A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #462 - Nour's Diary: I Heal, I Break, I Hold On, I Collapse (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

"How do you keep going? How can you keep helping others when you 
yourself are suffering? Have you ever completely fallen apart? Can you 
still move forward?" ---- These are the questions I hear over and over 
again from journalists, friends, colleagues abroad, and even strangers 
online. And, honestly, I ask them of myself as well. ---- For more than 
21 months, I have lived through an unrelenting war in Gaza. I am a 
mental health professional; but here, that title is far from enough. In 
Gaza, we do not have the privilege of being just one thing. I am a 
therapist, yes. But I am also a woman enduring loss. I am a mother 
trying to protect her children. I am a daughter mourning loved ones. I 
am a healthcare worker exhausted by war, a broken soul carrying the pain 
of others. I am a witness to unspeakable crimes. I care for the wounded 
while bearing my own wounds. I am all these roles at once, inseparably 
intertwined. I heal, I break, I hold on, I fall apart.

Since the start of this war, I have lived a triple life. I try to help 
heal a community drowning in trauma, even as I grieve my loved ones, 
even as I rise from the rubble after each new bombardment. I try to keep 
my voice alive, to continue bearing witness, even as fear grips my 
throat with its claws every day. Today, as I write this, I am living 
through some of the darkest days of the war. I will not be ashamed to 
say: I am hungry; and my hunger is no accident. It is the result of 
blockade, of policies, of deliberate deprivation - but the shame is not 
mine. It belongs to a world that preaches humanity and human rights 
while Gaza is bombed, starved, and silenced.

Who am I now? Am I still a "therapist"? Or am I also a victim, a 
refugee, a grieving daughter, a fearful mother, a humanitarian clinging 
to hope with bare hands?

I have learned to teach my children patience with hunger.

Since we began working in refugee camps, we have never practiced under 
normal conditions. Hospitals bombed, medical teams killed or arrested, 
clinics evacuated, roads made impassable. And yet we persist; not only 
out of professional duty but from a deeper moral sense. We kiss our 
children goodbye each morning, terrified it could be the last time. Then 
we begin the day's sessions - in tents, in corners of shelters, or among 
ruins.

My sense of self has changed; all of our lives have changed. I have lost 
everything I once considered normal. I have learned to cry while moving 
forward, to bury my dead in my heart and keep serving the living. I have 
learned to dodge death, to carry anxiety for 21 endless months, to pray 
for friends trapped under rubble. But I have also learned resilience. I 
have discovered a strength I didn't know I had. Is it because there were 
no other options? Perhaps. But more surely, it is because faith in God 
and in the dignity of our people is a force that carries us through the 
unimaginable.

I have learned to survive in a place unfit for life. To ration water for 
days. To go without basic necessities. To teach my children to endure 
hunger. A friend told us that her son - like most children these days - 
once complained of hunger. But when he saw the pain on her face, he 
immediately apologized, tears in his eyes: "I'm sorry, Mama, I'm not 
hungry. Please don't be sad." He was just trying to protect her from 
pain by denying his own. No child should ever feel guilty or have to 
apologize for hunger.

What does neutrality mean in the face of atrocities?

Every day I sit with people shattered by loss. Yet I am no stranger to 
their stories. I live this war too. I suffer the same pain, bear the 
same wounds. A 15-year-old boy once told me he wished he had died with 
his family. My heart broke with him. A mother confessed she could no 
longer feed her children. She whispered: "I can't do it anymore." 
Quietly I thought: "Neither can I."

This is what we call "compassion fatigue" - when endless witnessing of 
suffering begins to erode the soul. When you feel you have nothing left 
to give, but you keep showing up anyway. It is akin to "burnout," the 
chronic emotional exhaustion of those working in environments steeped in 
pain, danger, and scarcity.

We do not counsel from quiet offices. We try to plant hope in 
overcrowded tents and bombed-out schools. Children talk about missiles 
the way others talk about breakfast: casually, as if it were routine. 
And yet, even amid this horror, mental health workers are still asked to 
remain neutral. But what does neutrality mean in the face of atrocity? 
Am I supposed to pat children on the shoulder and say "it will be okay" 
when I know they will never forget the smell of blood? How can I speak 
of safety to those who now see danger in every sound, every shadow, 
every color?

The truth is, sometimes we don't speak at all. In some sessions, silence 
is all we have. But presence can be enough. To be there, to bear 
witness, to sit with someone in their pain without having to fix it - 
even that can be healing. The smile of a child after days of crying, a 
woman finally able to rest after a panic storm, the gratitude of an 
elderly man after being truly heard: these are the moments that help us 
keep going.

What warms my heart is how we hold each other

We are not alone in this grief. Around me are colleagues whose strength 
humbles me daily. Each carries a story of unimaginable loss, yet they 
keep going. A dear colleague, a gentle and caring doctor, lost his 
entire family at once. Despite his profound pain and suffering, he 
returned to work and to care for those around him. Even in his grief, he 
lifted us and reminded us why we continue. Another colleague lost his 
daughter. Another, her husband. And all of us, each one, have lost 
everything we once had: our homes, our streets, our memories, our loved 
ones. And yet we are here; tired, grieving, hungry; driven by something 
greater than pain: a deep, quiet love for our people. We pour what 
remains of our hearts into our work.

Sometimes circumstances force us to evacuate a clinic, and a heavy guilt 
sets in because we know how much people depend on us. But this guilt is 
not weakness: it is the measure of our love. This pain is the fuel that 
keeps us going.

What warms my heart is how we embrace each other. How we check on each 
other in the middle of chaos. How we cry together when one of us is 
lost. How we share our exhaustion, our pain, our helplessness, and still 
somehow plant hope in each other. "This will end," we say. "God will 
return what was taken from us." We remind the most desperate among us: 
"One day, we will look back and say: we survived." We have carried each 
other.

I look at my colleagues and see "courage wrapped in pain." We hold each 
other up, we remind one another that this will end, that justice will 
come, that our people deserve life. So how do we go on? Perhaps the 
better question is: how could we not?

To stop would be to let darkness win. We may be exhausted, but we are 
not broken. Not yet. Because Gaza is not only a land of pain and rubble; 
it is a land of fierce resilience, a place where humanity insists on 
shining even through the deepest horror. We are still here. And together 
we will heal.

As the poet Elia Abu Madi reminds us: "To despair, I believe, is a 
betrayal - of those who lived with hope or died still dreaming."

Nour Z. Jarada
Mental Health Manager
Doctors of the World - Gaza

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en