june 1: gaza city

We started the day off with visits to two beautiful places: the Right to Live Society and Atfaluna Center for the Deaf.

The Right to Live Society (which is not what it sounds like if you're from the US), is a center for children with Downs Syndrome and autism. The simple test for Downs which pregnant women in the US receive is not available in Gaza, and because of malnutrition and frequent lack of access to medical care during pregnancy, Gaza has one of the highest rates of Downs in the world, 1 out of every 600-800 babies.

You would think that with so many other problems to deal with, Gazans would have little energy left for the disabled, but the care and dedication that people exhibited in both these centers was amazing. Both emphasized working with parents to help them understand their childrens' disabilities and not become frustrated. Both had beautiful, incredibly modern facilities (well-funded by international NGOs) as sophisticated as anything you'd find in the US.

Of course, evidence of the war and the siege has a way of creeping in. The director of Atfaluna (who spoke fantastic English) pointed out a window covered with wax paper in the art room--most of the center's windows were blown out when the building across the square was attacked by F-16s. In the same room, among drawings that could have been drawn by any child anywhere, was one showing Israeli tanks and planes attacking a house.

The effects of the siege are in many ways more far-reaching than the 23-day massacre that Gazans refer to as the last war (to distinguish it from the many other, earlier wars.) It is not just a blockade of goods but of knowledge as well. For example, the director of Atfaluna said they would love to screen newborn babies for deafness as doctors do in the US, but there are not enough trained audiologists, since there is no place in Gaza for them to be educated and students are so rarely allowed to leave. There is also only one person in all of Gaza with the knowledge to repair hearing aids (essential since spare parts for anything are like unicorns in Gaza.) He works at Atfaluna and we met him.

Next it was off to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which did excellent work documenting the last war. When we walked into the conference room where we were going to meet the director of the PCHR, the first thing everyone noticed was a long table against the back wall filled with a examples of all the weapons that had been dropped on Gaza. Many had labels written in English and almost all are made in the USA. "Is anyone here from Kansas City?" the director asked. "Look what nice presents they gave us," he said, and picked up a white phosphorous shell.

At the end of the day, we all met up to visit Al Shifa hospital, the largest and oldest hospital in Gaza City. It was not shelled the way Al Quds Hospital (the headquarters of the Red Crescent) was, although the top of the building is pock-marked from some kind of artillery fire.

We were greeted at Shifa by a literal receiving line of doctors and staff, along with the Minister of Health, who spoke about the attacks on medical facilities and staff during the war and gave us a tour of the grounds. The first thing he did was apologize for the stifling heat in the room where he was speaking--Shifa was running on generators, as their power was out, and they don't have enough capacity to run both the medical equipment and the air conditioning. This is a frequent occurrence. They also don't have a working elevator at the moment. Patients have to be carried up the stairs by their relatives.

Shifa turned out to be one of the more depressing places we have visited. The building is falling apart. Any available funds have clearly been going to maintaining the bare necessities of medical supplies, and often not even that is available due to the siege. We saw a room filled with boxes of supplies for dialysis machines. This is one day's supply, we were told. Many times this room is empty, and sometimes supplies that come through Israel arrive expired or deliberately damaged. Remember those generators? One hundred percent of the fuel used to run them is smuggled through the tunnels. This is a public, government-run hospital, by the way. A new wing of the hospital, six stories tall, which would contain desperately needed ICU beds and operating rooms, stands half-finished. Construction materials are too difficult to obtain. Parts for equipment and supplies of all kinds, from medicine to gauze, are either allowed in at a trickle, take months to obtain, or are not allowed in at all. A new tube for the CT machine, donated by a French charity, was recently turned away at the Israeli border.

There is one building on the Shifa grounds that is not crumbling, but bright and shiny and brand new. A Saudi prince paid to build an advanced oncology center and donated all the necessary equipment, but because the disposable materials needed to run the MRI and radiation machines are not allowed in, the shiny new building sits unused. This is the reality of the siege.