The Egyptian nun runs the largest school in Gaza, where young people learned tolerance. «Today many of them died under the bombs. We stay to help: where else could we go?”
«Every day we mourn the death of many of our students and their relatives. They were young people educated in dialogue, they weren’t fanatics, they were good guys…”. Sister Nabila Saleh, a religious woman of Egyptian origins who has been working in Gaza for 13 years and who, after the violent re-explosion of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, found herself in the middle of hell: under the bombings, is experiencing the most difficult days of her life. incessant, without water or electricity, called to take care of many families who have lost everything and are hostage to terror. «This is our mission: to help those in need; Where else could we go? » she says.
Sister Nabila, of the Rosary Sisters congregation, runs the largest school in Gaza City: 1,250 students, from kindergarten to high school, almost all Muslims, given the small numbers of the Christian community in the tormented enclave Palestinian. Many of them, today, are unfortunately among the thousands of children killed under the bombs. Others are part of the seven hundred people (including over one hundred children) who found refuge, together with the nuns, in the small parish of the Holy Family, with the hope of a minimum of safety, although today in Gaza no place can be said to be safe. The school itself was severely damaged by Israeli bombing.
Local families have known and appreciated Sister Nabila and her sisters since – at the end of the 1990s – the president of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat donated land to them to build a Catholic school: «He esteemed the Rosary Sisters and was convinced that we would was able to contribute to the development of the Strip”, recalls Sister Saleh. In recent years the commitment of the religious women – whose charism is the emancipation of young people, and in particular of girls, starting from education – has been fundamental and, in the asphyxiated and often intolerant climate of Gaza, the school has represented a open and plural context in which students were educated in dialogue. Among the priorities of the nuns, who in recent weeks have received various phone calls of support from Pope Francis himself, is also healing the traumas of a generation that grew up in the midst of conflicts. And which today, tragically, is being decimated by even greater violence. When the bombs stop falling, Sister Nabila and the others will have to start all over again.
WHO IS
Sister Nabila Saleh belongs to the congregation of the Rosary Sisters, the only indigenous one in the Holy Land (founded in 1880 in Jerusalem by the Palestinian religious saint Marie Alphonsine Danil Ghattas). Sister Nabila, born in Egypt 45 years ago, has lived in Gaza City for thirteen years, where she directs the largest school in the Strip. In addition to the educational front, the congregation of Reporteras they are known, is involved in healthcare and charitable work throughout the Arab world, from Beirut to Cairo, from Amman to Kuwait City.