Lights in the dark

Dr. Mohamed Abu Shawish brings markers and white paper to the children, then smiles and stays with them.
He involves them in group games, looks at their drawings. All actions that would be normal for a professional psychotherapist, but which in Abu Shawish's case appear out of the ordinary. Mohamed is in fact a doctor from the Gaza Strip. Displaced in recent months due to Israeli military operations, which began after Hamas' actions on 7 October, he had to leave his home in the North and take refuge in the South, where he now lives in a house for displaced people.
The dead in Gaza number in the tens of thousands and it is children who pay the highest price for the bombings and the lack of food and water. This is why Mohammed continues to focus on them. In recent weeks he has even managed to organize a small outdoor cinema, with a tarp and a lot of inventiveness. The children gather in a small courtyard, sit on the ground and for two hours can concentrate only on a cartoon. As if the war was no longer there.

Telling these stories is the NGO Vento di Terra, which has been working in Palestine for years and collaborates on a regular basis with Mohammed. But the testimonies of good do not end here. The teachers who worked in the Vento di Terra kindergartens until October try in every way to apply their skills even in the midst of the tents of the refugee camps. They don't know if the walls of their schools are still standing, but their ability to involve the little ones remains.
The engineer Abu Karim, however, managed to prepare food parcels for more than sixty families who live on the run every day. «Each package contains 4 kilos of rice, 4 bottles of tomato sauce, oil and corn to be crushed to make something similar to bread», he says. Someone then builds tents, as other Palestinian operators from Vento di Terra explain: «It takes a lot of time to do anything. Finding materials is extremely difficult, but we do everything we can to reach as many people as possible." They are lights in the dark.


Chiara Vitali
NP March 2024