Gazawis Don't Float

What would you do if you lived on a sandy slice of the Mediterranean shoreline that was under an international siege that made it next to impossible to have a normal productive life? Well, If you're like many Gazawis, you'd hit the beach.

Every evening, the beaches of Gaza are packed with people. On Thursday, the crowds last well into the night, since for those lucky enough to have a job, Friday is their only day off. And yet it doesn't take long to realize that something's not right, and I'm not talking about the floating garbage, the occasional whiff of sewage, or the Israeli spy drone shining in the distance like a lost planet. Gazawis aren't very good swimmers.

Crowds of young men wading in the surf treated me like a visiting Olympian because I wore goggles and could sustain freestyle strokes for more than 5 minutes. And when I swam a couple yards underwater without coming up for air, they were even more impressed. "Do it again!" they shouted.

Swimming classes are turning out to be the most popular activity at a United Nations program this summer for 182,000 Gazawi children. (The UN is making a big point of calling this "Summer Games" rather than summer camps, because for Palestinian kids, a camp is either as an urban ghetto for refugees or a place where fanatics hit you with a stick.) Sixty thousand children signed up for swim classes, far more than the proram could handle. Between the years of war, crime, fighting, and the general lack of instructors or resources for kids, perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising to me that almost none of them had ever been swimming before. Though Gaza's future, and the future of these children, still looks bleak, at least it's now safe enough at the beach that all they have to worry about is floating.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Gaza City