817: The Cavalry Is Not Coming
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Saddam Sayalay begins each day with a 6am walk around Cairo. It's the only 30 minutes of his day he gets to himself, before emails and meetings and the chaos of his enormously stressful job begins. His job? Right now he's in charge of getting trucks filled with humanitarian aid into Gaza during the current war. He does this for a big American non-profit called an era that's sent aid into Gaza for decades. But since the war, every day, there are bottlenecks and logistical challenges with all the different governments and agencies and militaries and aid groups involved. I talked to him at the end of a very long day of this, and maybe this is a sign of his diplomatic skills. He seemed so calm, so chill, that I couldn't not ask him about it. Maybe that's just a facade. It is a facade. I had to tell you, I learned the hard way to hold myself together. I think I'll break down after things these are, but now I can't. So I'm keeping it together. I talked to Saddam twice, just before the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and then during the ceasefire, I was interested in talking to him because the stakes of any pause in fighting seemed so high for aid workers like him. The ceasefire so little humanitarian aid was actually making it into Gaza, an average of only 55 trucks a day, according to the UN. Remember at that point, already 1.7 million people in Gaza were displacing their homes. Doctors had been operating without anesthesia, they didn't have painkillers and basic medicines, food and water were in short supply, a pause in fighting would make a chance to finally get stuff through, and I wanted to know how he was preparing and what he hoped would happen. And the answer was about his preparations. His team in Gaza was going around doing what they had basically been doing for weeks, trying to figure out what the greatest needs were, like for instance in the schools and other buildings that are now the main shelters for over a million people in Gaza. These are incredibly overcrowded. People sleeping on the ground, everywhere. Like just to give you a bit of an image, women are sleeping inside the rooms, inside the school shelter, and the men are sleeping in the yard of the school. But also a lot of families are in the streets and it's winter, it's freezing. And that's when our team in Gaza was like we need tents, we need mattresses, we need blankets. And that's what I've been doing here. And immediately we started procurement of tents in Egypt. Like the first thing I did is I went to the sports shop at De Keton, like the sports shop. But I told them like how many tents do you have because they're like they're for camping, they're already there, we can procure immediately. We didn't buy these tents because there was a problem with them. And to explain the problem, I should remind you that even before this war for years now, Israel has controlled nearly everything that went in and out of Gaza, Gaza surrounded by a giant fence. And as part of that, Israel restricted specific certain metals and chemicals and fabrics from
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