My Multi Faith Airport Prayer Room

Returning from a visit to my parents. Thoughts filter through in the departure lounge. My desire for peace is inspired by the sign on the next door.

I have never forgotten a torrential downpour back in the nineties when we lived in the old city centre. The glass rattled to the thunder as I watched the street through slatted wooden shutters from the first floor. A man’s umbrella turned concave under the intense pressure of rain and minutes later I would discover our terrace out the back, ankle deep in water and that was at the shallow end. Water seeped, in no time at all, into the studio. In that storm there was a lot of damage done around the city, a few injuries. I was actually relieved that only one person in a city of 3 million had died.

I always remember it because that day I realised how bad a storm needs to be to bring about one death. The one-person loss became my first, personal, meter-guide to the scale of natural disaster.

So when Hurricane Katrina broke through the dam in the Mississippi basin in 2005, 80% of New Orleans flooded, my mind boggled at the scale of the disaster; over 1800 deaths.

Natural disasters often have an impact that’s off the scale for us to comprehend. Like the 2,500 lives lost in the Afghanistan earthquake in October and 2,900 in Morocco just the month before that with 1,300 houses and 20,000 houses destroyed.

There are unspoken scales of comprehension that struggle in our heads and in government minds alike. The penny drops, sometimes too slowly, then the aid gets sent, to help out. Thank God.

I write God, as a matter of speech. Like I celebrate the beauty of Christmas without religion. Like I felt drawn to the room in the airport on Monday, a Multi-Faith Room, for prayer.

I couldn’t resist the idea of a singular room for all of us. To put our hands together either physically or simply in our mind’s eye, in a moment of calm, to concentrate our joint minds, to hope for better. For peace.

A multi-faith room in an airport, of all places, riddled in security staff and alarms. Once you get passed all those barriers, we find a singular room for faith, ironically in a kind of no-man’s land.

All the different faiths in one room. A spiritual equality. I love that.

Sitting waiting for my plane I read the paper. 3,195 Gazan children dead. (According to Save the Children and no irony spared on the way that sentence reads).

In a silent pufffffff… my ‘disaster indicator’ of a ‘one-person-loss’, self combusts.

I hear some last call for a flight to Paris.

Numb.

My mind topples into free-fall. I can’t begin to g-r-a-s-p the scale of the tragedy. If those are the infant fatalities, what is the figure of all fatalities and the injured?

If the injured have no electricity to charge a phone to ring the emergency services who have no fuel for the ambulance to take them to a hospital that has no anaesthetic or medicine, or electricity or even a roof? Then the scale is…

..bombastic.

Literally. Or ‘unprecedented’ as the international law organisation writes.

But all this is only in three weeks. The first 85 patients crossed over yesterday to Egypt for treatment. On the scale of things, we know that reads practically zero.

So I compare another war that got me in the gut (…don’t they all, though?). In the Ukraine, in 18 months, the United Nations Human Rights Council (the OHCHR) says there have been 130,000 homes destroyed, but in Gaza, in three weeks? 170,000 homes destroyed. I go on to read more children have been killed in Gaza in October than the annual, world total of child fatalities from war (in statistics since 2019).

I feel sick. Numb no longer. Sick.

There are obvious reasons why in Gaza the deaths are higher. They say 80% of refugees in the world, who are forced from their homes ‘because of war’, go to their neighbouring country for safety. They wait it out while they pray they find their home in one piece afterwards. Like over a million Ukrainians waiting in Poland. A total of 18 million people fled Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine combined sheltered (or shelter) ‘next door’.

But in Gaza? Just as Amnesty International wrote in their report on Gaza in 2021, Palestinians cannot go to the neighbour, just like that, for shelter. Gazans were described by the NGO two years ago, as living all squashed together like in a prison cell.

To bomb such an area? My mind jumps to an image of a hand grenade going off in a biscuit tin, or a firework in a glass bottle.

There. I have done it again. I am so shocked by the scale of this war that I go numb.

