Experiences of the displaced: At a hospital and in a school

Today is the 29th of December and I’m going to speak about an experience I had at the hospital and some other experiences shared by people I met while there. A few days ago one of my friends told me that she was going to take a shower in the hospital. It sounded very weird to me and I said I’d join her. I was curious what it was like to take a shower at the hospital. We agreed to go there at 6.30 in the morning. Once there we headed to the kidney department which was in the basement.

I thought we’d be the earliest to get there but it turned out that there was already a queue of about 12 women waiting for their turn to take a shower. There was a man waiting outside the bathroom who basically lives in the hospital because he gets dialysis every day. He goes to see his family just once a week. So everyone knows him and he had taken on the role of arranging the queue of women waiting for a shower. He was very supportive but he also complained that all the hot water had finished because some women had come to the hospital at 3am to do their laundry. That was difficult to hear - there I was thinking we were early but it turned out we were actually super late and there wasn’t even any hot water left. The women were arguing about how much water they were using and their places in the queue as some were trying to queue barge. 

While I was waiting I thought about how this man was right - the hot water the ladies are using should actually be for the patients and the hospital is very generous to allow others to take a shower. Every woman went into the shower for a maximum of ten minutes and then would leave. Suddenly the man outside realized that I couldn’t  actually sit on the floor or on the stairs (because I’ve had some muscle pain lately) so he went and got me a chair to sit on. I started chatting to one of the women in the queue. She was in her 20s and had her six-year-old daughter with her. She was living in a school and seemed very upset and angry with everything going on. She described some of the experiences she had at the school to me, for example she said that some of the women baking bread at the school made it really difficult for children as they were not flexible about the location they would cook in. Children are sensitive to smoke and so it wasn’t easy for them to be around it. 

She also told me about how a lot of children are being born at the school as they’re not able to go the hospital because it’s really difficult to find a place at a hospital during this crisis. Those born at schools - even the UNRWA schools - are not being vaccinated. This is really worrying as it may also result in children with health issues. 

Also there’s so much follow up work that needs to be done by humanitarian organizations in terms of distribution of aid because sometimes the school manager thinks that whatever humanitarian assistance comes to the school is his responsibility to control. That means that s/he decides the amount s/he feels is correct to distribute to the displaced families. The managers can also switch the water on and off whenever they want. Humanitarian organizations need to follow up on accountability of aid distribution. 

I was also told many stories about the bathrooms, which seem to be the main place where it’s difficult for women to get along in the schools. The lady told me that sometimes the bathrooms are mixed and sometimes they are controlled and arranged by certain families. According to my understanding they should be arranged by the school committee which is not actually what’s happening. Instead there are certain families who claim control over the bathroom and the entrance of the bathroom and they decide how long each one stays and even who gets in and out in some cases. She also said that sometimes the men feel disgusted because some women go to the bathroom with their period pads and there isn’t enough water to clean up after themselves and there are high numbers of people in each bathroom.

If people are taking a long time other people outside start to knock their doors and sometimes if people feel strong and powerful they take each other’s turns. Women during their 'time of the month' end up having to tear part of their own clothes - one of them even tore her tent - in order to make sanitary pads. Some women actually cannot move because it’s cold at this time of the year and they get in severe pain and they don't know what to do as they can’t even access pain killers. 

Humanitarian organizations also need to follow up on the quality of food being provided to displaced people at schools because some people have already had food poisoning. One of the men at this lady’s school had died the day before I spoke to her. He was an old sick man with cardiac disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and so many other ailments. He couldn’t get access to health care because the priority at the moment is for cases related to the war. Yes there is a war but then there are also women who give birth and so many other cases - there are people with muscle pain - in my case I’ve been having neck muscle issues for the past two days and I couldn’t go to the hospital to get treatment.

Sometimes women who go to the hospital to give birth are deliberately killed by snipers - this happened with two women who were going to give birth. Another thing I heard at the hospital was about a man whose hand was already cut in a previous war in Gaza - a sniper shot his other hand and his other hand was cut.

So that was my conversation while my friend was taking her shower and then we said goodbye. I also spoke to the man who was doing dialysis. He had been doing it for 27 years and he was the oldest man who has been doing it in Gaza and the West Bank now. Once my friend was finished we left the hospital through a side road to try to avoid the crowds of people. On the side road I saw a dead body with people gathered around it who were saying their goodbyes. 

Obviously he was a martyr and I was very near them - just a few meters away. I was watching them saying goodbye and I thought “Oh my God, how can this happen on earth?” They were saying goodbye in private so I didn’t want to intrude but I deep down I was hoping to go nearer and give my condolences and be with them and be next to that body because I never feel that the body of the dead is something that should panic anyone anymore: obviously we are used to that and unfortunately this is our reality.

In my heart and in my soul I wanted to say goodbye to the soul of that person - someone I never knew and I never met but I felt sympathy with. Then I went home.