nomota

There are moments in Gaza when suffering becomes so ordinary that people stop asking for solutions. They begin asking only for the smallest relief. A little less pain. A child who sleeps through the night. When I entered the clinic that morning, I noticed a young woman carrying a baby so small that I could not tell whether the child was a newborn or simply made tiny by hardship. When her turn came, she gently placed the baby on my desk and said: “I want any cream you have.” Any cream. Not a specific medicine. Not a particular treatment. Just anything. She uncovered the baby and showed me the severe rash covering much of the child’s fragile skin. “I treat the baby with whatever free creams I can find in clinics,” she explained. “Anything helps.” As she spoke, I noticed something else. The baby was not wearing a diaper. Only pieces of cloth. I asked why. “I can’t afford diapers,” she replied calmly. “I wash these and use them again.” Then she added that they were living in a tent and that her husband had suffered a serious foot injury and was unable to work. “I’m not asking for much,” she said. “I only want a cream.” But what caught my attention most was not the rash. It was the malnutrition. The baby was severely underweight. The kind of malnutrition that is visible before any examination even begins. So I asked the mother whether she had noticed. She nodded. “Yes, I know.” Then she said something I cannot forget: “When the baby gets older, things will get better.” Not because she truly believed it. But because hope was cheaper than treatment. And treatment was something she could no longer afford. That was the moment that broke me. Not the tent. Not the poverty. Not even the illness. But the fact that this mother had lowered her expectations so much that she no longer dreamed of proper medical care, diapers, or adequate nutrition. She came asking for the smallest thing she could imagine. A tube of cream. Any cream. Something that might make the baby hurt a little less. The baby could not have been more than five months old. Too young to understand war. Too young to understand poverty. Yet already carrying both on that tiny body. There is something profoundly cruel about a world in which a mother’s greatest hope for her child is no longer a better future. Only a little less suffering tonight. #WoundedGaza