Let there be light

Power has been rationed to some extent ever since I started visiting Gaza in 2009. However, on this, my sixth, trip to Gaza, it is in particularly short supply. In fact, the average house is now being forced to live with a six hours on-12 hours off schedule, compared to an average of, say, 12-12 before.

I make it a practice to live with families in different parts of the Strip, and that means waking up many mornings to no lights, no Internet and no hot water. Combine that with an unusually harsh stretch of cold, wind and rain, and you have a recipe for hardship of a more severe kind.

For instance, take yesterday. I woke up to no electricity, so I dismissed my hopes for even a lukewarm shower and by 10 I was out on the street hailing a shared car.

There was no power at the home of my friends in Khan Younis either, and the cold was even more biting, if that is possible. Without even portable heaters, the temperature seems magnified. We sat in the living room, bundled in coats usually reserved for the outdoors, sipping sahlab — a hot winter drink popular all over the Levant — and I listened to them crack dark jokes about the dismal power situation. (The silver lining to the dark cloud of the Israeli siege is the closeness of the family environment. Just how often do most American families gather together for literally hours on end, doing nothing but chatting with each other?)

They have, the family tells me, seen stories about the United States on the TV, in which people become very upset when the power goes out for any reason, even for just a couple of hours, demanding, “What is the matter????” But in Gaza, they ask “what is the matter?” when the power stays on.

One of our neighbors woke up one day and the power was on, went one of the jokes. And it didn’t go off. All day long, the power stayed on. She became so worried that she called the power company and asked the official, ‘Are you all ok over there? Is something wrong?’ (Uproarious laughter)