February 26, 2010
Dear Friends–
I’ll be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation this coming week, either Monday or Tuesday, for a show tentatively titled “Haiti – Picking Up the Pieces;” revisiting the country 7 weeks after the earthquake to hear about the psychological aspects of the Haitians, as well as the medical situation.
I’ll be talking about the trip Rosemary, Star, and I just took to Port-au-Prince and what we saw there, as well the way forward, helping Haitians heal after this disaster.
Check your local NPR station for listings and schedule for Talk of the Nation, and the audio interview will be posted shortly after airing here. I hope you can tune in!
Posted in Announcements, Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 16, 2010
Barth Green stands easily in the middle of the dusty yard in front of two small administrative tents, just inside the gate of the University of Miami’s Global Institute field hospital at the Port-au-Prince airport. His blue shirt is clean and crisp, cream colored pants still pressed, his grey hair combed straight back. There is a storm of activity around him, squalls of need coming from every corner of the encampment.
the busy life of a Haiti hospital director
Men and women in scrubs, some with IV bottles in hand, rush up to ask questions. Military commanders and visiting dignitaries stand in a small circle around him. Barth Green responds thoughtfully, unhurriedly, sometimes with humor, to each person in turn. He is the director of the hospital and of the entire facility – the huge tent which contains the operating room and the acute wards for children which are attached to it, the other large one for adults, the small tents for convalescence and isolation, the tent-barracks where hundreds of volunteers lie on cots just like the ones the patients have.
Barth Green is chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the University of Miami Medical School. Since 1994 he and his colleague, family physician Michael Fournier, have been leading Project Medishare in Haiti, helping (along with the US based Partners in Health and the Haitian Ministry) to bring good primary care to the Haitian countryside. When the earthquake hit on January 12, he and his colleagues moved quickly; volunteers arrived. Some were skilled as physicians, surgeons, OR techs and nurses; others were simply, surprisingly even to them. moved to help: “at least I’m another pair of hands,” more than one says. Since then the “barely controlled chaos” as several doctors describe it, has been providing treatment for thousands, saving lives. And a surprising life enhancing life changing experience of selfless service for many who have come to provide that treatment and save those lives. “For me,” a tired looking fifty-ish U of M ER doc confides, “this has been the most important experience of my professional life. Maybe,” he adds after a moment, ” of my whole life.”
In Barth Green the surgeon’s calm amidst crisis and attention to present, necessary detail is coupled with an understanding of long term needs. He knows that the deepest despair and the greatest distress may arise only when the immediate crisis is over; and he recognizes the importance of CMBM’s commitment to helping caregivers deal with their own stress and trauma and to teaching them to help the Haitian people to help themselves. He reads over our annual report and our tentative Haitian work plan, and shares them with Carl Eisdorfer, the former chair of Miami’s department of psychiatry, and present director of its program of aging, who has just arrived.
The Team--Star, Rose, and Jim
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 16, 2010
There are six rows of cots, perhaps twenty cots in each. Children lie on them. White bandages capping the stumps left after amputations are visible. Some of the kids are asleep; others seem barely conscious. Women and mobile, healthy children crowd around many beds. A large somber man bends over a tiny baby whom he holds with one hand and delicately feeds with the other. Doctors, nurses, and volunteers in scrubs move from cot to cot. Doctors, nurses and other volunteers stop to high five small children who have been orphaned by the earthquake – wards of the ward it seems – hand them gum or candy, hoist them in the air, carry them for a while before setting them down. Periodically four men bearing patients on stretchers move quickly down the center aisle to or from the operating room or intensive care unit.
Stevenson lies quietly in one corner of the room. He is seventeen, tall and slim, with a sweet, thoughtful, handsome face. We talk about what happened to him. Stevenson’s mother Dieula (“God is there”) sits on a cot next to his, placid, nodding her head as her son speaks softly, adding details.
Stevenson had just arrived home from school on the afternoon of January 12. He had changed his clothes and was getting ready to do his home work – or perhaps watch a bit of TV first, he hadn’t decided. When the house began to shake and pieces of the roof to fall, Stevenson rushed outside. As he emerged a slab of concrete crushed his right arm. His mother who was outside cooking, rushed to him, held him up. For two days they walked and hitchhiked, Stevenson’s arm shredded, till they arrived at the then rudimentary Miami hospital tent.
