Gaza 2: Aid

With such a limited time, getting the aid to the right people became the overwhelming concern. It's not a small undertaking either, as the convoy consisted of 148 vehicles filled with medicines, clothing, power generators, atmospheric water extractors and medical equipment like dialysis machines. Eighty of the vehicles were ambulances destined for Gaza’s beleaguered hospitals and clinics.

I found Ellie Merton hugging one like it was her own child. “I’ve lived with this baby for 32 days. I personally picked it up from Norwich’s ambulance depot, and we’ve been through the snow, the rain, the riots and the waits” she explains. Its surprising how attached you can become to a lump of metal. As Ellie explains though, it’s become more than a vehicle. “We’re carrying with us the hopes and emotions of so many we’ve met along the way”.

Nearby I found Mirban Aslam, the driver of the minibus that I traveled in, having a sombre discussion with an education official. Having driven 8,000km into Gaza, the last few hundred with a fractured arm after a fall in Aqaba, he was finally handing over the keys to his vehicle to be used as a school bus for blind children. The usually bubbly Mirban struggled to hold back the emotion as he handed over the keys to the vehicle, which also included six diesel power generators, wind-up torches, and clothes. “This is exactly what I wanted”.

There is more to the aid effort than simply bringing stuff though, as Moheeb Abu Alqumboz explained. A manager at the Islamic University and a volunteer who helps receive humanitarian delegations, said that in Gaza, like anywhere else, the proper research needs to be done beforehand. “Proper needs assessment needs to be undertaken before sending medical supplies such as equipment or disposables. If the machines don’t fit the existing system or the staff aren’t trained in their use, then they’re not much use.” He points that often, health officials are too embarrassed to tell donors these details for fear of offending or disappointing them.

Moheeb also stresses that while direct aid is welcome, its really income generation schemes that are needed. One of the projects he’s involved with is Work Without Borders (www.palwork.net), a remote working scheme where you can hire services such as website design and translation from Gaza or other offices in Palestine. The work gets done by the many highly-skilled graduates who live in Gaza, and provides a vital link to the outside world as well as income.

You could find many of those young graduates loitering shyly around the convoy members, eager to help out. Almost all had embarrassingly good English. Despite the conditions, you sense that education is a top priority. Some of the most dilapidated houses we visited had several university students living there, an indication of how much they value it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that “the only way to get out of Gaza is on a stretcher or on a scholarship”, as one student pithily put it. Another English student, Abdul Moniem, can't contain his pride when he tells me that the Islamic University is the top-ranked university in all of Palestine, and the 14th best in the Arab world. I want to get away before he asks me if I went to uni, emabarassed with the Oxford degree I got with only a fraction of the sacrifices that he must make. The Science and Engineering buildings were destroyed in Operation Cast Lead, accused of being weapons workshops. Imagine the Radcliffe Camera got bombed. Think you'd hear about it?

(Photo: Haya Al-Shatti)