This Young Palestinian

In Gaza, there is a young Palestinian woman who drives to the University of Applied Sciences every day where she is completing her last year of the bachelor’s program in nursing. She loves nursing, but jobs are few in Gaza and it will be difficult for her to find one in this field. If she can, she hopes to become a general nurse in a hospital. After school, the Palestinian woman returns home to her family. She is the eldest of all her siblings, two brothers and four sisters, and they all live together with their parents. She helps her family around the house and they enjoy their meals together before she does homework for school every afternoon. In her free time, she enjoys walking to the Mediterranean Sea which is within walking distance of her home. She looks out to the sea and dreams of being able to one day travel outside of Gaza. At 21 years old, she has never left the Gaza Strip. Because of the Israeli blockade, the Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to leave. She says that one day she hopes she can go to, “Saudi Arabia for Hajj and Umrah, to Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque, to Yemen to see the mountains and farms and their simple way of life, to Canada because I want to see and play in the snow because we have no snow in Gaza and I like cold weather, and to France, because I want to see the Eiffel Tower and visit my aunt.” In all her life, this Palestinian woman has lived through three wars, and just two weeks ago, there was yet another attack on Gaza by the Israelis. This woman’s story is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who are prevented from sharing their realities with the world. By putting her story out there she hopes that she can, “Share the Palestinian reality in the voice of the homeland for the world to read.”