Gaza sisters

The girl brought her head down. She swung her legs back and forth under the kitchen table and crossed her arms on the wooden surface. A single braid sat neatly in the middle of her back. A big window behind her framed her profile in the mid morning light. She looked small, too little for an eleven-year old.

Her sister sat to her left. Her head stayed upright, her legs dangled above the floor and she crossed them at the ankles. She ran her hands over her hair, tightened her ponytail, and then brought down her hands to her sides to grip the bottom cushion of her chair. Her size didn't match her age, either. She looked like she was five or six, not ten.

The girls exchanged quick glances then sat perfectly still. They were nervous. We had that in common, at least. I could not clearly see their faces from where I stood at the other end of the big kitchen. But I had seen pictures in their files and had read their psychological evaluations. I was prepared. Or so I thought.

Fatimah and Hala are burn victims from Gaza. They came to Houston for treatment sponsored by the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, or PCRF for short. PCRF is a non-political, non-profit organization dedicated to fighting the medical and humanitarian crisis facing children in the Middle East. The girls could not be treated in besieged Gaza. Doctors and surgeons had volunteered their time and expertise to provide reconstructive surgery for them in Houston. A number of wonderful volunteers were involved in the girls’ unbelievable journey. On my end, I had volunteered my family to host the girls in our house during their stay, and this was my first meeting with them. The month was October, the year 2011.

My daughter and son formed a deep relationship with Fatimah and Hala, and we all kept in touch after they returned to their family in Gaza once they finished their treatment. Now I have no idea what happened to them. I can’t get through on any of the numbers I have for their parents. Their mother was also burned in the same explosion that maimed her girls. PCRF representatives informed me they are also trying to get a hold of them, as well as the other children they helped from Gaza. No news yet.

Today, my daughter asked me about the girls. She said she felt nauseated for not being able to do anything. I had no answers for her. And the little information I could gather was not promising. 

I remember the long nights, when the girls couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried to ease their pain. I remember the way I had to shield them from people’s stares, the many times I had to set strangers straight on how they got hurt. More often than not, people would doubt my account when I mention the Israeli invasion of 2011. But once in a while, informed individuals would briefly close their eyes and mumble, “Yeah. We heard about that.”

Going back to those days, when the girls graced us with their courage, their everlasting smiles, their giggles and tears, their hopes and dreams drawn in crayons and hung on my fridge door, I gulp for air to get rid of a suffocating sensation. We helped them heal, and where are they now? Are they still alive? In what shape or form? What kind of nightmares are they having? Are they with their mother and father? Holding them when they wake up screaming during the night? If they are alive, are they able to sleep? And how many children are burned like them this time around?

I heard my daughter’s voice quiver when she asked, “Will you let me know as soon as you find out anything?” And I’m afraid of what I may have to say.

I can’t, cannot imagine what those mothers who saw their children’s bodies torn by the latest Israeli bombardment on Gaza are going through. What courage, what faith, what strength they have!

How can they go on after this horror?

How can we all?

Lilas Taha is a novelist, winner of the 2017 International Book Awards  and is the author of Shadows of Damascus and Bitter Almonds.

No.

I had to say it. I hated to say it. I wanted to crawl under a rock and not have to say it. I stayed up all night, working out scenarios in my head on how to say it. I dreaded the morning’s arrival when I eventually needed to say it. I knew the kind of impact it would have on my client, 32 years-old and mother of three. But in the end, I looked her straight in the eye and firmly said no.   

I had been her advocate for nearly two years. The bond we formed together during that time was difficult for me to break. I saw myself as her sister or her best friend. But on that particular morning I recognized my selfish desire to be more than that. I needed to feel effective. I wanted to be in control. I searched for ways to make her agony count for something better.

She told me that when she called for help, she was sure no one would believe her because her husband never left visible marks on her body. She didn’t know what she would do if someone did step in to help her. And when I showed up at her doorstep, she had a panic attack. Hyperventilating and crying, she pointed repeatedly at her head and kept saying, “Inside. The bruises are all inside.”

Most people don’t realize there are many forms of domestic abuse. Physical abuse is the easiest to detect. But emotional abuse is another type of monster. It destroys the victim from the inside, like termites eating up the house structure without anyone taking notice. An emotional abuser tears down his victim by convincing her she’s worthless, that every thought in her head is questionable and needs his approval, and that she is the cause of her own misery, not him.

Isolation was the first step. My client told me her husband prevented her from communicating with family members. Neighbors were off limits. She had a car, mind you, and she was allowed to take the kids to school and get groceries. He wrote down the mileage before each trip and calculated the distance to her destination. Had she gone anywhere else, he would have known. He monitored the home phone and her cell phone, so she couldn’t make an unapproved call. He convinced her he could watch her online through surveillance cameras when she went to the grocery store, and demanded to see the receipts. He knew her email account password and stood watching over her shoulder whenever she used the computer. If she used it in his absence, he would track the browsing history and know where she went online. The list goes on.

Intimidation came next. When she took an miscalculated step, or traffic caused her to come home later than expected, he would walk out to the backyard, spray paint a big “X” in one area, then three smaller ones adjacent to it. She knew those “X’s” marked her grave and her children’s.

And so she complied and remained his prisoner. She thought no one who interacted with her would think she was in danger because, after all, she had the freedom to leave the house, had a car and money to spend. No one saw the shackles around her ankles.

I’m not going to tell you how she eventually managed to call for help, or what exactly happened that pushed her over the edge. But she did, and her long journey to independence began. She probably cried every day and every night. Sometimes I was a witness to those episodes of emotional breakdowns, but I knew that the real horror happened to her when she was alone, when she physically felt her world falling apart.

The morning I said no to her marked the end of her case in court. I had to tell her that her abuser, her ex-husband at that point, would not go to jail. She couldn’t understand why the judge would allow him to walk away. I had to explain that his actions were not considered criminal in the eyes of the law. He never laid a hand on her or the children. It was her word against his.

Having won her divorce case with enough child support was not her ultimate goal, I found out. She wanted to see him in handcuffs so he would experience what she went through during her thirteen years of marriage.

“Not even for one day?” she had asked. “One day in jail would be enough for me.”

“No, not even for one day,” I had to say.

You may find yourself judging her, thinking she should have been content in her new life. She had escaped with her children and was finally free with a secure future. She should thank her lucky stars - you may want to say. If you think that, then you really do not understand the devastation of abuse. It was not about revenge in her case. It was about restoring balance. In her mind, seeing him behind bars, even if for just one day, would give her closure.

However, there are no “just” solutions when it comes to domestic abuse problems, neither is there redemption. The damage is always irreversible, and balance is never restored even with counseling. She must continue on with all the holes in her soul wide open. If emotional abuse is a different type of monster, its victim is certainly a special kind of survivor.