A Kilo of Flour

My father called from the market to say he needed my help. It was the end of February. Tensions between Israel and Iran were escalating and prices in Gaza were rising rapidly. I rushed to join my father. My friend Ahmad, one of our neighbours in the camp, came with me. He didn’t have any money but he’d borrowed some from a friend to buy a bag of flour. Like all of us he was afraid of what might happen if the crossings were closed. We found my father at a vegetable stall. The price of tomatoes had tripled in a day.

Later, I went to sit with some friends in their tent and charged my phone using their solar panel. Everyone talked about their attempts to secure whatever they could, afraid of another famine, asking one another how many bags of flour we all had. I told them we had two bags, enough for our family. ‘Do you remember,’ someone asked, ‘during the famine, when our whole life revolved around a bag of flour and some pasta?’

Last summer, I received my first payment from an American magazine for documenting what we were going through. It was $150, though after transfer fees were deducted I got $135. It was near the end of the month, and my father, who is employed by the Palestinian Authority, only gets paid every fifty days.

I went to a cash broker to convert the digital currency into money that I could spend. The commission was nearly 40 per cent. I came away with less than $84 in cash. We were living through the hardest days of war and famine, down to our last bag of flour and some lentil soup. The air in our small tent felt heavy, as if hunger were sitting with us.

Converting my $150 payment into ready money had already reduced it nearly by half, but on my way to the market I imagined all the food I could buy for my family with the $84 I had in my pocket. When I got there, the market was almost empty. The cheapest flour I could find was $55 per kilo. I couldn’t refuse. My family was starving. I had to buy whatever I could.

I bought one kilo of flour and went back to the tent. No one said a word, but their eyes were thanking me and apologising at the same time. We measured out that kilo as if we were dividing our lives into days.