Medical Initiative For the Benefit of

The Children of Palestine

Ear Surgery for Palestinian Children

By Dr. Ibrahim K. Ladaa

Message from Nablus, August 19, 2003

Part 1

Dear Colleagues,

Qalqilia is a town of about 30 thousand inhabitants, 20 kilometers from the sea, surrounded by lemon trees and orange groves, olive trees and a mixture of Mediterranean and tropical plants, sweet-smelling flowers and bushes like jasmine, phull, alrihan  and thyme, large sweet figs and thorny   saber (cactus fruit) and many more.  Qalqilia’s hey-day has passed. The town used to be famous for its market, especially at the weekend when Arabs and Jews from the whole region looked with amazement at the rich offer of fruit and vegetables. It was a lively, mixed, lovable oriental town.

Qalqilia has over 50 deep water wells, at a depth of not more than 20 meters. The water reservoir is so great that the town can withstand several years of drought.  The mayor told me that when he took me on a trip through the town. He showed me the monster, a giant 8 meters high and 1.5 meters thick.  It cuts off the sun from the west, winds its way through residential areas.

I touched it and struck my fist against it; it didn’t answer. At this moment the mayor told me that many others had already done the same; parliamentarians and ministers from the western and oriental world.  One member of the European Parliament had cried as she stood beside the wall (a voice in the wilderness, deadly silence). On seeing the monstrosity, others said that a regime that builds such a wall has long since lost.

It is not only the wall that surrounds Qalqilia. On both sides of it there are asphalt roads alongside of which there are deep ditches. The Palestinians are not allowed to build anything on a 70-metre-wide stretch alongside the wall. Several houses which were in this area were destroyed.

The wall surrounds Qalqilia from all directions. It begins almost 10 kilometers from the eastern and only entrance to the town, down both sides of the road in the direction of Nablus. This is the only exit for 30,000 people, which is also controlled by strict Mahasim (checkpoints). While building the wall Israel robbed the Arabs of 19 deep water wells, which made up a total of 36% of the water reservoir. The orange and olive groves hardly exist any longer. Several old olive trees, which were uprooted on account of the course of the wall, were sold to rich Israelis who planted them in the gardens of their Mediterranean villas. Will the new owners derive any pleasure from these uprooted and alienated trees? Maybe some of them will remember, when looking at the tree, that the hand that planted the tree were Arabian hands; the hands of Mohammed, Mustafa, Ali or Ibrahim.

An Arab proverb says “Our ancestors planted so that we could live.”  May the new owners of these olive trees accept the principle of live and let live; maybe then we will be making progress in the right direction.

Ibrahim K. Ladaa

Part 2

Dear Colleagues,

SALAMMAT

We were a group of six specialists, a radiologist (trainee) from Romania, a neurologist and an internal specialist from Bulgaria, a children’s doctor, an orthopaedist from the Ukraine and myself from Germany.

At 8 o’clock on a Friday  and we were sitting in an ambulance traveling towards Qalqilia.

Friday is the day of rest here. The colleagues all worked in Nablus but, because it was difficult for the patients to get to Nablus, we went to them. The ambulance drove quickly.

Ambulances have a ‘privilege.’ Sometimes they are allowed to drive ahead and don’t have to wait in a queue.  Our driver had often done that and had had a lot of practice.  So he overtook a long queue of private cars and placed himself in front of the first car.  Then we had to wait until the soldier, who was almost 50 meters away, gave us a signal to drive up to him.

It didn’t take long and we drove up.  Between concrete walls there is a road only wide enough for one car. The soldier stood there in the heat with his heavy M16 machine gun and his steel helmet, which seemed to be too big for his head. Very fair skin, bright eyes, a pointed little nose, hardly twenty years old. The trousers were too big and didn’t fit properly, his finger was on the trigger. The ambulance stopped level with him. The driver had collected from us our identity cards, with clearly confirmed that we were doctors, during the journey. The driver jumped out, opened all the ambulance doors, ran up to the soldier, greeted him in Hebrew, handed him the papers and told him that were all doctors. The soldier took the identity cards and made a signal without saying a word. The driver understood what he wanted because he had taken this journey several times a day. He came back to the ambulance, sweating, threw himself behind the wheel and mumbled something that I didn’t understand.  At one very narrow spot he had to drive back and forth a few times so that the ambulance was so positioned in such a way that the soldier could oversee the rear door and have an overall view of the ambulance. Then we were all ordered to get out. This order did not come from the soldier. Up till that moment he had not opened his thin-lipped mouth. He only needed to look at the driver, who could tell from his eyes what he expected. The driver got in and lifted up the seat on which we had been sitting. Under it there were the emergency cases which had to be opened. Then the soldier handed the identity cards back to the driver without saying a word and we were glad to be able to drive on. The tension evaporated with a grin and regret as one of the colleagues said that power comes from the mouth of a gun barrel (a play on Mao Tse Tung’s red Bible of that time).  For me this boy was in the wrong place.  He was clearly afraid, he clung to his M16, thinking that it was his sole salvation. He didn’t laugh, didn’t speak. I told myself that he was only twenty, how long would he cling to his gun?

We arrived at the clinic in Qalqilia at 9.30. They had been waiting for us for a long time.  Each of us went to his room and started his work.  I was especially pleased because one of the founders of this clinic was a former doctor’s assistant who had worked with me in the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem in the 80s. At that time I was head ear, nose and throat specialist and director of the hospital.

I had to send five of the patients for an operation in Nablus. Four of them needed ear operations because of a cholesteatoma and one case was a choenal atresie left.