Blogging in Gaza

  I am sitting in the hotel restaurant of The Marna House hotel in Gaza City. It has a large covered outdoor area with some nice big trees. It is 9:45pm. The electricity is off in our rooms. We just finished a light late dinner of hummus, eggplant, tabouleh, and a hamburger.  Kevin and John left to go to bed, and I am at the table blogging.  I am the only woman here.  There are 7 other tables with 2-6 men per table smoking from hookas and talking, laughing. Sometimes the bubbling is loud enough to drown out the talk.  It smells good. Smokey and sweet.  It is just warm enough and enough humidity you know the ocean is near.  A bit of car noise and horns honking, but really quite nice.  It's one of those times when you are traveling that you know you've left home
  What I have seen isn't as mysterious and different as you might think. The biggest contrast is the entry.  We drove through Israel on nice highways, Sarbucks Israeli, big new train bridges that might be used, fancy man made lake with water park features, to a parking lot with loud taxi drivers which is the Erez crossing.  One picture, that the signs say I'm not supposed to take....

And one that Steve was not supposed to take...

 
  The Israelis check us through relatively quick in a big structure like an airport terminal.  There is us and 1 other woman coming in.  You go through a couple round scissor gates with all your luggage and it's a 2 k walk under a covered walkway to the Palestinian check in building which is a couple of trailers.

Now there is rubble on the right ("no man's land") and view of the dividing wall stretching south on your left, a dirt parking lot, and some shanties ahead.  The Hamas authorities check our passports and want to check our bags.  They are giving Kevin's bag a pretty thorough look.

  This is where you would have seen a picture of that had the guard not taken my camera, asked me to come into the office and delete them. They need to put up some signs.
  Sohail is one of the PCRF workers here that will be helping us this week.  He meets us and we go to the hospital.  You will be hearing more about the hospital in the next few days, but in brief, the staff is friendly, and welcoming.  It is smaller than the others we have worked in, but not the oldest and it is clean.  They have 2 OR rooms, and have not scheduled any surgeries this week because we are there. Five cases today, sorry for the medical jargon, hypospadias, clitoralplasty on 2 sisters with ambiguous genitalia, ureter reimplant.  We are done at 8:00pm.

my camera is in my dark room, will do more photos later...