Sharing Our Spaces
In this corner of the world there is more difficulty than ease and we need to share the burdens in any small way that we can.
Our visitors from Gaza had a lovely day. A couple of the families had only arrived (by bus of course which is a trial in itself) from Rafah the day before and the scars of stress were clear. Most of the kids were delighted to latch onto the dogs once they realised that there was no harm to be had. Adults had more deep-seated concerns that were very understandable, but the woman who was most afraid was smiling by the end of the day. They were accompanied by a lovely Palestinian clinical psychologist and the garden was a perfect place for adults to talk about traumas, fears, and hopes together. A couple of the most recent arrivals were farmers who sat and talked about their lost farms with my staff for at least an hour.
We had prepared lunch for the group, but next time we will do things differently. We realised that all of these people who had been living in tents for months really wanted to cook their own food in a decent space. They all jumped in to help us, so next time we do one of these gatherings we will assemble the items needed for lunch and let our guests do the cooking. Cooking is important in all of our lives, and the laughter and conversations of the men and women who were working around our grill told us that this has to be part of any sort of return to humanity for refugees coming to the farm. I realise as well that we need to make contact with some groups here who are acting in support of Sudanese refugees who are every bit as in need as the Gazans.
I had my first horrific nightmare the next night, first in a year. I journal my dreams so I know that it was remarkable. I now totally understand why the reason for the dream. The disaster that is Sudan, a country that has been home to many of our family until recently, began even before this horror show in Gaza. I have been sharing news about it on my social media, largely because it hasn’t been getting any coverage at all anywhere else. There has been no functioning government there for ages, only two warring armies fighting over the gold that the Wagner Group’s proxies, the RSF, have been stealing for Russia. For over a year now people have been fleeing for their lives from Sudan, having to leave behind everything knowing that their lives’ work is gone, their homes have been looted, many of their families have been killed or lost in the battles and efforts to find safety. No one outside of Sudan is paying a bit of attention. There are more people by number dead in Sudan, displaced in and out of Sudan, and threatened with starvation in Sudan that there are in Gaza. And no one is noticing, even in Egypt which is Sudan’s neighbour and where it is often said that every Egyptian has a Sudanese uncle. This is not to compete between the two horrors. There is no competition. They are both impossible to justify or to condone, but Sudan has slipped beneath the radar largely because it is not seen anymore as the neighbour and relative that it is. Sudan has been “othered”.
The creation of the Aswan Dam was the sign of a border between Egypt and Sudan that had never existed before. After the filling of Lake Nasser the railway that had connected Khartoum to Cairo was never rebuilt. When my late husband was young he used to travel from Khartoum to Cairo every year to visit his mother’s family in Egypt, but now that has changed completely. People still travel by plane but the access is much more limited. Until the 60s Egypt and Sudan were one country but it was decided to split them in two and then three, and many families, like ours found themselves similarly split. My husband’s family moved to Cairo because his father was an irrigation engineer with an Egyptian wife and Egypt had a thriving bureaucracy. A few of his father’s brothers moved to Egypt, and some moved to Europe. My first trip to Sudan was in 1980, and I was enchanted by the culture there which is quite different from Egypt’s. I have always felt, sadly, that much of the separation had its history in the old devil of racism, our evil inheritance from the world’s colonial past. My nightmare spoke to this and allowed me to realise that much of my physical and emotional discomfort over the past year has been based in a sense of inability to help those I love.
So this was the nightmare:
"For the first time in ages I had a helplessness dream this morning that I was trying to manage life in a wooden shack that was being over run by those huge yellow orb weaving spiders who were filling the space with webs that terrified me, and there was a crowded school next door in a similar shack. We had to share a bathroom and space around the buildings but there was some grass. There was also a man, a kind of a generic male… who showed up halfway through the dream and sat down in the room that I was using for the children, demanding to be left alone because he was programing a computer that was supposed to be the answer to everything. Suddenly I had to take some of the children in my care somewhere, and we were traveling in a totally demolished car like a taxi that we took once in Alex. It had a seat in the back but the entire interior was nothing but steel, and I realised that there were about 8 of the children from the school in the car with me, hanging out the windows and riding on the outside of the car. I made the car stop to sort things out, and while I was helping an old couple with some totally inadequate food, two small children fell into a pool of water…one a tiny baby. I quickly put the food on the table and ran to get the baby out of the water which was deep enough to cover it. I was holding the baby and trying to drain water from the lungs which seemed like they might start to work when I woke up."
The dream speaks volumes. I can feel good that some people have been able to ease some of the pain of their lives, perhaps enough to face the struggles that they have ahead, but in no way have I solved anything. But I suspect that is our lives for this moment. The hard times are coming to us all but if we can help each other, even by offering a space where people can prepare the food that speaks to them of home, it is something.