Poor

'Come and live among the poor for a time, and realise what a struggle for existence really means.' (Dr. Selena Fox)

When I arrived at a Palestinian hospital to offer myself as a volunteer, the Director looked at me – this young man with long blond hair and a dangly, silver cross earring – with undisguised scepticism. Another volunteer, from Germany, offered to show me around. We sat together on a balcony with hot sun burning down and wasps buzzing around us, to give food to children with severe disabilities. I was just 22, yet I had a mysterious sense that this place, Bethany (literally 'house of the poor' (בֵּית-עַנְיָה)), a stone’s throw from Jerusalem, was where God wanted me to be. That night, I stayed on a dirty mattress on a classroom floor. The drains flooded and spewed raw sewage into the room.

As time passed by, I learned to jump back less when I pulled sheets out of a cupboard and saw and heard cockroaches fall and scatter all around my feet. I tried very hard to ignore (ugh!) the huge black spiders that slept in corners where the classroom walls joined the ceilings. I started to get used to the sporadic on-off electricity and water supplies. I began not to notice the stench of classrooms where incontinent children had laid on torn mattresses all day, and we had no soap or disinfectant to clean them. (It was the same mattresses on which we slept). I learned to mask my disappointment when we got to the end of a hard-working day, only to discover that no food had been delivered.

When air force jets flew over at low altitude, creating a loud and unnerving sonic boom, even that became part of daily life. I no longer threw myself onto the floor with my hands over my head as the doors and windows rattled. I struggled when I heard nurses tell stories of how they had been treated by military patrols. I was horrified when I met a 17 year old girl hiding in the kitchen because she had been seen talking to a man in the street who wasn’t a relative. Her own family was hunting her down to kill her – to restore their “honour”. I felt mortified when nurses stepped over and ignored a man with cerebral palsy who had fallen out of his wheelchair in the corridor, “because he’s a Syrian”.

I was sometimes shocked by well-meaning nurses’ lack of basic training, such as when they gave out random, out-of-date medication (usually donated with labels in English that they couldn’t read) because, “medicines help people”. Yet, deep down, I admired these amazing people, working so hard in such harsh conditions. Most welcomed and accepted me as a foreigner, no matter how cross-culturally naïve and painfully out of my depth I was. I always remember that remarkable volunteer who put me to shame by his amazing love and example. I will never forget the nurses who crowded into a sherut when I left, clinging to me and crying unashamedly as I fought back my own tears.