Reham's story

Hello, my name is Reham, and my dad’s name is Faraj. The thing that we love most in life is chickens .… so much that we want people to call us “Abu Dajaj”, father of the chickens. We love chickens so much that we made three farms.

I want to tell you what happened with us in the war; I don’t have anyone who was killed, and we didn’t have heavy bombing in our area… Honestly, I wasn’t feeling the war… Until one day when we were sitting there happily, and suddenly my uncle came to our house with a changed face. He told my dad that the Israeli army had hit bombs on our farms and flattened one of them to the ground. My dad went running to the farm. The losses were 3000 chickens and the bags of feed. The army took all the bags and made them into bunkers instead of sand bags.

We weren’t upset at the financial losses. We expected them to bomb the farm or bomb us at any time – because the Israeli rockets didn’t differentiate between Fatah and Hamas, or between a Gazan and an immigrant – but we were very upset for our chickens. What was their fault? And what did they have to do with the war???


Reham – Born 1996 – Al Shuja'iyeh/Al Montar


Are these the kind of realities children should be so matter of fact at the age of 14 ? Conflicts make children grow up faster than they should, whether or not they are directly affected by it. They learn about the politics of war, power struggles, suffering caused by people on others all at a young age. But some part of them remain childlike and this is why they cannot fully grasp the reality of the situations they find themselves in. These emotional scars they will carry with them into adulthood. Is this what we want for our younger generation?


Come hear Reham's story on the 30th and 31st of October at the Goethe Institute at 7.30pm.