Thoughts from the Palestinian Teritorries

15 January 2008 – I’ve been to Palestine for a month now. Winter has come for good. Temperature falls below zero during the night. During the day I visit my patients at their homes. The houses are very cold. Nothing that needs electricity is working. It is too expensive. People are rushing to switch on the heaters just for us. I feel embarrassed wrapped up in my fleece while people around me wear basic clothing. There was a small child today with bare feet walking on the cement ground. Her feet were almost blue from the cold…

Children gather around when I visit. We draw together, we play, we talk. They are shy but very polite usually. Not much time passes till they start smiling at me trying to attract my attention. They don’t have to try much. My attention is on them anyway. To those who cannot manage speech so well to explain what are they afraid of, to those who cannot understand why they need to visit their parents in jail and not have them at home, to those who wake up with nightmares every night. Children don’t understand about politics, diplomacies and casualties. They are not supposed to.

During Christmas boys are asking from their parents plastic guns as gifts. Toyshop owners say that anything else stays on the shelves, nobody buys it. So they stopped bringing any different toys anymore. Little Palestinian boys stand on the side of the road, targeting me with their gun as we pass with the MSF car. At first they “kill” us and right after they smile broadly telling us “welcome to Palestine”.

The photo below is a special request from the boys. They wanted me to send it to a newspaper but they finally content themselves with the internet!

This one was taken during Christmas in Bethleem…

And this is the MSF house in the morning. Amidst fog…

“See” you all in 2 weeks…

03 January 2008 – Coming to Palestine to work with MSF as a psychologist was a desire I had for a long time. The last 3 weeks this has become a reality for me. I’ll be living and working in Hebron for the next six months. The goal of the project, the goal of my work, is to provide psychotherapy to the local people suffering from the ongoing conflict with Israel. Easy to write, difficult to accomplish such a thing though.

My first impression about the people here is that they have an amazing courage and love for life, despite the difficulties. And there seems to be a lot of difficulties here, of a varying nature and sometimes even unimaginable. I am wondering already how I would have reacted myself if I had to go through such sufferings. I feel that I have to go through this personal introspection in order not to just carry my western psychotherapeutic ideas around. Reality stroke me suddenly on the head here and thus this introvert mood… The photos are the first ones I took when I came in Hebron. They show Bedouin children somewhere between the foot of a mountain and an Israeli settlement.

Elina Pelekanou
Psychologist, Hebron
MSF

Elina Pelekanou, a psychologist from Greece, is currently on a mission with MSF Spain in the Palestinian Territories. She writes from Hebron.

Elina has been a member of MSF’s exploratory team which assessed local needs following the great Peloponnese fires, as well as a team leader in the “Acteurs d’urgence” event – both in Greece during 2007. Previous field missions include working in Indonesia in 2007 following an earthquake, and in Armenia in 2005.