Review: Still Lives – A Memoir of Gaza
Looking for a comfortable read? Then don’t pick this book! Marilyn Garson, an experienced aid professional, worked in Cambodia and Afghanistan, and then in 2011 was invited to travel from her Hokianga Harbour home to Gaza.
Marilyn’s speciality is to create jobs in places torn apart by conflict. In Gaza she became the director of a large NGO, leading a team of Palestinians. Through the eyes and experiences of the team members, Marilyn shows what it is like living behind the blockade. It is their voices which describe the shortages, unemployment and the effects of war, and which bear witness to so many hopeful actions.
Gaza has thousands of IT graduates, few are able to gain employment as they lack the opportunity to gain practical experience. Grappling with this problem overturned Marilyn’s understanding of aid and justice, and saw her convincing the United Nations agency in Gaza (UNRWA) to support a programme to provide that practical experience.
She then volunteered to join the United Nations Emergency Team that stayed in Gaza to supply emergency aid during the 2014 war. It was estimated that 35,000 people would seek shelter. Before the 50 days of bombing were over, 293,000 people crammed into shelters and schools.
All the while Marilyn is discovering something of her core identity: what it means to be Jewish in a territory which Israel has turned into a prison or even a ghetto. In 2015 she came home to New Zealand.
“My Hokianga house needed 20 years of maintenance. Lonely, burnt out and spiritually starved, I needed repair no less than my house. I declared 2018 to be my Year of Primary Sources. Halfway through a Biblical Hebrew primer I began to sound out the syllables of the books of the prophets, I began at the beginning, with Genesis. …. I brought all my rage at the waste I have seen, my impatience at the injustice, my exasperation at the indifference, my old search for some grounded source of decency in this world, and my wonder at the elemental mysteries I have been shown.”
One of the greatest gifts we can offer to another is to really see them. In sharing stories of ordinary people in Gaza, this book opens eyes. I commend it to you.