I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey Read Online Free Page B

house for him. (My sixth brother, Noor, had become caught up in the conflict of the region, and has been missing for decades.)
    Mayar and Aya, who were in grades nine and eight, were almost painfully shy. Sometimes they even asked one of their older sisters to speak to the others for them. But they were clever girls. Mayar looked the most like her mother, and she was the top math student in her school. She entered school competitions here in Gaza and usually won. She wanted to be a doctor like me. She was the quietest of my six daughters, but she was not shy about describing the impact the strife in Gaza had on the people who live here. She once said, “When I grow up and become a mother, I want my kids to live in a reality where the word
rocket
is just another name for a space shuttle.”
    Aya was never far from Mayar. She was a very active, beautiful child who smiled easily and laughed a lot when she was with her sisters. She wanted to be a journalist and was very determined inher own quiet way. If she couldn’t get what she wanted from me—permission to go to visit a relative or to buy a new dress—she’d go to her mother and say, “We are the daughters of the doctor; you must give this to us.” Aya loved language, excelled in Arabic literature. She was the poet in the family.
    Raffah, my daughter with eyes as bright as stars, was an outgoing child, inquisitive, rambunctious and gleeful. She was in grade four this year.
    Mohammed was a young man of thirteen. He needed the guidance of a father, and I was worried about that because I was away four days a week, working at the Sheba hospital in Tel Aviv. He was to write the grade seven exams in June. His little brother Abdullah, in grade one, was the baby of the family. Watching him running to his sisters on the beach, kicking up the sand as he bounded over the dunes, I felt a special pain for this motherless boy: how much would he remember her?
    That day they all sat for photos beside their names in the sand. Even Aya and Mayar smiled into the camera. When the tide came in and washed their names away, they wrote them again, higher on the beach. They rushed from playing in the surf and riding the waves to climbing into a boat that was moored on the beach, from building pyramids in the sand to racing back into the water—the camera click, click, clicking, recording the jubilance of my eight children. I watched them, thinking, “Let them play, let them escape from their grief.”
    While they cavorted on the dunes, I drove back to Jabalia Camp to fetch the kebabs. There’d been such a long lineup at the butcher early that morning, I’d decided to go to the beach and return for the meat once the children were settled. While driving, I thought about Nadia and the changes in our lives since she had died. At first I’d believed that I would have to stop the research work I was doing, since it required me to be in Tel Avivfrom Monday to Thursday. But the children insisted that I continue. They said, “We’ll take care of everything at home. Don’t worry.” It was the way Nadia had raised them. She was the example they were following. Nadia managed the house, the children, the extended family, everything, while I went away to study, to work, to try to make a better life for all of us. Sometimes I was away for three months. When I studied public health at Harvard from 2003 to 2004, I was gone for a year. But how could these children manage without a mother if their father was away more than half the time, even though they all told me that I needed to go on? This is why I was so happy they had agreed to move to Toronto: there we could all be together, with no border to cross every day.
    And while we were in Canada, this place would be waiting for us. There’s something eternal about olive, fig and apricot trees, a piece of land that’s near a beach where the sky meets the sea and the sand, where whitecaps break as waves roll up to the shore, where the surf rides high on