Deir el-Balah, Gaza, Palestine – In a displacement camp, a woman stands outside a tent, hanging laundry on a line. Rawan Badr’s face is tired as she places each piece of clothing carefully.
A movement makes her look up, it’s her six-year-old daughter, Massa. Massa is a cheerful little girl, busying herself with play and making an energetic commentary on everything.
Her mother says she also loved dressing up before the war, the bigger and more colourful the dresses, the happier she was showing them off to her friends.
‘I lie. We won’t return’
The state of the clothing on Badr’s clothesline is wretched – faded, stretched, patched and frayed pants and shirts lie limply beside each other.
The 34-year-old and her family – 38-year-old husband, Ahmed, and their children, 11-year-old Yara, eight-year-old Mohammed, Massa and three-year-old Khaled – were displaced from Gaza City in October last year.
Badr grabbed only a few items when they left, assuming they would be able to come home soon. Several displacements later, Badr is near despair.
“I left everything behind,” she says. Now her children’s clothes are falling apart as a result of being worn for days on end and being washed on the other days.
“Sometimes”, Badr says, “Massa asks me about her clothes. She remembers every piece. She asks about her red Eid dress. She asks about her pyjamas that she loves. I don’t know how to answer.
“Every day, I tell her we’ll go home ‘tomorrow’, but I lie. We won’t return.” Badr stops talking to check the food she has on an open fire.
Like parents everywhere, when Badr has money to spare, she tries to buy things for her children.
But in Gaza, her choices are limited to worn-out used clothes that are usually the wrong size because there’s nothing else available.
Then she has to take them to the market, where a tailor at one of the makeshift stalls can alter them a bit to fit.
At home, when things tear or get worn out, she does her best to mend them herself using a needle and thread she keeps in a tin.
When she was forced to buy a pair of shoes for Massa one day – for about $40 – the family could not afford to buy food for a week.
Between necessity and a little joy
Two of the busiest craftsmen in Gaza today are tailors who do alterations and mending and “eskafis” who repair shoes. Both can be seen on the sidewalks in the Deir el-Balah market in central Gaza.
The market is full of displaced, tired people who wander around. Some of them are there looking for food they can afford. Others hunt for other essentials.
A lot of them can only look because they do not have any money to buy anything.
On a street corner, Raed Barbakh, 27, has set up a stall and is mending a small pair of trousers that look like they are for a six-year-old as a man and a woman stand in front of him, waiting to take the trousers home.
Barbakh himself is displaced, having come to Deir el-Balah with his most essential possession: his sewing machine.
“I work from 7am to 7pm,” he says. “There are so many customers, their clothes constantly torn or needing to be altered.
“For the first time in 10 years of being a tailor, I hate my job. A few days ago, a man displaced from Gaza City came to me with one of his shirts and asked me to turn it into two shirts for a three-year-old child.”
The man, Barbakh says, was willing to sacrifice one of his few pieces of clothing to make his toddler son happy. With no job, that displaced man is not likely to have money to buy another shirt anytime soon, he adds.
“Every day is full of people coming to get clothes repaired. There aren’t any new clothes to be bought. It’s all old, worn clothes that need repair or alteration.
“I used to make clothes from scratch, cut from beautiful new fabric,” Barbakh sighs.
‘Exhausted with finding solutions for the children’
Next to Barbakh on the sidewalk is a portable cobbler’s stand where Saeed Hassan, 40, sits surrounded by shoes people have brought for him to mend.
He holds a shoe, carefully examining it to see where it can be mended.
His hammer and nails lie next to a bag that looks big enough to fit all his equipment in case he wants to change work locations.
Hassan is from Deir el-Balah and works mainly in the market although he sometimes roams among the displacement camps if things are quiet in the market.
Sometimes, he says, people bring him shoes that “cannot be repaired. But they ask me to try to fix them any way I can. So I’ll end up adding bits and pieces of material to try to cover any holes, but that’s not easy at all.”
One day, a man came to Hassan with a couple of pieces of foam and asked him to turn them into shoes for his children.
“I can’t do that!” Hassan chuckles. “Making shoes isn’t easy, and it needs its own tools. Also, a foam shoe won’t last long. Look at the streets. Our destroyed streets can destroy iron.
“I’ve never seen things as bad as they are now. People are exhausted by how intense it is simply to find solutions for the children.”
