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The man agreed and went back and brought his wife. The doctor spent the whole night and delivered the woman by candlelight. In the morning, three people were in the street; the father carrying his baby and the wife carrying the white cloth and her British passport, which proved useless in this most critical of situations.
When the curfew was lifted, the doctor met the husband and told him that he had spent the rest of the night without candles because they had consumed all the candles the night that his wife gave birth. “It was a romantic delivery,” said the doctor, “and your baby came from darkness to face another horrible darkness during daylight”, he continued. The Ministry of Education ordered the reopening of schools the next
day, and that the students whose schools had been damaged be distributed among other schools. Sixth graders and up were expected to resume school on Tuesday 24th, while the rest were to resume the following day, Wednesday 25th. I told my husband that night: “Don’t you think that it is a bit too soon for schools?” He answered with determination: “We are people who look for life and reality, not illusion and mirage. It is a wise decision.”
We are people who were born to live for a while, die slowly only to come out of near death and live again. We are as immortal as our cause. Personally speaking, I am a person with a weak heart. I believe that what gave me the strength to survive was my great belief in God. I used to recite verses from Qu'ran every night thanking God that we were safe and alive. It became such a
habit that when shooting and bombing intensified, my lips would start automatically to move to recite verses. It was unconscious, and simultaneous with the level of fear. Apparently, things were on their way to becoming normal. However, I still felt that things were not normal. My kids were discussing the idea of buying a big deep freeze for storing food that runs on
batteries in case of future incursions, and electricity failures. A friend of us told us that his father-in-law had died during the incursion, and it was a natural death. His family didn’t know what to do with the body, which they kept in one of the rooms and closed the door waiting for things to get better. There was no fan and no ice to help preserve the body. The
body stayed three days and it began to smell. The family then decided to bury the body under the only piece of ground that they had, which was the entrance to their house. Their neighbors helped them in digging the grave and the body was laid in its final resting place. When his wife and son cried over such end to their father and grandfather, they were told that he was lucky to find someone to carry and bury him, and that they might not find someone to treat them
similarly under such horrible situations. What was agonizing was that anyone entering the house would have to step on the grave. “He was a good man, and deserved a more decent burial.” His wife said. “His other sons and daughters didn’t have the chance to see him for the last time. It was cruel,” she added. Our neighbor told my mother-in-law that her grandson’s
condition was better after they took him to hospital. She told her that a woman she knew was about to give birth. The ambulance driver couldn’t reach the village where they lived because he was forbidden entry. The pregnant woman was taken to the clinic in the village where the doctor decided to operate on her since she was carrying twins and normal delivery was difficult. The twins, two girls, were premature and needed an incubator. They called and even begged the
soldiers to let them take the babies to hospital in the city. The rejection resulted in the death of the two babies. I guessed that our neighbor who was crying when she asked us for some remedy for diarrhea was afraid of such end for her own grandson. My kids prepared for school and Nammor discovered that some pages of his history book were torn out. I tried hard to
make the house look as normal as before. I still felt that it wasn’t normal. My kids said that they kept on smelling that strange smell: “the soldiers’ smell.”<END>
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