The following is excerpted from and interview by Danny Muller who traveled to Gaza with MECA Director Barbara Lubin in July 2012. Beesan receives a scholarship from one of MECA’s scholarship funds:

My name is Beesan Abu Hameed. I’m a first year student at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, studying English Literature. My real village is Kawbaba.* I live in Rafah in Brazil [neighborhood].

I feel English is my real language because I use it more than Arabic sometimes. I enjoy speaking English and have friends all over the world. It is one of my hobbies, to make new friends.
I volunteer at the Union of Palestinian Women-Rafah [a women and children’s center] because I need to do something with my free time and I need to help people. The biggest challenge the children here face is fear. It is with them all the time. They are afraid at night of Israeli attacks—bombs, airplanes and rockets. It is a big horror. I don’t know how our children can bear it. They have nightmares all the time. When I come here and I’m able to put a smile on a child’s face I feel that I am challenging the Israeli occupation; that I am fighting back.

When I finish school I want to work as a translator. I want to translate novels and I want to translate for people who come to visit Gaza and learn about our lives.
I love to read novels. I like Charles Dickens. Dan Brown (author of “The DaVinci Code”) is my favorite writer. Right now I’m reading “The Lost Temple” and I like it so much.
I also write stories and poems. I have won awards for poetry. I have written a poem about the bad Arab leaders who lie to their people. We need leaders with humanity.

*Kawkaba was a Palestinian village on the southern coastal plane of what is now Israel. In 1948 all the inhabitants were forcibly expelled by Zionist soldiers or fled in terror after a Zionist brigade executed a large number of young men in the neighboring village of Burayr.