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| By Lili Galili | "Haaretz", March 31, 2007 |
No dreams, only plenty of memories
Somewhere in the Galilee, in a protected place, near an Arab village, 10 Sudanese refugee women with their children and babies have found shelter. Their names and photographs cannot be released out of fear for their lives, should they return one day to the country they were forced to leave. Rita, the director of the shelter where they are staying, asks that their last names and the location of the shelter not be released. This request is not necessarily linked to her being a member of the Messianic Jewish sect, problematic in itself when it comes to the ultra-Orthodox. It is based on her past experiences, when she was threatened by the furious Israeli husbands of the battered women this facility once sheltered. What an inverted world: evil lives openly and fearlessly and its victims and their benefactors have to hide. The landscape around the shelter is pastoral and tranquil in contrast with the drama that unfolds within its walls. Ten women and 21 children have been living here for periods ranging from two months to a year. A number of the fathers are incarcerated in Israeli jails for breaking the harsh laws to prevent infiltration into Israel. Other fathers have been released and found work in moshavim, cooperative farming communities, where they are not always treated fairly. Despite the forced break-up of the family unit and the uncertainty this is still the best time these women have known since the outbreak of civil war in Sudan, which turned into genocide. Certainly it is better than the months or years they spent in Egypt whose borders they stole across to reach Israel. There, the authorities persecuted them, while people cursed them and their children in the streets. Sometimes, they were even beaten.
From Sudan to Aswan
"It is very difficult to be a person no one in the world wants - not your country, nor your continent, and not even those people of the same religion," Fatma (not her real name) says, nursing her baby in the shelter. Fatma, who comes from Darfur, is illiterate and has no deep understanding of life. She only knows they were very bad. She does not understand the cruel war in Sudan - why Muslim tribes would attack Muslim villages, why blacks would butcher blacks, unless it was because they were blacker. When they felt danger closing in on them, they fled to Khartoum, where Fatma's husband was arrested for reasons they never found out. One day he returned, passports in hand, and said they were leaving. Fatma walked three hours to say good-bye to a neighbor who she knew she would never see again, and they left on the long journey from Sudan to Aswan. But the three years they spent there were not much better. The Egyptian police persecuted the husband, who sold sewing notions in the street. During a demonstration organized by the Sudanese refugees, Fatma was hit in the stomach when she was three months pregnant. They left again, this time for Israel. They crossed the desert barefoot, with the Bedouin as their guides. "Follow the light" they were told when they were within sight of the Israeli border. They crossed, and soldiers in a passing Israeli military jeep heard the baby crying. First they were taken to the hospital, then they were separated - the husband was taken to jail, and Fatma, with her two children and the baby, was taken to the shelter. Fatma has no political opinions. She knows she is in the Jewish state, where she says she feels safer than in Sudan where they kill non-Arabs, or in Egypt where Sudanese are abducted to traffic in their organs. But she has no dreams. Refugees have no dreams, only plenty of memories.
Wandering the desert
Rada, a Christian from southern Sudan, has very bad memories. As she tells her story, she collapses in tears. Before she begged to stop, she told of a whole family hit, of a house burned, a flight to Egypt and the torment there. She tells the story of her desert crossing in detail. Lost in the heart of nothingness; attempts to signal planes that passed overhead; their greatest desire to run into police or an army patrol. How absurd - illegal refugees usually run from the law; yet here, the authorities in a country defined as hostile became the epitome of hope. The time since her husband was released from jail and took on a job that was arranged for him at a moshav has been harder than when he was still behind bars. All Rada wants is "to be a normal person," she says. Most of all she wants for Israel to decide whether it wants them or not. If not, let it send them elsewhere. "I'm tired of injustice and uncertainty." The day of our visit, we could see the tensions of the years breaking out in anger over what seemed like nothing. The women brought the inter-tribal tensions from Sudan here to the shelter. "Something like the tensions among our tribes," an Arab woman from the nearby village, who works at the shelter, says. And this is still a safe harbor, presided over by Rita, formerly a Jewish American hippie who married a Japanese American and found Jesus, thanks to whom she says she can do all this good. Many good people are involved in this project, a Parisian volunteer makes French food, others work with the children and mainly try to calm the environment. When they are sitting on the grass folding laundry, this place seems completely normal. As much as it can be when no one knows what the High Court will decide, what the state will do, and what tomorrow will bring. Fadi Eyadat contributed to this story.
