For Alaa Hessi, in her final month of pregnancy, this small ritual begins with a calculation of gas rations. Her family gets a ration of 6kg of gas every three months – enough to heat a pot for 18 precious minutes a day. That’s needed for cooking – so for tea, a fire must be built instead.
For 12-year-old Ramadan, the process begins with a hunt for anything flammable, in an environment where there is almost no wood left. He scouts through the sand dunes where he lives, snaps off a few twigs from a thorn bush, and feeds the flames with pieces of discarded plastic that wash up on the beach. Before you boil the kettle, though, there is the matter of the water – with none running, the question is whether a water truck visits your area that day, and if not, how far you must walk to find it.
Then there is transporting that water – how will Ramadan store it, given all of his family’s large water containers have been chewed through by rats? And how does a small boy carry the weight of it – enough liquid for a family to wash, brush teeth, cook with and drink through the next 30C summer day? Finally, the water is boiling, but still there is the question of whether you even have tea or coffee or sugar to brew.
Holding the paper bag of rationed sugar sparks a memory of what those goods have sometimes cost to acquire. Crouched over the teapot, Ramadan recalls last year’s famine, when aid points became death traps, and he and his brother risked everything to sprint for a bag of flour or sugar. He remembers the boys he saw shot beside him, because they moved too soon or too late.
Most of the headlines we encounter about Gaza are the extreme events: bombings, mass deaths, targeted assassinations. There are some things, however, that rarely make the headlines, but have come to define life in Gaza. They are grinding, cruel realities that only really emerge when you inspect the minutia of a day – like a cup of tea.
Over the course of this week, we documented the daily routines and mundane tasks of five ordinary Palestinians: a child, a pregnant woman, a teacher, a skateboarder and a grandmother. We followed them from sunrise to dusk, through the small, ordinary moments that rarely make international news – and through them, hoped to get a different, deeper understanding of what life is like now for Gaza’s people. There is a lot you can understand from the anatomy of a day in Gaza.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
