How Aisha, 25, got a new classroom 

Today is the day that Aisha’s school will be bombed. Aisha doesn’t know that, but even if she did know, she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. 

Aisha has tried to maintain some sort of regularity. She still teaches, even though chaos reigns at her school. 

She now teaches groups of up to sixty kids. All age groups mixed together and as many as can fit into one classroom without suffocating. It’s almost impossible to make any real progress. Some of the kids are learning how to divide and multiply, some of the older kids have been doing some algebra, but she realizes it’s more important now to give the kids some sense of normalcy with pandemonium all around them. Officially there is no school and none will graduate. 

Every day some of her kids leave with their families, in search of safer places or places where food is distributed more regularly. Every day new faces appear, and some are reported missing or injured or killed. 

It’s become very challenging to push kids to do math when you know that their head could be blown off tomorrow. She regrets having given lots of homework to her kids the previous school year. Some are dead now, some have lost legs or arms. If she had known that beforehand, she would have let them play a lot more. 

She’s visited some of the amputees. A six year old asked her if her legs were perhaps merely invisible, because she could still feel pain in them. Maybe with some paint they could make them visible again. Aisha, not a big fan of indulging in fantasies, told her ‘I don’t think it works like that, but you will get new legs later.’ The girl said: ‘I don’t want new ones. My old ones were the best. Why did they take them? Where are they now?’ Aisha said: ‘Your legs would have killed you.’ But the girl said her legs would never want to kill her. 

Even worse were the burns she had seen. Some kids she had taught she could only recognize by the sound of their voice. Their faces looked like they had molten away. If there had been something in her stomach she would have vomited. 

She hasn’t visited the hospital since. She feels bad about that, because she knows many kids there have no familiar faces around them. The screams are just too unbearable. Some are too shocked and too exhausted to scream. They have screamed so much they’ve run out of screams. The sight of those is equally heartbreaking. 

A doctor, the most tired man she had ever met, he looked well over 50, even though he was only in his thirties, told her every day the bring it 500 injured people. The staff has to make snapshot decision: who will receive treatment and who will be made as comfortable as possible in their death struggle. 

He told her most could be saved with modern treatments, but they didn’t have the supplies nor the equipment. ‘We’re giving sleeping pills to kids and then saw off limbs as fast as we can. Sometimes we don’t have time to wait till they’re asleep. Some wake up in the middle of the procedure.’ 

She overheard a nurse say: ‘I have died, but my body is still here. I don’t know who or what is making my hands and legs to the work.’ 

Routine and discipline keep her sane. Allowing one’s thoughts to wander could drive one to suicide. She knows of two mums who lost all their kids who attempted suicide. One stabbed herself in the neck with a pair of scissors. She died three days later. One hung herself with her little girl’s skipping rope in their bombed out apartment. 

Luckily she’s not a mother yet. Being a parent now is what makes this place truly hell on earth. Compared to those fighting to keep their children alive, she has it a lot easier. 

Unless there is some emergency in the middle of the night she gets up well before sunrise. She prays at all the prescribed times. She has stuck to her exercise programme, even though her body is not getting the calorie intake she needs to maintain her muscles. She’s lost weight, something many girls would be rather enthusiastic about, but Aisha likes being fit and strong, not skinny. 

There are two books next to her bed, a mattrass on the floor. The Koran and Discipline equals freedom by Jocko Willink. The Americans who throw simplistically formulated hatred at her every time she tweets about the situation in Gaza have no idea how influenced she is by American culture. She stopped trying to debate them when she realized they weren’t commenting to learn or to give their opinion, but to trigger her, to make her feel bad, to make her feel hated and despised. She doesn’t even read the comments anymore. 

The hatred has patterns. A tweet going ‘so what you’re saying is…’ is sure to be from someone trying to put words into her mouth, trying to ridicule what she is conveying. A tweet that mentions ‘IQ’ is sure to be from the least articulate ones. The hatred doesn’t register anymore. Bombs, bullet hunger and one’s own thoughts can kill, not the silly comments. Way more dangerous is to go online to look at images of food. It’s excruciating to be able to make any dish in the world appear in a matter of seconds when you’re surviving mostly on bread and sweetened tea. 

Every morning she checks the news hoping to read about a ceasefire deal. It’s been eighth months of this. 

She won’t be checking the news this morning, because the little storage room that’s become her bedroom at the school will be completely destroyed in a few minutes. It’s only a storage room, but at least she has a space to herself. All the others sleeping on the school grounds sleep in rooms with twenty to thirty others. 

Aisha is praying when the bombs hit. She’s on her prayer mat and has made herself very small. It’s prayer that literally saves her. A wall crumbles on top of her, but it’s a thin wall. She only has some scratches on her arms and her calfs. Somehow the ceiling right above her hasn’t collapsed. 

Her first idea is to get up and get as far away from the school as possible. She knows that the enemy sometimes waits for rescue efforts to get going to strike again. Then she thinks of the children and their parents and how she should help carry the wounded to safety. 

But Aisha is on the second floor. Only a small part of the floor is still there. She can look straight down to the lower level. The stairs have been blown away. Aisha is left sitting high and dry on a tiny part of the second floor. It’s too high to jump, so she’ll have to wait till they come and free her. She gets scared that her tiny corner might still collapse. 

Below she can see the charred bodies of the dead. A much more sickening sight is that of those who are still alive and writhing in pain. She sees a woman crawl through the rubble, her face completely covered in blood. Her clothes have been blown off and Aisha can see how blood is streaming down the woman’s naked back. She stops crawling and collapses. It’s obvious she had tried to reach the dead body of a little boy. He’s been cut in half and his intestines look like a little pile of multicolored jelly. His hands are on top of it, as if he tried to push it all back in. 

Aisha scratches her own face until she spots blood under her nails. 

Rescue workers arrive. They see her. She tells them to first look for other survivors, but the men ignore her. Eventually two guys show up with a wooden ladder. It’s an old rickety thing. It’s obviously been used for paint jobs. It’s stained with white paint in many places. A few rungs are missing. 

A medic says: ‘Your ear needs attention.’ 

It’s then that she feels how half her left ear is gone. 

The man takes a closer look at it and shrugs. ‘You need to get that disinfected.’ 

He asks her to count to ten. He puts up three fingers and asks her how many fingers she sees. He asks her to look to the left and to the right. 

His facial expression reads: that could have been a lot worse for you. 

‘Get the ear checked’, he says and darts off. 

Aisha stares up at what is left of her improvised bed room. She tries to figure out why it hasn’t collapsed along with the rest, but she’s a math teacher and not an architect. 

She stumbles off, not really knowing where to go. She can’t bear the sight of more death and destruction. What she’d like most now is to be at a gym. Lift weights, kick a punching bag till it bursts open, work up a sweat. Growl like an animal that’s been caged for too long while running as fast as she can. 

A group of women rush to her. They try to pull her in the direction of the hospital. She tells them to please let her be. She lies that she is a doctor herself. They let her be. 

But with no place left to go, her only option is to join the refugees crowding  around the hospital. She can’t  bear the idea of having to see a continuous stream of wounded being brought in, but she can teach there. They must have a whiteboard there and some markers. 

She is not sure if Einstein ever said it, but she remembers the quote: ‘Life is like riding a bicycle. You have to keep going or you fall.’ 

Aisha heads in the direction of the hospital. Her pace is brisk and determined. 

Discipline equals freedom.