Hearing about the Horror
The Middle East is horrific these days.
The PBS News hour seems to give the most unbiased reporting. . . suffering and loss for all sides. I want to do more than write my representatives and the White House, asking the US to call for a ceasefire, to pay attention to international laws of war, the human suffering. I understand the politics are difficult.
I am reading the Psalms these days, and reminded of the centuries of pain and suffering in the region. Psalm 22: My god, my god why have you forsaken me (us)...
My colleagues on the West Bank are suffering, cities closed by piles of dirt and cement blocks. My colleague in a northern city tried twice to leave to drive to Amman to catch her plane to WONCA (World Organization of Family Doctors) to receive an award. The airline even called to reschedule her, but she was unable to get out. I Whatsapped to check on her. “Not doing so good, but I am working,” she responded. She is completing a module for her Masters in Education from Dundee.
Another in the south did make it to the meeting and now heads back. She sent me the obituary of a young family medicine physician, who just received her boards, killed by a bomb.
Another, who has been in the US, doing an externship in the hopes of getting a US internal medicine residency slot weighed returning now (last week) or in a couple of months when his visa expired. Better to be with his family to know what is happening, or to be in the US where internet is more stable for interviews. If he stays will he be able to enter and get home in November or December?
There are no easy answers here. Horror for both sides and dysfunctional governments, Israel, the West Band and Hamas, as well as our own House of Representatives. The unfairness of it all, the resorting to stereotypes, the efforts to simplify it into bad and good, black and white. It is hard to swallow. However, one Palestinian colleague reminded me that no matter how dark the night, the morning comes.
Sunrise Narragansett Bay, Late October morning, the winter birds have returned and occasionally a loon calls.