The surgeon amputated Stevenson’s arm with a pocket knife, Lisa, a volunteer from New York tells me, crying with the memory. “There was only eight minutes of anesthesia,” she goes on, “and he just said ‘I am fine’.” Stevenson is still in bed a month later because the above elbow stump has been infected and reinfected. An IV with antibiotics flows into the back of his left hand. I teach him and his mother him some slow deep breathing to quiet the pain a bit, to help them sleep.
With Star interpreting from Creole Dieula and I talk some more. Only when I ask after the rest of her family does she tell me, turning aside for a moment first, that her daughter died in the ruins of their house, that in fact her entire extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins also perished. “There is no one,” she says with the tragic matter of factness, the enormous grief barely held behind a dam of determination, that seem to me emblems of this entire catastrophe, “except for my boy and myself. And after this hospital we have nowhere to go.”
I tell Dieula and Stevenson how much I appreciate them talking to us, how sorry I am for their terrible loss, how they have helped us to understand the pain and the plight and the strength too of the Haitian people. I explain that we are going to be visiting with other people in the hospital and that we hope to use what we have learned from them and others to help staff and patients here and elsewhere to deal a little better with their grief and all the uncertainties of the future. She says that is a very good thing and much needed.
I am not at all sure if we have been of any help at all. And yet when we greet Dieula a few hours later, as she sits on a bench, she favors us with a smile that brightens the overcast afternoon. “You have not forgotten,” she says.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 13, 2010
Day 2 in Haiti, Feb. 12, 2010
Dear Friends,
In Haiti three days of “memorializing the dead,” of prayer and fasting have begun.
thousands gather to memorialize the dead
We drive downtown, past blocks where some houses are still erect and others down, victims we are told of neglected building codes, and others where everything is flattened like discarded, half-eaten sandwiches; fragments of concrete and stone and dust are everywhere. S.O.S. signs are chalked on walls. We pass open air congregations, gathered like human lakes in front and on the sides of tent encampments, several hundred people here a few thousand there, listening to sermons in Creole, raising their voices in song. On the radio one preacher exhorts his listeners to ask God’s forgiveness for drinking, smoking and going to voodoo priests. Requiems for the dead are broadcast, and reminders of God’s power to see and do all, to help us go, and live beyond death.
Haitians gather for sermons
We park at the Champs du Mars. A hundred thousand people are here, or more, it is hard to tell. They fill an amphitheater where the speakers stand, flood across fields and roads, flow among the thousands of tents that have been set up, sit in the trees overhead. The Haitian people, we are told, are like those who were with Joshua at Jericho: They have no weapons but God will save them. The messages from the Haitian President as well as the preachers, are similar – have strength, have faith; we will work together for the future. Men, women and children, most in tee shirts and loose blouses, some in surprisingly neat even stylish clothes, sing and raise their arms ( a few extending bibles upward) to praise God and shout “Hallelujah”. The mood is somber and suffused with determination, but also celebratory. “We are,” one lean fortyish man with dreadlocks tells me, holding my hand and looking at me with urgent fellow feeling, “here to give thanks to God, to rejoice for our brothers and sisters who have perished, to love one another.” Drums begin to play and a breeze, as if summoned by them, blows through the noon heat. We are all clapping and dancing now. None of the Haitians,needing to remain strong, seems to be crying, though sorrow rises like steam from their bodies; tears come to Star’s eyes and mine.
the cathedral in ruins
Afterwards we stop at the Cathedral. A nearby music school has disappeared, its students dying with it. The Cathedral, once one of the city’s glories, is a skeleton, its only note of celebration bright bougainvillea in what was once a garden. You can see through the great building now, from one side of the transept to the other, from the porch at the back through the nave to the chancel at the front. Across the street people too injured or tired or dispirited to attend services that require standing are camped in rubble against a wall, a few possessions piled around them, burlap for bedding. At the head of one’s pallet is an astonishing sign of faith and hope, taped to the wall: a picture of the risen Christ, emerging from a blue sky, returning victorious to earth.
great faith and hope for the future
Jim
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 12, 2010
Shortly after we arrived yesterday afternoon, Star and I crossed the street and walked down the ragged line of incongruously bright new tents that front the road. An open space gives us entry, and we wander through the maze of living and cooking spaces, a large, older white man, a small, younger black woman whose “bonsoirs” are often returned with smiles.
