the rain fall

The man held up two fingers, one for each of his wives. Next, he held the tip of his index finger and shook it.

“She’s paralyzed, the waist down, can’t move. Go, bring your mother,” he instructed one of the children.

S, bint el hara (their neighbor), explained again that unfortunately we were not from an NGO. We were not here to build rooms or to give them better roofing. We were here only to document their conditions in hopes of conveying them to a broader audience. We would make no promises, for we could not keep them.

They didn’t believe us, I don’t think, for they kept asking if we’d taken their names down and if the help would know their address when it arrived.

The man’s present wife served us over-sweetened tea, but its sweet scent was lost amidst the overpowering smells of animal droppings. The steam rose doubly quickly, for we stood in the center of the house, an unpaved square that boasted two canopies — a leaky zinc one and another intangible one made of a material that turns red-orange but doesn’t rust.

Pheasants and chickens, also eager to avoid the rain, shared the small canopy with us. With hands cupped around our tea glasses, we watched as the sky showed off its various card tricks: thrusting weak spades into the muddy ground, slicing the air with rain sharp as diamonds, then slowing until it seemed the heart of the sky would stop pounding altogether.

One of the children, undeterred by the slings and arrows of outrageous weather, stood directly under the rain. There were three open-mouthed bins set out to collect rainwater for rainless rainy days. The bins were full to the brim. With water dripping down his face, he tried to wash his feet and sandals — an impossible feat, given that both would instantly be muddied as fast as they were cleaned. He ended up perching on one of the bins, his little sandal bobbing up and down beside him.

“Here she is — my wife,” the boy’s father commanded our attention once again. “Paralyzed feet, but no treatment.”

To my astonishment, the woman peered at us from behind the wooden gate, standing on her two allegedly paralyzed feet. We, all of us, looked at her mystified and expectant. Her husband waved her in. He wanted us to take a good look, to help her out.

As she came forward, it became clear that there was indeed a problem — not (what I understood to be) paralysis but something crippling nonetheless. She walked as if her feet had been incorrectly screwed on, as if her legs carried otherwise dead feet. We were paralyzed with dread as we saw her make what was, even to us, a perilous journey across the mushy shit-covered ground.

The rain had given the Arabic expression – zad itteen billah, made the soil wetter — a new (brown) shade of meaning.

Before we could locate a tray or a ready hand to rid us of our tea glasses, the woman had fallen. Hands and knees went into the slime, and she struggled to rise.

Why did her husband ask her to come across? Did he not know better? Why didn’t we move more quickly? I wanted to kick myself for just being there, for seeing that.

The sky cried hard, out of turn. Meanwhile, the woman, who had every right to weep — she looked at her muddied hand as if it did not belong to her, with dry, almost indifferent eyes.

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the narrator describes the exhausting search for a friend’s corpse in a river of mud and shit. Vietnam was just that, O’Brien implies, a river of mud and shit: slippery, malodorous, deep, unbreathable and hard to get out of.

Gaza Camp is not unlike.

As we prepared to leave this Saturday, an elderly man told us that, when we were 120-years old, we would remember him as a distant memory merely. I told him that I hoped the camp would be a memory, and I meant it.

I hope that in the camp’s place will be a flourishing city, a city able to stand tall, on strong stable feet. A city that doesn’t fall to its knees. A city like all others that, when promised rain, delights instead of wondering if perhaps this time it shall drown in its own waste.