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Tank
fire, machine gun fire, and roosters crowing; explosions, more
tank fire, more gun fire, and those stupid all-night roosters
with no sense of timing: How Not to Sleep in the Refugee Camp
at Rafah – at least if you're a visitor and listening
to the "low intensity war" rage on the borders of the
Gaza Strip all night still frays your nerves. Two year-old Haia
and 4-year-old Sharaf sleep peacefully, unperturbed. "They
got used to it," their father says. "And anyway, this
is nothing."
Nothing?
Any school child can tell you which noise is the tank, which is
the gun, what type of gun, whether the explosion was serious or
just loud, how to tell the difference between the sound of Apache
and Cobra helicopters, and which planes are F-16s and which are
not. I remember war novels and war movies where the seasoned soldiers
would teach the new recruits how to tell what noise was what and
when to worry, when to run. Kids growing up in the Gaza strip
would make excellent trainers.
In
addition to the military expertise of the average Gazan comes
the street-wise know-how of refugee camp living: where to walk
or when Not to walk in certain areas; where the latest tent-city
can be found, thanks to UN help for the families whose homes are
heaps of stone and twisted metals thanks to Israeli home demolition
experts; which families are most in need of community help so
they can eat or get medical care. Poverty is increasing everywhere.
Unemployment has reached 75%. Human traffic at the weekly Saturday
market in Rafah has declined noticeably because fewer goods from
Egypt are allowed in causing the prices of those items that make
it to rise. Fewer and fewer people can afford to buy the lowest
priced goods around.
Much
like the refugee camps in Beirut, the camps in the Gaza Strip
host their own ecosystems. Competition for the garbage rages between
the chickens, the goats, the sheep, the cats, and the rats. Rats
are the boldest, helping themselves to anything digestible, including
the boney-thin cats that slink away from the garbage pits when
the rats are out in force. In a dark alleyway on the way back
to my hosts' home a huge brown rat races out in front of
us. Worried that I'll shriek in terror, Mahmud attempts to
chase the rat down an alternate pathway, but she's undeterred
and comes tearing towards me. He kicks her with his foot and she
squeals grotesquely, irritated that her evening stroll has been
disrupted. The rats come into people's homes, invading their
kitchens, crawling over sleeping children on their bed mats. Nothing
keeps them away. They are a real problem, he says. The flies and
crawling bugs don't merit much attention as a result. I wake
up with bites on my face and ankles so from now on I'll wear
socks to sleep and keep the blanket over my head. Or so that's
the plan. Rafah's fairly warm at night.
It's
time to return to the office in Gaza City, so I'll have to wake
up at 6am – early enough to make sure I arrive at the checkpoint
south of Deir al-Balah in time to get through. It'll stay open
for an hour or so today. The usual convoy of taxis, cars, trucks,
carts crowd at the entrance. Tempers flare. The smell of rotting
produce permeates the hot taxi I'm stuffed into, which is idling
behind a diesel-fuming truck. But the traffic starts to move,
slowly, evenly and we pass the checkpoint in 30 minutes. A good
day. The only tense moment coming when the driver of an IDF jeep
escorting a bus from the Gush Katif settlement slams his hand
down on the horn warning us to get out of his way so his privileged
passengers can get on to their exclusive road without delay; without
having to plug their noses as they cross the path of the human
garbage they're hoping to eventually completely displace.
Jennifer
Loewenstein lives in Gaza City, and works for the Mezan Center
for Human Rights.
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