We reach one boundary of the encampment formed by a four-story concrete building which has been crushed like a paper hat. A young woman with an infant greets us. The baby is a little thin, a little dour, a little jumpy. Her name is Miranda, and she is two months old. Miranda’s mother shows me a place on her head where the nearby building had quite literally fallen on her. It hurts still, a month after the earthquake, and so do her neck and back. I go into her tent to take a look. There is great tension and tenderness at the site of her injuries. I do some gentle manipulation, and she smiles with relief. I reassure her that in time the symptoms will subside and remind myself to bring acupuncture needles next time.
Others have not been as fortunate as Miranda and her mother. One woman’s two children have been seriously injured and are still at the hospital. Another’s aunt has died. A third is missing her husband. A fourth has lost the sight in one eye. The pain from injuries received in the earthquake persist. Memories of loss and unspeakable terror seem to have attached to and continually restimulate the pain—the ever-present physical replaying of the catastrophe, the physical manifestation of psychological trauma and ongoing distress. Some “cannot remember the simplest thing,” or “make any decision.” The blind woman fears that she will not receive medicine without money to pay for it. No one sleeps well. All are fearful of further loss or injury, or—they are not quite sure what.
And, indeed, the situation is enormously stressful. The tents, which look so good, just arrived yesterday, brought by the French Red Cross. . For a month, these people have been sleeping in the open. “We have a committee,” says Wilson, Miranda’s father, “to organize ourselves.” And they are indeed cooking communally. “But we do not have toilets, or other necessary sanitation.” There are no doctors readily available to them, or medicine, or replacements for needed glasses lost, or hope for more adequate or permanent housing, or indeed, much communication with the world beyond the tent city. As we are leaving, Wilson invites us to share the rice that half a dozen families are beginning to eat.
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More in days to come.
Jim
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 12, 2010
Day 1, part 1 of 2–Arrival
There is a weight to the air; we begin to feel it at the border where we enter from the Dominical Republic. We can smell it, too, in the swirl of dust that forces some to wear masks, in the acrid edge of burned and burning building materials. It grows heavier as we bump around flanks of rubble on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. In the city, it roughens our voices and presses tears from our eyes.
Happily, surprisingly, we have a place to stay—in the Coconut Villa, a hotel near the airport that is an undisturbed island amidst collapsed houses. Across the street, several thousand Haitians live in tents.
Rosemary Murrain, Star Myrtil, and I are here to see if our approach can help bring psychological relief to the people of Haiti—and to see if we can work with and find support from the large international agencies that are funded to bring food, housing, schools, and emergency medical care to the people. Our approach, which combines such mind-body techniques as meditation, guided imagery, biofeedback, and yoga, self-expression in words, drawings, and movement, and small group support, has made sense to and worked remarkably well with war- and disaster-traumatized populations in Kosovo, Macedonia, Israel and Gaza, in post-Katrina New Orleans, and with US military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s practical, easy to learn, and feels right to people who are trying to gain control over the thoughts, feelings, and memories that overwhelm them in the wake of catastrophe. We’ve published the only randomized controlled trial (RCT) of any invention of any intervention for war-traumatized kids. It showed an 80% decrease in symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in Kosovo high school students, an improvement that was maintained at three months’ follow-up. More recent studies on 1,000 children and adults in Gaza show similar sustained gains in spite of the ongoing constraints and tragedy of life there. Altogether, the several thousand clinicians, teachers, and community leaders’ we’ve trained have made our CMBM model available to hundreds of thousands of children and adults around the world.
Rosemary is CMBM’s new Director of Finance and Administration. Immensely capable, unflappable, fluent in French, she’s an MBA student who has helped to create and lead educational programs throughout Africa. She’s in charge of the logistics that brought us on our journey here, and she will help create necessary partnerships. She’s also, I say with pride, my goddaughter. Star is her friend, a Haitian living in Florida, leading women’s programs there and fluent in Creole as well as French; a human bridge for us to Haiti and to its people.
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I’ll post more this afternoon, about our visit to the tent city outside our hotel and the people we met there.
