Free I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish Page A

down, though I continued to skip class when it was absolutely necessary. My family obligations pressed on me like a red-hot branding iron, but my teachers never stopped encouraging me to stay the course. I tried my best to keep my teachers happy, especially my English teacher. It was the practice to assign extra homework for students to do over the regular two-week winter break, which for me was an opportunity to work at a paying job every day that I couldn’t miss. So when the grade eight winter holiday rolled around, I did all my English homework in advance and handed them in to be marked before the holiday had even started. I will thank my teachers forever for never ceasing to encourage me to stay in school.
    By the end of grade eight, I rarely skipped classes, but I never stopped working. In the winter months there were always jobspicking citrus fruits and loading them on trucks. In the summer months I’d go to the farms to load fertilizer, which entailed piling manure into two baskets that were slung over my shoulders and carrying the load to a truck. I felt like a donkey. The smell was awful, the summer heat almost unbearable, and the manure seemed to weigh more than I did.
    I remember I had to walk five or six kilometres to get to that farm, which took two hours. This meant I had to get up at four to make it there for six, when work started. All that walking to and fro was hard on my arthritic legs, and my joints became swollen and inflamed. One day I fell and couldn’t get up—I just couldn’t force my legs to support me. The United Nations health centre referred me to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
    I asked the doctors and nurses so many questions about the arthritic pain in my legs—that’s where I learned about the use of high-dose aspirin for my condition—and about everything else I could think of. All of it fascinated me. They were all Palestinians like me; I wanted to know what they knew, live like they seemed to live, with good jobs and respect. I knew one of the doctors had running water in his house and a special room called a sitting room where people gathered just to visit. But more than that, I was very impressed by the medical treatments, by the fact that there were drugs or therapies or other means to actually alter the course of an illness. I could see that they were really helping people. This was when and where my dream about becoming a doctor began. I could see that if I became a doctor, it would be possible for me to improve the condition of my family and also to serve the Palestinian people.
    But the hospital experience left other impressions on me as well. I shared a room with a Palestinian girl whose family brought her food—quantities of food such as I’d never seen in my life. They obviously weren’t refugees! They brought whole bunches ofbananas. If there was ever a banana in our house, my mother would cut it into equal pieces—one for each child. In my world there was no such thing as a bunch of bananas, and certainly nothing as luxurious as a whole banana for yourself. The girl and I shared a cupboard in the hospital room and one night I took one of her bananas and ate it. I loved that banana. I admit I stole the fruit. But I excused the act by telling myself that the Quran allows such behaviour if you are hungry.
    Another lasting impression on me was made by the relationships I observed between the male and female nurses and the doctors. It was clear even to this young boy that they were having fun at work. They respected each other, worked hard and helped each other out. The hospital culture—the way the women and men related to each other—was very different from what I experienced at home. For example, there was teasing and gossip about nurses and doctors having intimate relations. In my world, men and women wouldn’t even work together, never mind make jokes like this with each other. And I saw romantic relationships between men and women in the health field, and they