Back in Gaza, I looked for someone who had moved into a new residential area after large tracts of Shati' camp were destroyed by Ariel Sharon as punishment for the 1970 Gaza uprising. A friend in UNRWA suggests I should visit an employee she knows, a working widow, who lives in a low-rent area where many Shati' people moved, Sheikh Radwan. It's an added reason to meet her that 'Umm Faris' returned to Gaza after many years in exile in Lebanon, a violent environment for Palestinian refugees since 1969.

'Umm Faris' is a pleasant-faced woman of brisk appearance. Her home still looks new, built as she tells me in installments, with the help of neighbours. The land was provided by a grant from the Ministry of Social Affairs. She lives alone here with her two sons, both students. Her husband came from another part of the diaspora; she has little contact with his family. Relations with her own Gazan family aren't good. She is somebody who has had to rely on herself to achieve her dream - a home of her own, and independence.

Friends and neighbours figure largely in her story, pointing to the way that, in Arab society and culture, people without family manage to build family-like relationships through which runs help of various kinds, material and moral. A neighbour drops by during the recording session to see if 'Umm Faris' needs anything. He is a builder and helped

provide her with roof beams.

Marriage to a Resistance officer brought travel and suffering. Much of the first part of her story is about sickness caused by childbirth complications. This was in Baghdad, where medical services were not as advanced as in Palestine. Later, in Lebanon, (Sidon,1991), her husband disappears, victim of the dreaded Majlis al-Thawri. Return to Gaza (her birth-place) wasn't easy, since they had no travel documents. She and her children lived for a year in Baddawi camp (Lebanon), helped to survive by neighbours. Eventually they managed to get to Amman, and from there to Gaza, where luckily her birth was registered. Some early training in social work enabled her to find a job.

Though she's back in Gaza now, in a home that is her own in the full meaning of the word, 'Umm Faris' still feels insecure. She asks me not to write her real name. There are things she tells me after asking me to stop the recorder. I know she's worrying about possible gossip in her work-place, and about the future of her sons.

'Umm Faris' begins her story:
"When I first married - I married in Baghdad in 1978, My husband was a member in the ranks of the Revolution. We stayed in Baghdad around five years, and in that time we moved house more than once. My oldest son was born in 1979, by caesarian..."