Jim
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 9, 2010
Dear friends,
We’re on our way to Haiti now, via the circuitous route that the damaged Haitian airport and the daunting US weather demand. We’ll be arriving on Thursday to begin working with people on the ground and exploring partnerships with the Haitian government and local and international NGO’s, churches, schools, and other community groups. I’m going with Rosemary Murrain, our Director of Administration and Finance, who has worked in Haiti, and Star Myrtil, a young Haitian woman who has been a Program Manager for NGO’s and speaks Creole as well as French.
We’ll let you know more when we’re on the ground; meanwhile, here’s a brief description of the work we hope to be doing.
All my best,
Jim
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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December 29, 2009
Dear friends,
The Christian Science Monitor featured an article on our Healing the Wounds of War program in the Middle East! Ilene Prusher interviewed some of our Gaza trainees, and myself, to write this thoughtful piece. She also notes that it is the one-year anniversary of the Israel siege on Gaza, “Operation Cast Lead,” which devastated the people and landscape of Gaza, and from which they are still struggling to recover a year later.
Here is an excerpt of the article, but I hope you check out the original, with some pictures and related stories on Gaza and the Middle East, here.
Gaza war anniversary: How one group helps victims overcome trauma
By Ilene R. Prusher Staff writer / December 28, 2009
Jerusalem
Rawya Hamam was watching her son deteriorate. Hisham wouldn’t sleep, clung to her incessantly, and said he wanted to go back into her belly so he’d be safe. “Grandma is lucky she died so she doesn’t have to live here now,” the boy told his mother.
It’s not a normal statement to expect from a five-year-old child, but neither were these normal times. A year ago, at the outbreak of war between the militant Palestinian group Hamas and Israel, anything resembling a normal life disappeared into a violent maelstrom that wreaked unprecedented destruction on the Gaza Strip. More than 1,400 Gazans were killed, according to a Palestinian count, in a campaign the Israeli army named “Operation Cast Lead,” with the aim of getting Hamas to stop the daily launch of occasionally fatal rockets onto Israeli communities. Thirteen Israelis were killed in the three-week war. . . . keep reading
We’re so thankful for the recognition of our work in Gaza, alleviating psychological pain and suffering, and all of the work we do, both in the Middle East and here in the US teaching health and mental health professionals to learning to handle their stress and incorporate mind-body techniques into their practice through our Mind-Body Medicine Training as well as our Healing Our Troops program. These warm, caring professionals we train use their skill and wisdom to help families recovering from disaster, like those who survived Hurricane Katrina, as well as working with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.
(If you kept reading my post, don’t forget to check out the rest of the original CSM article with pictures and related stories on Gaza and the Middle East, here.)
Jim
Posted in Announcements, Gaza, Global Trauma Relief by Dr. James S. Gordon
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December 24, 2009
“We have been on a journey,” says the psychologist who is leading the final session of Mohammed’s group. She sits comfortably cross-legged on the floor, in her long coat and headscarf, next to the young man who is her partner on this last day. “We have come to know each other in a way that is not usual here in Gaza,” she goes on. “men and women speaking together from their hearts, all of us finding new friends.”
This is our last group and, as we check-in, and while my translator summons up her English, I find myself pondering old mysteries and contemplating new wonders. The dress of the woman’s co-leader: He is wearing a sport jacket and slacks, neatly pressed, and a tie, secured with a Windsor knot, a professional code of dress that many of the men favor. How much effort, I wonder, does it take to maintain such self-respect amid Gaza’s crushing, demoralizing constraints? And how does he do it with the dearth of dry cleaning facilities and the scarcity of solvents? I am impressed once again by the intelligence, dignity and, yes, elegance of a woman who, except for a tiny slit for her eyes is completely covered. Her assessment of herself this last day is so open, unsparing, witty – “I want to thank all of you,” she begins, “I realize now I have been too rigid, and often wrong, in my judgments; and I have been unnecessarily covering my feelings, not just my body.” I too realize once again – what a grace of these groups – that I have much to learn about my own preconceptions and judgments.
In this session we do drawings similar to the ones we do on the first day of the first training, pictures that often show us how much – sometimes how stunningly, satisfyingly much – we have changed since that opening group. The wires of a cage that contained an irritable, frustrated physician have turned into steps on a ladder which will bring him to a place of peace, among trees in his yard and within himself; a psychologist’s family members scattered across the landscape by misunderstanding in day one’s picture are now gathered in a comforting circle in which they are, like members of the mind-body group she is addressing, “sharing their feelings.”
