Everything was as it should be; the house was spacious, filled with sun, birdsong, and blossoms. The rain was wetting the trees in the yard, and the smell of rain-soaked sand seeped into the house. The extended family quickly gathered in one place, and the house was filled with grandparents, their children, and grandchildren. My firstborn son was crawling in the house and moving from one place to another, leaning on the wall and furniture to take his first steps. I was looking at him and anticipating the best he could find when he grew up, and I was waiting day after day to see him as a boy talking and thinking.
Everything was possible. We had a home. We had land – land that we could trace back to our ancestors. We knew our neighbors one by one, and we knew the neighborhood’s residents. We lived a simple, though sometimes uneasy, life, but we tried with all our might to be happy and create happiness in our homes, with the simplest of things, like birthday gatherings for our children. After the birth of my son, Qais, I couldn’t wait to celebrate his birthday, but then the war came.
On his first birthday, last December, we celebrated in an abandoned house in Rafah, where we were displaced after we left our home in early October due to the war. It was a small celebration. I tried to gather all the displaced children in the same three-story house, and provide them with what they needed to be happy for a few hours before they returned to the constant fear they lived in due to the sounds of the shelling and bombs.
Despite the difficulties – like searching out in the streets, bombs raining around me, for hours for a candle, or the materials to make a cake – it was a beautiful time. I felt happy as I watched the children from other families in the same building spend a long time playing with my son Qais. However, I couldn’t shake the sadness inside me. I wished that he would celebrate his first birthday in his home, our home in Gaza City, among his uncles and cousins, and the children who used to spend time playing with him before the war. But none of them were there; I was displaced in Rafah, and they were all displaced in Khan Younis. Throughout the war, we only met a few times.
Hamoud, my nephew, was Qais’ closest friend. He would spend the whole day with him in our house in Gaza. When Qais would sleep during the day, Hamoud would knock on our door constantly, asking about Qais until he would resign to just sitting in the living room and waiting for him to wake up. While waiting, he would wander around the house picking up sweets and toys that I always had waiting in the home in anticipation for the visits from my nieces and nephews.
Qais’ arrival was the beginning of stability in my life. I had gotten an excellent job with Mondowiess the day before my marriage, and by chance, at that time, I felt that God was taking care of the family.
I was so generous of Qais’ guests in our home in Gaza, and I loved to see him among the children playing and laughing; he was the youngest grandchild in the family, and they all loved him and wanted to be around him. I wished to see him as a boy accompanying his cousin Hamoud to school one day. But the war tore the family apart and displaced everyone, each person with his family and children, to a different place. Hamoud remained in the displacement camps in the Gaza Strip, and Qais moved on to a journey of asylum and living in exile in Cairo.
Just last month, Qais celebrated his second birthday, this time, in Cairo, surrounded only by my wife and I. We had a birthday cake on a small round table, candles, decorations, balloons, and sang in the house all day. In the end, however, my wife and I could not stop talking about how if this birthday had been in his house in Gaza, it would have been more beautiful and filled with the children of the family who loved Qais and his company.
We could not get over this idea if our celebration had been in our house in Gaza instead of the loneliness of exile. We began to remember the times the family spent in our home, the bedroom we used to prepare for him, the toys inside it, his clothes that we lost after the displacement, his wooden bed, his pictures on the wall, and the playground in the courtyard of the house. All of our happy occasions as a family in that house have turned into a tragedy of memories.
The war has robbed us of our happiness by depriving us of our homeland, our families, and our friends, and it has destroyed everything we made our memories and our lives with. They destroyed our homes and our cities. Everything we owned and worked hard for, has become a painful memory. Even now, in moments of joy, all we think about are the things we lost, like celebrating my son’s birthday, celebrating the new year, or even the simple pleasure of gathering as a family without fear of the Israeli death that hovers around us.
Nice photo. Let us hope that as more candles are added in future years, the light dispels the darkness more and more.