Was I switched at birth?

After Ahmed Masoud was born in Gaza, the hospital was bombed. His father rushed to the special care unit – but did he take home the right baby? I had a very happy childhood in a very large family, with five sisters and six brothers. I’m right in the middle, which is a good place to be. But we lived in one of the worst places on Earth – the Gaza Strip in Palestine – and when I was six, in 1987, the first intifada started. There were continual searches and raids on Palestinian homes and hospitals. Some years we hardly went to school at all. The whole school would be out throwing stones at military Jeeps. It was a game for us, but a very dangerous game. In this situation, my mum was the one who held the family together. My father was an Arabic teacher in an elementary school, but he was often not at home; he would be taken away and questioned and then a few days later be brought back. But every evening my mum would play cards with us and she became a child again, like us. Her sense of humour was brilliant. We could hear gunfire outside but my mum would stay calm, or get more competitive with the cards, and you’d forget about the gunfire and focus on the game instead. Looking back, I see how she provided us with a bubble to stay away from all the troubles outside. So despite everything going on outside I had a happy childhood. But all this changed when I was 17. One day I came home from school and turned on the TV. There was a programme about Palestinian refugees and how their families were fragmented because of the troubles, and it talked about how children and babies were mixed up in hospitals. I looked at my mother and she was electrified – her mouth was open, her eyes were staring and she looked like a ghost. I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me. My dad, too, was staring at the screen. I could see that behind his glasses there was a tear coming down. I hadn’t seen my dad cry before, and to see his tears falling down his cheek was terrifying to me. Then he wiped his eyes and held my hand, and my mum’s hand, and he started telling the story about what happened when I was born. At the time, the hospital was being raided and I was evacuated to a special care unit before my mum had even seen me. My dad heard news that the hospital was being bombed and went straight there. When he arrived he was told the room and cot number where he could find me. He ran as fast as he could, but when he got there, he found not one but two babies in the cot. He didn’t know which one was his – the one on the left

Posted by on March 18, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.