Our leader has brought us candies wrapped in red foil, to celebrate our time together, and to mark its end. “I Love You” is written across them in silver. Another woman has brought us all pens “to remember this group when you write.” A third has baked a cheesecake, its top speckled with many colored candied glitter, with a single candle. “This is,” she announces, “to celebrate our journey and also,” she adds, “the Prophet Mohammed’s hijra,” his journey from Mecca to Medina in 622, “whose anniversary falls on this day.”
It was in Medina, I remember, that Mohammed created the umma, the spiritual community that is the model for Islamic society. It provides Muslims with the opportunity to gratefully practice the prayers and manifest the precepts and the code of conduct that Mohammed brought to them.
As our leader carefully divides the cake in squares I hear, as clearly as if he were once again standing in front of me, the closing comment of a young psychologist in our previous training nine months before. A tough, pale, earnest, bearded young man, he had spoken with some formality: “I did not know what to expect when I came; these techniques, it seemed to me, were foreign to Gaza. But as I have been here these days I have been so impressed. You and your faculty are so knowledgeable and such good teachers, and I have learned so much about myself as well as psychology. But even more important” – I can hear again his voice lowering, more intimate now – “you have all been so kind to me and all the participants, have made us feel so much at ease. I believe,” – I knew he was getting ready to conclude, but never could have imagined what he would say – “that this is what it must have been like in the time of the Prophet Mohammed.”
Our leader hands us plates, and we eat our cake and savor each other’s company. There is general sadness at “concluding this blessed vacation with ourselves,” as one woman observes, to general agreement. But there are also commitments to “meditate daily” and “shake and dance with my children when we are feeling overwhelmed, or stressed.” Everyone expects to “start mind-body groups for patients on the first of the year.” There are promises all around to be in touch in the months ahead – in the supervision groups that Mohammed and the rest of our faculty will be leading every week throughout Gaza, and less formally too. Phone numbers are exchanged and a paper passed around for email addresses.
And then our leader in her long coat and head scarf reaches over and turns on the CD player and stands and claps, and sways a little, while her young colleague in the sports coat, his collar open and tie now loosened, rises and steps to his right toward Mohammed and the other men, and begins the steps that will take them and me too, our arms on each others’ shoulders, in a small happy circle, around our room.
Posted in Gaza, Global Trauma Relief by Dr. James S. Gordon
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December 21, 2009
December 20, 2009
Day 6
Dear friends,
If Gaza is saturated with tradition, and blessed with generous impulses, it is galvanized by politics. Until several years ago, when we developed a high level of skill and firmness in directing our trainees back to their own present feelings, simple declarative statements often threatened to veer off into impassioned political narratives. The Palestinian faculty we have trained now recognizes the hazards, and has become adept at forestalling rhetoric, foreclosing budding arguments, redirecting attention inward, and calling for immediate feelings as well as the historical conditions that may have provoked them. Inevitably, however, politics and the devastating consequences of political decisions are not far from the minds and speech and feelings of Gaza’s men, women and children.
In the small groups we see and hear that the consequences of history are inscribed in our participants’ pain and fears. Remember the hurt that the young psychologists whom I described in the previous blog carry from childhoods shadowed by loss and deprivation and squeezed by self-righteous brutality. And anxiety about present safety and future survival is absolutely, understandably universal: Gaza is closed off from the rest of the world, vulnerable to unpredictable attack from Israelis who control its borders and airspace and to violent schisms and reprisals within. Inevitably there are symptoms: One stocky young male psychologist from a distinguished family of Gazan warriors admits, embarrassed but eager for help, to “panic attacks” when his toddler daughter develops a cold or returns late from a babysitting relative; several other mental health professionals speak of waking abruptly, hearts racing at innocent sounds that evoke body-memories of Israeli shells landing or Fatah and Hamas fighting under their windows.
Six months ago, Gaza, though deeply wounded, seemed far more hopeful. Crumbled buildings – large public and small private ones – punctuated the streets of Gaza City and Rafah; blasted orchards and fields torn by shells tolled a loss of innocence as well as income; memories of the 1400 who died in the fighting in December and January filled the eyes of families we visited and appeared, often briefly, modestly, but with head-shaking sadness, in conversation. Still, there was a sense that things might, even that they likely would, finally change for the better.
