Mornings in Jenin by Abulhawa| Susan

Author:Abulhawa| Susan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2010-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

Back in Jerusalem, I went to retrieve my bags from the orphanage and to say good-bye to that city and all it had come to mean to me. Reaching into my pocket, I found a sealed envelope and grinned, knowing it was a letter from Huda. I placed it in an old tin box given to me as an Eid present by a charity from one of the rich Gulf States many years earlier. It was scratched and dented and it held my most precious possessions—Baba’s pipe, the chest piece of Mama’s prized thobe, her faded silk scarf, the dice Lamya had guiltily returned, and a stack of letters from Muna Jalayta, accumulated over my four years at the orphanage.

Even though we lived in the same dormitory, Muna and I communicated the goings-on of the orphanage and our secrets through letters. It was a way to conquer the isolation and boredom of our lives. As it turned out, these letters would become the chronicles of times we shared extra food, picked bugs from our meals, and combed lice from each other’s hair. They painted the colors of friendships born of mutual need for survival and kinship. They contained tales of the “white comb,” silly games we invented, and our adventures breaking into the art studio and clinic to steal paints and nursing supplies to give to Layla. In those letters she also wrote often of the boy she loved. His name, ironically, was Osama. I used to joke that I felt pressure to marry someone by that name since both she and Huda, my two best friends, would be married to Osamas.

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