Meet Me in Gaza (33 page)

There’s also rich farmland in the area of Mawasi, which lies south of Nuseirat. Mawasi was one of the locations where Israeli settlers spent decades spawning vast greenhouses to grow fruit and salad vegetables before being dragged – in some cases, literally kicking and screaming – out of the Strip in August 2005, when the Israeli government finally withdrew its settlements from Gaza. Now that the settlers have gone, the Gazan farmers have resumed their harvests, selling guavas, figs and lemons in peace, though they still cannot export their produce because of the siege. The guava plantations are built on land that looks almost as rich, green and moist as Scotland. One afternoon, near Mawasi, I visit a new seaside hotel built from traditional bricks of baked mud. It has spacious, loft-style rooms, a garden decorated with voluptuous mud statues … and a short tunnel leading from the hotel onto the beach: a wink to the local subterranean smugglers still working down at the border. It is a beautiful, audacious and optimistic setup, though I’m the only customer. The Mawasi guava plantations lie inland.

But threaded in between them are tracts of empty coastline, with just a handful of lonely houses standing apart from each other as though they have no friends. Here at the beach front, the land is parched like sun-bleached bones, the soil crumbling into dust that sustains nothing. This is where Gaza kisses the Sinai desert.

The BBC weather forecast I read before leaving Scotland stated that the chance of rain in Gaza was ‘zero per cent’. And there has been no rainfall since I came back. Everyone is complaining that the end-of-summer rains are overdue, the land is parched. I wonder whether the Sinai desert is stealthily encroaching north, like the foot soldiers of the British army before their battles for Gaza. If so, what will this do to the already dire quality of the water, which makes my guts ache and gives me the shits most mornings? Suddenly it feels important to know, so I arrange to meet Monther Shoblak.

Monther is director of the unimaginatively named Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, which has overall responsibility for water and sanitation services across the Strip.

‘Welcome, my dear!’ he croons as I enter his presidential-style office. He directs me to sit at the top of a gleaming conference table, set opposite his expensive-looking desk, where a hefty gold plaque is engraved with his name in Arabic and English. His shining black hair carefully swept back, Monther flashes me a rakish smile.

‘Now, Louisa, what is it that I can tell you?’

‘I want to know about the water situation in Gaza. The drinking water, that is.’

Monther leans slightly forward, his fingertips arched together, like a BBC correspondent.

‘Here in Gaza, we are completely dependent on the coastal aquifer, which lies 40–150 metres underground. The aquifer has an annual recharge of about 80 million cubic metres. The problem is that in Gaza we’re using 180 million cubic metres of fresh drinking water every year. And because there is no vacuum status in the aquifer, 95 per cent of our fresh water in the Gaza Strip has now been used up.’

He pauses to let this fact sink in.

‘We also have serious problems with the water that is available, like problems with nitrate and chloride concentrations.’

He stands and crosses the room, to a set of framed wall maps.

‘Look – the purple sections on this map, and the orange sections on this one – you see how they fit together? In areas of Gaza where you find a high concentration of nitrate, you also find low levels of chloride – and vice versa. High chloride levels can cause kidney problems – though these can also be due to the amount of salt in our diet. But nitrate absorbs oxygen and it can cause major health problems, including blue baby syndrome. Nitrate is a silent killer.’

Because of the chronic shortage of fresh drinking water in Gaza, he tells me, many locals buy drinking water from the myriad private companies who run dozens of small desalination operations and sell drinking water from trucks. They don’t have the facilities to detect levels of nitrate, which has no odour, colour or taste. Some 80 per cent of private water sellers in Gaza are not licensed or regulated, so these companies are no solution to the drinking-water problem, he adds.

‘Some of the water is also heavily contaminated with bacteria. But we can resolve the nitrate problem if we can lay out a new sewage system for Gaza.’

The Gaza sewage system is, famously, a mess. There are just three sewage treatment plants in the entire Strip – each unable to cope with the volume of raw waste being pumped into it. Up in Beit Lahiya, the sewage treatment plant was originally built in a natural depression without a sea outlet. Consequently, untreated waste water flows directly from the plant into stinking cesspools built just above a local Bedouin village, Umm al-Nasser. On April Fool’s Day 2007 one of the cesspools burst, creating a 2-metre-high wave that engulfed the village. Five local residents drowned in shit. It was the second sewage flood to hit Umm al-Nasser in eight months. A new waste water treatment plant is planned for northern Gaza, and when it is completed the cesspools can finally be sealed.

The Al-Sheikh Ejleen sewage plant, just south of Gaza City, lies close to Wadi Gaza, once an ancient settlement with clean water wells and a pristine natural wetland populated by migrating birds. Now it, too, is a series of stinking, foetid pools. The birds have fled and the sewage plant is spewing 20 million litres of raw and partially treated sewage straight into the Gaza Mediterranean every day, poisoning the coastline. But dozens of local fishermen still dock their boats on the beach opposite Wadi Gaza. Shoals of fish come to shore to gobble up the shit.

Monther acknowledges that there has been mismanagement of local sewage plants. But he reminds me that water treatment cycles are constantly being interrupted by Israel’s continuing to restrict or deny essential operating materials and spare parts, and the frequent power cuts. Suddenly he seems a little deflated and we both fall silent. I remember the empty houses on tracts of wasteland in south-eastern Gaza, and the weather forecast predicting no rain.

