“I curse you!” Fatima Ahmed Qadeeh says. “I curse you hypocrites! You live off the blood of Gaza!”
On the surface she’s angry, because I haven’t been able to find a tent for her or buy her one outright. But really it’s much more. About fifty members of her family, including her husband, have died in Gaza’s Nakba. She can’t remember the exact number and she doesn’t want to.
“One, two, three…” Those are the ages of her children. Besides her father in a wheelchair and her starving mother, they’re the only relatives she likes to count.
Between rage and despair, Fatima lives in Deir al-Balah, another widowed refugee fleeing into the unknown without even a tent to protect her family in ninety-degree heat. She’s done this too many times to count, and I wonder if her hatred of the world has made her an orphan without friends. She doesn’t even have a GoFundMe. She uses PayPal instead.
She lives under a series of disintegrating tarps, lashed together with odds and ends held up by sticks and spite. As we iron out our frustrations with the help of Google Translate, I take stock of her behavior. She praises all the things I’ve done for refugees: the stories I’ve written, the thousands of dollars in donations I’ve solicited, or the article in the American Jewish magazine Moment highlighting how I help them. For me and my unproductive life, it seems like a lot. But, it only goes so far for Fatima. Her family bakes under the sun as it battles scorpions and thieves.
“You lied to me!” she says. “No one will help me. You have to be someone’s relative to get anything done in Gaza. Don’t you understand how it works?”
I had tried to get my friend Omar to help her with a tent. She filled out a form I sent her, but “He never called me! It’s been two days,” she says.
When I ask for more information she responds by yelling “There’s no potable water and no food. What more do you need to know?”
I send her another form, this time for free propane gas, and she discharges her exasperation towards me again: “Where will I get a tank to fill with propane?”
I mentioned this to my Gaza friends.
“I’ll beat her up!” one says.
“I’ll kill her!” says another.
We laugh at the absurdity of it all. They are in pain, too, but they treat me as an honored guest. Palestinians are the most welcoming people I’ve ever met. I am called brother by both men and women. I am invited to visit Gaza when the Nakba ends.
Patiently, I listen as Fatima fights the world. Usually, I would never talk to someone so disparaging, but normally I don’t speak with people experiencing genocide in real time. Social media has changed the definition of the word friend.
Throughout our disagreements, I ignore her, block her, and yell back. In the end, I tell her that she’s crazy. “I know,” she says.
Then she asks me, “Are you promoting my campaign?” She’s been bugging me about this every day since she had gotten someone to make a GoFundMe page for her. But I’m not interested in becoming a marketing machine.
“No,” I say. More curses come.
Finally, I realize I can write a story about her. That way she’ll get free publicity for her fundraiser.
When I tell her she replies: “God bless you, my friend.”
The following fundraiser will help feed Fatima and her family: Fatima’s Go Fund Me
Please visit the author’s website for more stories and information on how to help refugees: https://erossalvatore.com/
You can also visit the Facebook page Glimpses of Gaza
Eros Salvatore is a writer and filmmaker living in Bellingham, Washington. They have been published in the journals Anti-Heroin Chic and The Blue Nib among others, and have shown two short films in festivals. They have a BA from Humboldt State University, and a foster daughter who grew up under the Taliban in a tribal area of Pakistan. Their work can be seen, heard and read at https://erossalvatore.com/
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate