“People just want to live in fuckin’ peace”.
It was October 10th 2023 and I was leaving the Sinai. The car radio was on and a news bulletin had a snippet of a man yelling enthusiastically in arabic. I couldn’t tell if the man in the car speakers was yelling because he was angry, or if his aim was to transmit his message, personally, to every single Egyptian via the air waves. Whichever it was, it sounded important.
Something told me I wasn’t going to hear music on this trip.
Tensions were high for the past 3 days. Hamas had just crossed over into enemy lines.
I was torn on how I should feel about the whole situation. On the one hand I was hearing from the retired expats: “oh no, we’re miles away from the conflict.There’s nothing to worry about. It’s about as far away as Scotland is to London.”
That was definitely a point. Was it supposed to be comforting, though?
On the other hand I was getting messages saying: “wait, you’re on the Sinai?!”
This reaction felt more honest.
When you come from an island nation, the idea of protecting your borders never crosses your mind - not once. I had gone my whole life naturally assuming that everyone who came to NZ was planning on leaving.
I had been looking up information on YouTube semi-obsessively these past few days (Google, as well, of course: “how far is Gaza from Sharm?”) and stumbled across some unfamiliar news channels in Arabic that had english subtitles. There’s this one particular video that sticks with me. It’s a journalist walking around Gaza on October 8th, talking to civilians and reporting on the general ‘mood’ in the streets.
An older lady wearing a pink flowing dress down to her feet and a black hijab was on camera - hysterical. She was beside herself as the journalist asked her “why are you so upset?
Her wrinkles slid back into an all too familiar place, revealing an expression of despair that she had worn in well throughout her life.
She screamed in arabic. The words in english appeared on the bottom of my laptop:
“because they’re going to blow us off the face of the earth!”
For the past 400+ days, there have been people and reactions from this genocide that I’ll never forget. I can close my eyes and see their faces clearly on the back of my eyelids. For me, this woman is always the start of that montage.
“… and so that’s why Israelis can visit Egypt but we can’t go to Israel” he finishes, as the car pulls up to the airport drop off zone.
.
Another image that features in the montage. Young child carries her sister over he shoulder
As I open the door to get out of the car, I thank him. He points at my keffiyeh and nods over to the airport security waiting at the departure doors, “they’re going to stop you. It makes you look like a criminal”.
“Does it? I think it looks cool.”
I was stopped at security… five times.
Marshall McLuhan coined this term “THE GLOBAL VILLAGE” in 1962, which describes how the world is becoming more interconnected through advancements in communication technologies, from the phone to the television to the internet and social media. He foresaw a future where information could be shared instantaneously across great distances, effectively shrinking the world into a small "village."
Over 60 years ago, there were people who saw our lives looking the way they do today. They predicted that we were going to become a global community, where smaller communities have more power to connect ideas, influence others and create change on a global scale.
While it is true that cellphones and social media have connected us, when I think about how many hours and miles I’ve dedicated to going ‘somewhere else’, it also made me realise just how close we live to one another. Before setting off, the world felt huge. I almost believed that if one wasn’t careful, it could very easily swallow you up forever.
But, the world has only gotten smaller the more I’ve seen of it.