Prayer for Gaza and . . .
How do I respond to the horror? Starvation, continued bombing, the suffering? I have been helping a Gazan family physician Dr. Salam write up one year of data for the Family Doctor Initiative (FDI) she founded in January 2024. Together, we wrote her story that was published in the Family Medicine journal this past November. She founded the FDI which created three family medicine health care tents located in the refugee camp in the middle of Gaza. The tents are staffed by a family physician, GP (medical school and a 1-year hospital internship), and nurses. Over the past year, they cared for nearly 50,000 patient visits with the family medicine approach – whole person care (biopsychosocial) for the entire family, including breast-feeding and mental health support, and integrated into the surrounding community’s needs. The tents run north to south along the Gaza coast, not far from the sea, and are located 7-10 kilometers apart or about a 1 ½ to 2 hour walk. The most northern tent was closed in February, now with the current offensive, patient care in the middle tent is suspended.
I have been in WhatsApp contact with one of the GPs, who works for FDI to help him write up his own story. Two months into Dr. Sami’s internship, the war began, and he was pulled into the emergency department to care for the wounded. He fell in love with general surgery and has not been able to take his certifying exam because he did not have the money, although the University of Gaza did reduce the fees. This morning, he texted me: “The offensive has surrounded us for about 3 days. The bombing and quad copter shots (drone with camera) don't stop, and we can't move from one room to other. We cannot sleep. I can't even dream of my future. All of I think about [is] how I could offer food for my pregnant wife and my elderly parents. All we need is a ceasefire. And to live like any other people . . .
How to respond? “🙏 🙏 🙏 and I cannot imagine what you and your family are going through.”
I am overwhelmed with the horror and darkness in our world. So much is unfair and unjust. This week I reviewed a manuscript about the impact of armed conflict on medical education in Sudan. I don’t need to tell you that it was incredibly disruptive. I am also preparing for three asylum evaluations of the teenage children of Guatemalan parents who fled Guatemala when an older child was murdered by a gang. Now the undocumented parents are at risk of being deported and separated from their children or all being forced to return to Guatemala. The 3 children were born in the US, attended school, speak English better than Spanish, and have the dreams of US teenagers. Deportation for the family or separation is unthinkable to them and will totally up end their lives and health.
Gaza, Sudan, deportations, and the homeless on our streets, not to mention the wreckage of our safety net that we have not yet begun to deal with are all the realities of our current world. How do we move forward? How to we avoid being frozen in our uncertainty.
Krista Tippet’s On Being Podcasts are being produced again. I followed her in Minnesota with her Speaking of Faith podcast that evolved into On Being. Recently she rebroadcast a 2011interview with Walter Brueggemann, a one hour discussion about When the World We Have Trusted In is Vanishing. Brueggemann was a biblical scholar with a focus on the prophets. This is not my strength given my Catholic roots where we spent little time with the Bible, let alone the Old Testament. He spoke about how the prophets used poetry to speak about their broken, fearful, and hopeless times. Poetry enables us to hold and see something new. The sitting with the imagery can help us find a way forward or a way to wrestle with our discontent within the chaos. Both the Book of Lamentations, a collection of poems that grieve the loss of the destroyed Jerusalem, and one-third of the Book of Psalms are songs or prayers of sadness and loss and grief and upset.
Perhaps allowing the painful images of our current times in and mulling over them, as well as paying attention to the modern prophets, those willing to tell humanity to face its hardest realities, will lead us forward in our own response to the unspeakable horrors our world is facing today.
I wish all of us courage and peace of heart as we wrestle with these difficult times, these unspeakable horrors.