Silence, my silence, and probably yours, is not complicity, but shock.

I could post a picture of nature and say nothing, but it scares me that it might look like I live in denial. By writing this and letting it out there, I reduce some inner confusion at least for a while.

I also know that the beauty of nature is even more needed as therapy right now.

Denial will also be impossible if this tragedy sparks a new pandemic. If the hospitals can’t sterilise equipment due to the lack of supplies and fuel, then how are morgues supposed to cope without electricity? And is there anywhere that can handle 1100 children’s bodies a week? That’s assuming the staff haven’t crumpled and collapsed into a lake of tears and I don’t know how many adults. I understand the children make up nearly half.

I have this pathetic -in the grand scheme of things- desire to run back to that multifaith room to prove we could do more for humanity under one shared ceiling, as equals. Imagine a multifaith room in every town. If you can do it in an airport, why not everywhere?

Then it dawns on my naïve mind that though every faith is invited, not everybody can get their hand on that door handle. Only people with passports are allowed in this airport lounge. Gazans have passports but it has little power. A Palestinian passport is ranked 186th in the world. Once acquired, it allows travel to only twelve different countries and that will only work if a visa is issued by one of those twelve countries in advance.

There’s no such thing as a spontaneous, romantic weekend getaway for a Palestinian living in Gaza. To celebrate love, Valentines Day. To fly to freedom. Like myself and most of us do in the blink of an eye.

On top of that, people in Gaza are having to drink salt water. Soon many will be too ill to travel. I read how a mother tried to explain to her child that they all had no choice but to drink salty water,

‘There’s no fuel to feed the pump my darling’.

‘Why not mummy?’

She can’t answer. Only her tears speak.

The other reason for saying nothing, which I know many of us share, is because it is all out of our hands.

Powerless.

Malala was also powerless when she spoke out about her right to education in her home country. I’ve only just learned that she had already been awarded the National Pakistan Youth Peace Prize for her writing when she was eleven! It was six years later that she became the youngest person to win the international Nobel Peace Prize.

She convinces me that there is an equal of Malala in every country. There must be a young eleven-year-old-plus, a Jewish woman writing for peace, who might not agree with Netanyahu’s handling of the retaliation for the horrendous terrorist attack by Hamas on the Israeli Jewish community on October 7th.

If security was lower she might be found sitting outside a government building right this minute, or an Embassy somewhere, protesting quietly like Greta did in 2018 when she was horrified by existential threat to her and humanity at large.

And this situation is existential. There are 33,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with practically no medical support. I am waiting to see what date will be chosen by those Pro-Life demonstrators you see every six months or so, on the international news, to protest about the threat to unborn babies.

I am convinced there are some young Jewish voices who have other more peaceful ways of approaching this dire situation. Maybe they have also won peace prizes in Israel or elsewhere.

So where would young voices choose to sit? Outside a Ministry for…Foreign Affairs? To my surprise I read there are almost no Ministries for Peace in the world, except in Nepal, Costa Rica, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, but there are a few National Peace Academies, in Canada, Romania, USA and in Spain.

That’s when I came across the Barcelona International Peace Academy that promotes the culture of peace through dialogue, awareness-raising, and crisis management training. There, only 45% of participants are women and over half of students are over 40, so we should be looking for new leaders for peace regardless of age and gender.

I just get this feeling there is another Jewish Greta Malala and a Palestinian Greta Malala that could help lead world peace.

There is a lot to be said for sensation alone.

My flight is called. Gate 14. A five-minute walk. Two flights of stairs to the plane. I hear people complaining. A young woman with huge false eyelashes (I’ve always wondered how heavy they must feel) and skin carpeted in some smooth, skin-coloured, beige cream, asks the other,

‘How are we supposed to get there with a toddler, a pram and a small suitcase!?’

And I can’t help but think, you pretty, eye-lashed mother,

‘You might have a point there, but if only you knew how lucky you are.’

Lots of love.

Poppies behind fences, by Pipp