by W.D. Ehrhart
Readers who have followed my writing in the New Hampshire Gazette will perhaps recall that I have written multiple times in the past few years about my unusual friendship with a young Palestinian woman named Rawand Gawad Abu Ghanem, to whom I was first introduced by way of the scholar Lorrie Goldensohn and the playwright Naomi Wallace. Because Rawand can only text and I can only e-mail, all of our communication has been through Naomi.
I’ve never met Rawand, nor even spoken to her, and probably never will get the chance to do either. But she and her family—a husband and two young children—have become very dear to me, and I worry about them daily.
I have not had any news from Rawand for well over a month, so I recently asked Naomi if she has heard anything. Naomi replied that she’s been working with a Palestinian-American colleague for the past two weeks at the University of Athens, but that she’s been in regular touch with Rawand, who had sent this message to be shared with the Greek students with whom Naomi and her co-writer have been working.
I think Rawand’s letter to Naomi’s students, dated May 25th, 2026, is worth sharing with you:
So hello, it’s me Rawand Abu Ghanem from the beach city Gaza, Palestine.
I am the first surfer girl in Gaza and my father was the pioneer of surfers and his father too (my grandfather) he practiced this sport because he was a fisherman so he taught me and my brothers and sisters how to swim and later how to surf. He taught me on the same sea beside where I live now in a tent. The sea is still my favorite place where the sound of waves can comfort us even now, when the rest of the city has been turned over to ghosts and rubble and suffering.
What I still hope now is to live in peace, to teach my children beautiful things and to feed their characters so they can one day grow up to be students like you. I want to teach my children how to surf. Yamen is six. Mohammed is almost one year old. I am their mother and I cannot guarantee their lives or mine from one minute to the next.
I dream of traveling with my family to complete English literature studies and to complete my life in a home that is not a plastic sheet called a tent. I dream of sleeping without fear, of drinking sweet water, of wearing clean clothes, of sleeping out of the way of starving dogs that enter the tent and frighten us. Dear students, I once had a home where we could listen to the rain and stay dry. Now the insects and rats move across our bodies while we sleep.
Despite everything difficult around us, I still see light moving on the waves of our sea and I look to the sky and the same beautiful moon hangs in the darkness, the same moon that you see in Athens.
This chain of suffering must soon be cut, this genocide must end so that happiness and freedom can wash over our lives like our beloved sea. Inshallah.
With all my love and respect to you.
Rawand from Gaza
The ongoing undeclared war of choice being waged against Iran by this country and Israel, combined with the obscene assaults on decency and democracy perpetrated by the Felon-in-Chief in the Whitewash House have all but driven the genocide in Palestine off the pages and screens of mainstream American media, but the suffering of the Palestinians is still ongoing on a daily basis.
As of a few days ago, 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in the course of operations by Israeli Defense Forces with at least another 173,200 wounded; at least half of the casualties are women and children. Most of the surviving 2,000,000 inhabitants of Gaza have been displaced, many of them multiple times.
Large portions of Gaza are nothing more than piles of rubble, and there are chronic shortages of food and medicine.
Meanwhile, over 1,240 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by the IDF and Israeli “settlers” in the past 33 months, a figure greater than the number of Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7th, 2023.
And Rawand and her family are living beneath plastic sheeting that passes for a “tent.”
And there is no end in sight.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.