soldier's wounds?
Fed a hungry grandfather?

The world as we both know it
will change tomorrow,
perhaps the day after.
The oppressor and the oppressed
will look the same,
tomorrow, or the day after.
Those who designed the nerve gas,
will also take the last of breaths.

You- have you lit a candle
or decided that some deserve darkness.
You-shut the doorwatching the last of light,
taking the last of breath
the last of name, accent and skin color.
And, she looks at the last of human race,
following you, in the casket made for two,
as was in the beginning, and now sealed for eternity.

The story hidden in a grain of sand

2008-02-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

"My son, Go West
Till it becomes East,
Ride the Waves
Till you subdue them.
The unknown is packed
With adventure, sandstorms,
Seas and shows, And most of all—people."

I stared at the milky galaxy
And plunged into discovery
A search for- what I called,
Naively but truthfully-
The heart of life, its soul
For I wanted to obtain it
Claim it.
How else to interact with anything
but through acquisition?
Acquisition of gold, territory, People, countries and planets?

When I have finally come near the end,
Where whales sleep forever,
And the sun rests with the moon
Where the sea is only a drop
And butterflies' wings flap stronger
Than thousands of human inventions
Life's heart whispered to my mine own,
"My daughter, go to the East,
where you have come from, till it becomes West."
Her words showed me another galaxy
That of the soul,
Where greed and possession
don't exist
And where a small seed
And an eye's tear
Embody all there is to know about
The East and the West,
togetherIn a beautiful harmony
Dancing to a secret song
Only the daughters of the East know
Beyond the oasis and quick moving sand
Where home and adventure are but one.

An Epitaph of a Palestinian soul

2008-02-01T02:21:00.001-08:00

Across from her bed
Lies the map of the world
An adventurous American friend
gave it to her
Above the world,
She hung a close up of Adam's creation:
Adam's hand barely touching God's
And slowly drifting away

- fallen-
Fallen from heaven,
From perfection and home
On a cloud,
all alone
To be thrust
- fed-
into humanity below

The continents beneath
continue to drift, too
Her soul also drifts:
the East is further
And further parting from the West
To perhaps never touch again
To become a painting
Or a remembrance of a lost face
Packed simply and unrightfully so
Into a small box
With a big Epitaph written on it

As she finds her way to adulthood
In the United States
She comes out alone,
like Adam, On a cloud
Not wanting the separation
From heavens of the East
Yet realizing it slowly happens

What would Michelangelo's painting be
Without Adam's leaving?
How could the continents be if
There was no separation?
Alas, her soul holds only one answer:
Somehow, she has become Adam,
the continents
Longing to touch the East and its coast
Yet knowing that there is no return now

The oceans of life and forces carry Adam away
Further west, as he continues to yearn
Extending his tired hand.
An angel chisels at the East's tombstone:

Background and Heritage lie in stillness
As one soul has left home, forever.

The ultrasound reader

2008-02-01T02:20:00.001-08:00

Dedicated to a mother...and her son.

----------------------------------------
Students huddled around a screen,
dressed in white, reflecting the color
they would like to bring to the wards:
Health, but almost impossible.
To reverse nature? To wash disease?
"Here, you see," said the professor.
"echogenic mass, possibly tumour."
Aspiring for health and whiteness,
to erase colors on ultrasounds.
I pointed the same to the mother.

"Your son will travel many places."
She stared at the ultrasound image.
Motseh: Morrocoan, she answered.
"You know, my grandmother was Arab.
She used to read in my funjan,
The way a doctor reads an ultrasound.
Im Saleem told me I would travel many places,
you and your son also will travel many places.
Maktoub."

Ode to S,: from Beer Sheva with sutures

2008-02-01T02:16:00.000-08:00

Dedicated to a little boy, who was safely kept on the ward, and then left back, to an unknown or known destiny, I am not sure.

A bullet had hit
Your fifth thoracic vertebrae.
Blood had pooled in your chest.
You were scooped by the army
To our hospital.
Were you going to live?
The answer lingered
with the forceps, Kelly clamp,
scalpel blade
And Richardson retractor.

Your name: unknown.
Your anatomy: known quiet well!
Your condition: unknown.

Today, you move your arms,
Walk to the bathroom,
Speak very few words.
"You stupid, lift your arm,
"Your stepfather screams at you,
While helping you shower.
I, the medical student,
Stand outside of the bathroom.
He later says he loves you.
My eyes consolidate
Your silent hazel eyes,
"Does he really?"

"The IDF wants to send him back,
Not his first incident of trying to escape,"
Proclaims a doctor the verdict today.

"His father beats him,"
says the stepfather.
The mother's will to keep him
fades away,
She lives in Yaffo,
Loving him from far only.

S: We send you back to Deir El Balah.
Nobody can return with you,
Except those sutures,
gauzes and staples.
Will you ever read those words,
little boy, And know that you are cared about:
Love knows no borders
Though Deir El Balah and Beer Sheva might.

My Grandma Im Saleem

2008-02-01T02:10:00.000-08:00

In an old restaurant,
Decorated with plastic plants,
*Im Kalthum was played
Resurrecting an old memory of a home
That has only become a ghost.
I desperately seek a living remnant
The song resonates within my soul
Other tunes of that land
A bald old man,
with a big moustache,
Dark skin and big rough hands,
Brings me waterI smile:
does he know my song?
Secret whispers come from hookahs
Pictures of a mosque and a church
The smell of food brings pictures
and sounds Of when my mother
used to make me eatGrapes leaves and Zukini
The smell of Arabic coffee brings back
Early mornings with
Old people sitting at balconies
Sipping coffee talking about the future
My grandma is reading in my cup,
"You will travel many places. **Maktub.
"Does the cup say when I will come back?
"No. But, I see a group of people.
Who love you greatly," she says.
I look in my cup to find it but I cannot
It only takes a wise old person,
Like my grandma Im Saleem,
Drinking Arabic coffee to see that