Looking for Trouble

Guest blog: Gerri Haynes reports from inside the Gaza blockade

For the next 10 days, Gerri Haynes will be sending back reports from inside blockaded Gaza. As she did last year, Gerri has organized a team of doctors and other health care providers to work in hospitals and clinics in Gaza in an effort to directly help the people there and to bring attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis that the Israeli blockade has created.

Again, in Gaza

This morning, our delegation was allowed to pass through Erez Checkpoint into Gaza. On the Israeli side, the director of Erez warmly welcomed us. The open tunnel that leads a walker to Gaza from the Israeli side was completed after our visit last fall. Concrete and barbed wire open to views of desolate land and armed Israeli guard towers.

Members of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility delegation cross into Gaza. (Bob Haynes photo)

Nine delegates of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility have come here to work with medical and allied health care colleagues. We are to attend to patients, consult and teach – while we learn about life here in 2010.

Our initial meeting with leaders of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, our host organization, was an introduction to the “situation” and to the work of the Mental Health Programme.

The majority of the 1.6 million residents of Gaza are traumatized – either directly by Operation Cast Lead, by the daily threat of further attacks or by the effects of the ongoing siege.

With this nearly universal level of trauma, Gaza Community Mental Health is striving to normalize individual responses to an abnormal situation. They are educating medical and allied health practitioners to care for the highest functioning individuals in primary care clinics. In this way, the most seriously affected individuals may be treated by the limited number of mental health specialists.

The siege, in place since 2007, denies residents of Gaza basic the needs of life: a variety of foods, building materials, electricity, fuel, medicines, school supplies…

We will be in Gaza for ten days, trying to understand. Already, we see the human spirit at work – many programs for children, empowerment clinics for women, reuse of materials retrieved from destroyed buildings, small business ventures in development – all attest to resilience and strength of community.

We are grateful to be here.