Talestotell is getting published in Jan 2010!

From the book’s back cover:
‘An honest, forthright account full of compassion and insight. It plunges the reader into Gaza.’
JEREMY HARDY
‘Moving and understated. … By sharing in the vulnerability of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the crowded killing fields of the Gaza Strip, Sharyn Lock manages to humanise the inhuman. … Unforgettable.’
RICHARD FALK, from [...]

Defend the Rescuers

Some of us are currently working on setting up a blog called Defend the Rescuers, as part of  a new International Campaign of Solidarity with Palestinian Emergency Workers. It’s a work-in-progress but I wanted to tell you about it. You can see what emergency workers face in Gaza in the following short film, “One of…” made [...]

May 25: Back home in England

I’m back in the UK. It is nearly a year since I left here to be part of making the FreeGaza project happen, pretty much expecting to end up in Israeli prison – the one thing that didn’t happen! Instead, we reached Gaza and it became inextricably part of my life. I don’t really have [...]

April 16: Visiting Al Assria Cultural Centre

In one of my last Gaza days I went to visit the Union of Health Work Committee’s Al Assria Cultural Centre . I’d meant to get there ages ago, on request of Sheffield Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, who have been supporting various projects Al Assria have run for years now, but the Israeli attacks had gotten [...]

April 20: Kafka’s Border

This is an excerpt from a post I wrote in September 2008…
The outdoor restaurant overlooking the sea has been nicknamed “Casablanca without the alcohol” by Dr Bill. Here, we internationals and Palestinians alike sit, looking out over the moonlit water, sharing argeelah and rumours about the Rafah border. Will it open? If so, when? And [...]

April: Kids on wheels in Jabalia & other farewells

Here again are the children of our Jabalia friends, one of the many lovely families I spent last week saying goodbye to. The wheelchair belongs, not to any of the kids thank goodness, but to the father of the oldest boy, who lacks both legs, yet continues to tackle life with humour and enthusiasm. It [...]

April 20: a world without bullet holes

…after two days at the border, I managed to exit Gaza via Rafah into Egypt. I feel a bit stunned at the shinyness of this world outside. Give me a day or two to adjust, and I hope to share some final Gaza writing with you.

April 13: Living in the real world

When we began our first level medic course here in Khan Younis Red Crescent after the Israeli attacks, we found a lot of black humour in the training slides, developed in America, which their authors were probably unaware of. The smiling medic pairs, wheeling Aryan children – sitting up and looking unaccountably cheerful – [...]

April 11: Disarming by direct action

Last night I was playing chess in the shisha cafe across from Al Quds Red Crescent, where I am sure to find a familiar face and where they seem to have got over me being a girl in amongst the shebab, when I got a text from the south. “Our friends J and L were [...]

April 9: Art in the ruins

In my last post, I told you about the photo exhibition in the middle building (which I tend to call the Social Centre, possibly because someone told me it was called that) of the Al Quds Red Crescent hospital complex. And last week you heard about the concert held in the ruins of the third [...]