‘Is the rainfall decreasing here?’ I ask him.

‘Ten years ago we received up to 600 millimetres of rain per year in Gaza,’ he says. ‘But in 2007 the rainfall was around 400 millimetres, and for the last two years it has been just 250–300 millimetres.’

Most of the rain falls in northern Gaza, around Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun – one of the reasons that Beit Hanoun used to be the garden of Gaza. The south-east of the Strip, which is classified as semi-desert, receives the lowest rainfall, sometimes just 70 millimetres a year. In spite of the increasing drought, Gazans have not managed their water resources very well. Less than half the rainfall is harvested, yet harvesting rainwater is simple: it involves setting aside tracts of land, removing the top layers of mud and replacing them with sand, to create porous infiltration basins which help to recharge the depleted aquifer. In the past, this would have been useful. Now it’s vital. But a lot more has been happening here.

‘What we need is a strategic solution,’ says Monther. ‘And we don’t have much time: by 2015 Gaza will be deprived of good-quality water.’

‘You mean drinking water?’

‘Yes, I do. In five years, the Gaza coastal aquifer will almost certainly be dry.’

‘So what needs to happen now?’

‘Either we have to build desalination plants or we will have to import our water.’

‘Which do you think would be better?’

He tilts his head to one side and casts me a final smile, but it’s not a happy one.

‘Frankly, my dear, I really don’t mind which. But we only have until 2015. That is our deadline.’

When I leave Monther’s office, I go to meet Saida. When I see her, she beams and kisses me on both cheeks. We’ve arranged to have lunch at one of our old haunts, the Haifa Restaurant. I tell her about the meeting with Monther as we take a taxi from the city centre. She listens intently, as she always does. We ask the taxi driver to drop us off beside the beach just outside Gaza City. It’s mid-afternoon, sunny and perfectly warm. We take our shoes off and stroll along the shore. We have plenty of time and a good lunch is waiting for us at the restaurant. We choose to forget about the water crisis and enjoy the moment.

Saida is in an unusual mood today; she gaily wedges her black heeled sandals into her bag and skips playfully along the beach. The tide is going out and she stops to draw on the wet sand with her fingers.

Life is beautiful, she writes in a big, curling script. I’ve never seen her quite like this, apart from the evening we danced with her sister and her mother, more than two years ago. She looks almost radiant. In these last couple of weeks, something inside her has been released. We collect shells from the sand and shallows, exclaiming over their beauty, laughing at everything and nothing.

‘You know, when we were little we used to tell the shells our secrets,’ she says, running her finger along the whorl of a perfect white shell. ‘
Ummi
and my father would bring us to the beach, my brother Muhammad too, and we would pick up shells and take them home and whisper to them. And hide them to keep the secret safe.’

‘Do you remember the secrets you told your shells?’

She laughs again, a lovely, uncontained laugh. But she does not tell me what they were. I know Saida very well by now: she’s the kind of woman who tells her secrets to shells because they will never talk. But she
has
just told me why she’s so light of heart. Three years after returning home to Gaza, Saida (whose name means Happy) thinks that maybe she
has
finally just found love.

We wander past rickety fishermen’s huts, where they store their gear, and snooze in the shade. We watch young men with gleaming, salt-caked skin dunk themselves in the sea as they watch us too. A small fishing boat glides into shore, and as it lands the fisherman is joined by a man driving a donkey and cart along the beach. He hitches the boat to the cart, and the beast drags it along the sand towards one of the huts. Sunlight amuses itself on the waves. The soul-destroying situation inside Gaza grinds on, but this afternoon it seems that everything is bright. Including us.

‘Will you come back here,
habibti
?’ she asks me suddenly.

We are both standing barefoot in the shallows, the sun warming our faces.

‘Back here to Gaza? Yes, of course I will.’

It has never occurred to me that I won’t come back here; Gaza has seeped into me, like the sea.

‘Come back soon,’ says Saida. ‘Meet me in Gaza. Because I cannot come to meet you.’

A few days before I leave Gaza once more, I take tea alone on the al-Deira terrace, then find myself slowly strolling towards the beach once more. I have an hour or so before I have to go and meet someone, and the beach is always a good place to dawdle. The fishermen are out at sea, children are swimming and two men are playing an energetic game of paddle in the shallows. I glance over without really looking at them, lost in my own thoughts.

‘
Marhaba
, we thought you had left for good,’ one of them says to me.

Startled out of my reverie, I glance up at him and only half-recognise his face. But when I look over at his partner, I am suddenly delighted because I never expected to see the bearded beach acrobat ever again. He’s not wearing the stripey bathing costume I first saw him in, but modest shorts and a loose white T-shirt. He still has the thick grey beard though, and the look of vitality about him. The acrobat nods me a greeting, but does not say anything.

‘How are you?’ I ask, conscious that I’m grinning at him.

‘I am fine – how are you?’

He is gazing at me from the side, without making direct eye contact, the way a cat sizes you up. I know this gaze: it means he is a pious man who doesn’t look women outside his family in the eye, for fear of some impure thought entering his head.

‘Are you still doing …?’ I stall because I don’t know the word for ‘acrobat’ in Arabic.

‘Acrobatics?’ he says. ‘Yes, sometimes I still do acrobatics.’

‘Where did you learn?’