TENT DIARIES

By Dr. Jehad Hasanain

Those who live in tents. They have begun to feel strange pains creeping into them. Some of them are psychological. Others are physical. Or both.

Among these complaints, which are not the only ones. They have alternating pains in their kidneys. A complaint that is almost common among all of them. Some of them explained it as being due to the polluted water they drink every day. They get it with difficulty and in queues. Sometimes it tastes like diesel or oil. If you expose it to sunlight, you will see white or black objects swimming in it. Or its color tends to yellow. But there is nothing else. Everyone is forced to drink it. Otherwise, they will die of thirst.

Uncle Ibrahim, who lost his family in the north and was displaced for the fifth time to the Mawasi of Khan Yunis, told me that the reason for his kidney pain is the cold he is exposed to at dawn in his tent, which is only thirty meters from the beach. The cold is intense at dawn. The tent cannot prevent it. It also cannot prevent the heat of the sun, which turns the tent into an oven after eight in the morning and especially at noon. “Our bodies can no longer withstand all these fluctuations, my son. The fluctuations of temperature and weather. The fluctuations of politics and time. The fluctuations of war, hunger and poverty,” he told me.

Ahmed was lying on his right side next to his tent. Feeling his kidney with his left hand, he did not share his family’s lunch. (Three cans of peas from UNRWA, of poor taste. They were heated over firewood and poured into one plate.) He assured me that the cause of his kidney pain was not the cold. Rather, it was the preservatives in canned beans, peas, and other bad canned foods. He explained to me, in a quasi medical way, how after more than seven months of consumption, preservatives turn the body into an iron vessel that is susceptible to rust and melting. He told me this in pain. Our bodies have begun to melt and rust from the inside in this war. Preservatives are not only destroying our kidneys. They are destroying our hearts, livers, veins and all our organs. The kidney is just the tip of the iceberg. But with time, after the war ends, all the people in Gaza will collapse. The hospitals will not be able to accommodate them. People are forcing themselves to postpone their pain and their illness, their downfall. Those who were not killed by the bombing will die slowly from pollution, preservatives and psychological pain. This war has killed everyone living in Gaza. Either by quick killing or slow killing.

I left Ahmed imagining the people crowded around me and in the tents, iron vessels eaten away from the inside by rust, neglect, waiting, disregard and preservatives. Waiting for the moment of their final erosion and gradual collapse—which will not be sudden.