Qalandiya

Once Sami had dreams. Not any more.

“When I come home I want to have enough money to buy milk and look my son in the eye.”

Not much, you might say. For Sami, however, it’s a lot.

Once Sami had dreams. But since the day three soldiers attacked him, cursed his mother, beat him, abused him and tossed him away bleeding, bones broken – he no longer has dreams. Since then he’s simply been surviving.

The marks of that day are still visible on Sami’s body: the scar above his eye from rifle blow (“I can’t see so well with that eye”) and the one near his ankle from the kick that shattered the bones in his foot.

Sami also told us that last Friday (23.5.14), when the army dispersed a Palestinian demonstration at the entrance junction to the town of A-Ram, the soldiers fired a great deal of tear gas, and not just gas, and one youth was shot in the leg – “His leg has an entry and exit wound,” Sami said.

The people who’d waited hours in the entry shed to the DCL at the Qalandiya checkpoint, some of them sprawled on the metal benches, others crowded around the gate, had no dreams either. The offices within were deserted; no one answered the phones. More than half an hour went by but no one was admitted.

Many – too many – Palestinian youths, some still alive, others not, with entry and exit wounds dream no longer.