I'm an aid worker in the Gaza Strip - it's my duty to help people

I was already working in the humanitarian field for many years before, and this was my passion in my life to be specialized in this aspect.   

The situation is totally different than before. It’s very risky for everyone. Sometimes I'm an aid worker and sometimes a civilian. It's very risky if I want to go out, whether for a personal purpose or for work. It's become more tiring and full of challenges.  

Before we had transportation, we had food, the health was better, but today we face a lot. If I want to go to my office, I have to walk for two kilometres or more. We don't have electricity, so we depend on the solar panels as a source of the electricity, which is not available everywhere.  

Before, everyone had an internet connection at home. It was not a big deal. But now you cannot do your work at your home. You have to go to any other place where you can find the electricity and internet. 

My duty is to be involved with the people we support and to hear their complaints or concerns, whether that’s about our project that we implement or about any other thing. Once they know that I'm an aid worker, they will start talking about many, many things.  

This is the challenge that I'm personally facing. People come and ask me for food or any other kind of aid, which I sometimes cannot afford myself.  

I'm a humanitarian worker. My duty is to is to provide for you or to give you the service that you need. Once you feel that you're failing to give people what they need, you will feel frustrated. Of course I try to explain to them, but I eventually I can't do anything, which increases the burden in my heart.   

After two years of attacks against Gaza, people have become displaced, most people here lost their houses. They started to live in tents or makeshifts shelters or in schools, universities, governmental buildings, and they are living together without having any privacy, without having any hygienic situation, because the infrastructure of Gaza became totally destroyed. 

You will find that a lot of families, maybe 20 families, are sharing one bathroom. This was not the situation of people before.    

The most basic need now is food, and flour. Some countries may depend on rice or pasta. But flour here is the basic item for all meals. So once the families don't have access to this to flour, they will start to starve.  

It's now nearly two years of the depriving people from this nutritional food. It affected their health. People have become very pale. They've become skinny. They don't have any health. This is the basic need of people now, to get access to good food.  

They are also in need of water. Now, people are depending on the water trucks that are coming. When trucks come to any neighbourhood, you see how much people hurry and start to run just to fill one jerry can - or two if they are they are lucky.  

They also need water to have showers, to clean the place where they are living, to clean their bathrooms, to wash the dishes, to wash their clothes. The situation is that you'll find that most of mothers are not able to bathe their children every day. Whenever I sit with any woman, I hear the same scenario from each one. 

One of the things that had an impact on myself recently is that I started to witness the changing psychological behaviour of people here. Once you deprive people from food, from water, from flour, once you deprive them from their homes, from good shelter, they are not having a dignified life. Of course the behaviour of people will change.    

I noticed that the percentage of gender-based violence has also increased. Once the man fails to provide his family with what they need, in addition to many other things that he doesn't have a job, he's lost his property, etc., his actions change and he will start to be violent against his wife, sister, sometimes maybe daughters.    

It also affected the behaviours of children. I see this with my own eyes, the changing of the children's behaviour, they also became violent and every time whenever I walk in the street I see the children – when they have fights, they carry a stone and they throw it at each other.   

The verbal language that they have it's also changed. I know that this came because they started to live closely next to each other. The people lost their privacy. So they hear a lot of words, so they will start to repeat these words even if they don't under understand it.    

The aid nowadays, when it enters Gaza, is not reaching everyone. So what is happening is that people started to loot the aid. The one who is looting this aid, he will survive because he will be able to feed his family. There are a lot of women; they don't have husbands because they were killed, or their husbands might have disabilities, or they might be injured. They have children, and they don't have anything to feed their children. So they find themselves forced to go to these areas.

Of course, there are many other needs. Students are deprived from their education. We're talking about two years of not going to school. Here in Gaza, people are very keen about educating their children. We tried to make our children join the schools, but the problem was that if there is no security and there's no safety, you cannot guarantee that your children will be safe to go to schools - because any rocket, any missile could target any place. Sometimes we were telling them no, stay at home because it's not safe. 

People nowadays are not focusing too much about education because they are very busy with the providing their families with the with food, water, et cetera. But it's still a concern inside their heart that they are worried about.  These people feel that they are losing their dreams, their ambitions and their plans for the future.  

At CESVI, we are providing the life-saving service of water trucking, because water is basic to keeping our people alive. We are also working on the rehabilitation at the IDP shelters. We're trying to make the shelters at the site more hygienic, because the situation is much deteriorated. We are providing some sites with latrines, because there is a huge shortage of latrines.    

What we are doing in CESVI to take care of those vulnerable people, is we start off making a needs assessment for the sites we are targeting, we are giving high priorities for the sites which include a huge number with the female-headed families and people with disabilities, we're trying to provide them with the services that is adequate or more suitable for their situation.   

Many people are sheltering in schools, but these schools don't have an adequate number of toilets or bathrooms. So what the people started to do, they started to make private bathrooms inside the room where they are living. But the problem is that these bathrooms are not linked to a sewage network. So what was happening is that the hygienic situation of the shelter was very bad. We're not talking only about the bad smell of the shelter, we're also talking about the side effects of this on the people who we help. So we started to rehabilitate these sites, to make it more hygienic.

I'm one of the people who are living in Gaza. I'm not only a humanitarian, I'm also a person who's affected badly by this situation. But still it's my duty and responsibility to help the people have a dignified life, to make their voices heard, to ensure that they have adequate services, to safeguard the children while they are trying to get the services.  

This all is our responsibility toward our community, because we all have the same agony, so we should all work together to make our life better.   

We are working as much as we can, just to give people a little bit of hope that tomorrow might be better.

Concern is working with our international NGO partner CESVI to deliver life-saving aid in Gaza.