819: Special Bonus Podcast — Yousef’s Week
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-Hello. -Hi, this is Yusef Hamash. -Yes, it is loud and clear. -Good. Is this still a okay time for you to talk? -Yes. -Okay. -That's a bit crazy outside a lot of crowdness. There's a lot of traffic, especially from the children. Let me find a quiet place. -Okay. -That's close the door. Yes. Earlier this month, one of our producers, Khanna Jaffi-Wald, made this call to Yusef Hamash in Gaza. He works for a humanitarian organization. They know Weijian Refugee Council, the NRC. He's just in his early 30s. He's got two kids, big extended family. Khanna talked to him a few times over the course of one week, really knowing very little about him or his situation at the beginning. And as you'll hear, more and more unfolds. It gets revealed. And it all feels so immediate and particular to these few weeks right now in the war in Gaza that we wanted to bring it to you now. Like it feels like it's about right now. We have other stories I should say about this war in the works, including from inside Israel. So please stay tuned for those. But for today with Yusef, Khanna would talk to him at night, his time. His family was living in the NRC office in Rafa. So he was in the unusual situation in Gaza, where he often did have internet access with solar panels providing power. The first day Khanna talked to him, he had just relocated with his wife and kids to Rafa, where the office was. It's along the border with Egypt. His four sisters and their families were about eight miles away in a town called Han Yunus. So here are those conversations. So talk to me about what did you do today? And today I had to find a place for my extended family, which I found the life of today. I found a place and I built a tent, two tents actually, for because I couldn't find a house to rent or anything. So tomorrow I will move the rest of my family here to Rafa from Han Yunus to these two tents. And today it takes me a while building these tents. Then I had to go to the market buying whatever I can find. What did you find? Today I found, ah, that's a good question. Try to remember, so it sounds vegetable. Actually it was tomato and pepper and I couldn't find potato because there is no potato in all over Gaza and milk for the children.
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