Middle East ......

“All day I am thinking: your son, your son. You need to do something for your son. Yazan is not a normal boy, he’s very disabled. But he’s the most precious thing I’ve got. Before the war he was improving so much. He was going to therapy. He was making good eye contact. He’s very shy, he cannot express his feelings. But I would take him to visit the neighbors and everyone loved him. He’s a lovely boy: he holds my head, he kisses my cheeks. Right before the war we had a surgery on his legs. At that time he was five years old. When the doctors removed his casts I brought him home from the hospital, and I told my daughters and my wife to close their eyes. When they opened their eyes again, Yazan was walking. We’ll never forget this moment; we had so much hope that he’d be a normal boy. But all the clinics have been closed now for two years. He’s had no therapy. Nothing has been done for him, nothing. Now if he walks three steps he falls down. Before the war he’d started to make sentences with a few words: ‘I need bread, I need water.’ Now if he wants something, he’ll just catch me by the arm and show me. And he’s doing this thing now, where he jerks his arms and legs. This is something we’ve never seen before. We thought we would always go forward. We thought that he would be a normal boy. But now I am watching him deteriorate before my eyes. I have a good job; I work on a medical team. But still, I have no power. It takes all my power just to keep him from dying. Last year he got very bad diarrhea. There was no drinkable water. All of the pharmacies were empty. But I heard of a pharmacy six kilometers away with diarrhea medicine. I was so tired. No car, no fuel, no donkey cart. It was like horrible American action movie: there was bombing, shooting from tanks, shooting from helicopter. But I walked six kilometers, and I got him some medicine. And we managed to stop the diarrhea. Anything he needs, I will do. I have two hands. In one of these hands I carry all the problems of my work, all the problems of the war, raising my four daughters with no food, no water, no shelter, no electricity. And in the other hand, I carry Yazan.”

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Mohammed and Yazan’s stories are part of a series I am publishing over the next several days on the Palestinian staff of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Gaza. Photographs taken by Nour Alsaqqa.

From MSF: Mohammed joined Médecins Sans Frontières / MSF in 2007, serving in multiple roles including Nurse, Operating Theatre Nurse, Medical Liaison Officer, operating theatre Nurse Supervisor, Head Nurse, and currently Deputy Project Coordinator.