One of Hamas’ top officials, Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmed Yousef, spoke of the renewed faith in American idealism that Barack Obama’s election and his speech in Cairo had inspired in him and others; of his hope for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas; and of a future in which a regional partnership “of the world’s three great monotheistic religions” would bring peace, tourism and industry to Gaza and the West Bank as well as Israel. “Soon, inshallah, (god willing)” our Gaza faculty estimated, “we will be able to go with you to Israel, the West Bank, maybe even America.”
The current “situation” – the word is an all-purpose one that Israelis as well as Palestinians regularly use – seems by contrast dispiriting, even desperate, to the Gazans I meet outside of as well as in our training. Now Ahmed Yousef reminds me that “we have not fired on Israel for a year,” and asks, sadly, rhetorically, “and what has been our reward?” Young people wonder whether a world that will not open Gaza’s borders to trade that is necessary for rebuilding or to the free passage that will overcome their punishing isolation, understands or cares about or even notices their plight. Several speak, with resignation but chilling firmness, of the inevitability, in the absence of progress, of resuming “resistance”:
I do not feel that the vast majority of Gazans whom I meet – and I have worked closely with several hundred and met many hundreds more over the last seven years – want to return to fighting; it is that they do not know what else to do, how else to lift the crushing weight of the occupation, to signal, amid what appears to them colossal indifference, if not hostility, that they are “human,” and deserve the basic rights that the rest of us assume. “Don’t the Israelis understand we are just like them” one young woman, a well educated “political independent” asks me. “I have parents and children I love. I want to help my people. Yes, I hate what the Israeli government has done to us, but I do not hate Israelis.”
There are to be sure fanatics in Gaza, people chained to an unchanging allegiance to past wounds, committed to a holy war that will wipe Israel from the landscape. They are, however, very few among the very many I have met. Hamas has been a resistance movement and has committed terrorist acts, as, I would add, have other movements in this region. However, many of its leaders and many of the young who have been drawn to it now aspire, in spite of their current distress, frustration, and discouragement, to becoming partners in leading a state, productive members of a tolerant regional and world community. A burly young man, a high ranking government functionary who speaks with resignation about the possibility of resuming resistance, sounds a few moments later exactly like an American graduate student. He is particularly glad to talk with me, he says, because he wants my advice on framing a topic for the PhD thesis he hopes to write.
The day before our training ends, I speak, at Ahmed Yousef’s invitation, at The House of Wisdom, an independent Swiss funded Gaza City “think tank” that he helped found. “Everyone has to speak English here,” he tells me. “We want to be part of the world community.” Thirty earnest young intellectuals – political scientists, environmentalists, government officials – gather on short notice: Some are affiliated with Hamas, others with Fatah; many are unaffiliated with any political party.
I sit at the intersection of long polished seminar tables – it could be Georgetown or Harvard- and talk about the work we are doing in Gaza, the research that demonstrates its efficacy in reducing stress, improving mood, and enhancing hope for the future. I discuss the resilience of the people and the community that supports them; the central role of self-care and mutual help in all health and mental health care; the necessity of knowing and caring for and changing oneself as a prelude to helping others do the same; the dangers of fixed ideological positions that force people to deny or suppress their true and changing needs; and the importance of meaning and purpose in sustaining all of us. There are nods of heads and some smiles. The questions and comments are thoughtful, balancing appreciation for and curiosity about our work – “Yes, I and others in politics could use that,” remarks one man – with reminders of the challenges to safety and survival as well as sanity that continue to confront all Gazans.
As the seminar draws to a close, the House of Wisdom executive director Mahmoud El Madhour, a wavy haired, urbane PhD engineer and MBA who has studied Greek philosophy in Greece, and is a proud independent, thanks me. He ends the afternoon with a few words of reflection: “Without communication,” he begins in easy but urgent English, “we have nothing.” He pauses for a moment. “We stand here in Gaza, with no other place to go. This is my resistance. Gaza is a lovely place. And I want you to know I do not mind sharing it.”
Posted in Gaza, Global Trauma Relief by Dr. James S. Gordon
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