‘We’re all imprisoned now – even those who oppress us.’ The testimony of a family in Gaza. My latest in Overland.
Category: Activism (page 1 of 2)
Hello World,
First Giveaway ran well. There was many more entries than I had expected. Congratulations to the winner.
So I’m running yet another giveaway for this short novel.
Enter your email and you’re subscribed to the giveaway! It’s that simple.
You will be given a unique link afterwards. Make sure to share it. Each time you do, you chances of winning increases!
The winner is selected by random choice and is notified by email.
I’ll sign the book and send it to you, where-ever you may be in the world.
If you can’t wait, just go to the store here and get the book now. I offer the cheapest shipping you can find online! (And if you find it cheaper anywhere, please let me know and I’ll give match that price).
There is also a giveaway currently running for Twenty Two Years To Life. It ends in a few days so enter if you haven’t already!
Good luck!
Salaam
Morsi
[giveaway id=887]
Hello World,
🙂
The very first Giveaway here on Living In The Strange went well.
A big congratulations to David Schaafsma who will receive a signed copy of What Is Past Is Dead.
I’m really happy there were so many entries to this Giveaway. I have shifted Giveaways to my own website instead of as before, running them on Goodreads. The now owned by Amazon company, has gone absolutely haywire, charging a ridiculous amount of money to just run the Giveaways.
I use Goodreads and social media to send out the invitation for the Giveaway, also a reminder halfway through. When you receive the ‘event invitation’, please don’t respond. There is no need to.
Just follow the link, either in the text or event description, type in your email of choice and hit enter!
Once you have entered, you will receive a unique URL (link) that you can share. For every other time someone else enters the giveaway – from that link – you will receive an additional entry and your chance of winning increases!
Any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Peace, Salaam in Arabic.
M M Morsi
Hey everyone,
It’s time for the first Giveaway for Twenty Two Years To Life from me and Living In The Strange.
As you might have seen, a secure store has been opened and the plan is to fill that with stories, books and photographs. Giveaways has until recently been done through Goodreads but due to their high fees which further constrict and limits authors who do not have the financial capacity to mass market their work. Goodreads is still a great place to discover authors and connect with other readers but what they’ve done on Giveaways is simply not fair.
So enjoy and make sure to share this giveaway. Each time you do and someone joins the giveaway from your unique link, you chances of winning increases.
The winner is selected absolutely randomly and is notified by email.
The only thing I do is sign the book and send it to you, where-ever you may be in the world.
If you can’t wait or don’t believe in luck, just go to the store here and get the book now. I offer the cheapest shipping you can find online! (And if you find it cheaper anywhere, please let me know and I’ll give you the shipping free).
Good luck!
Salaam
Morsi
[giveaway id=868]
I would like to thank all those out there who support my work. I have had people from all corners of the world write me. Primarily to raise their appreciation for the novel Twenty Two Years To Life. If you have not read it, it is a fictional novel, based on a true story from the last conflict in 2014. It is a story of love and war and what we do when we are bereft of all hope. Some people also ask me to tell a bit about my story. Admittedly, I am terrible at writing my biography. My life has been immersed in circles of change. Which changes do I include in a biography? Change is life so in a way a biography has to be dynamic, although a glance into the past is usually what we can practically get away with.
In mid-May 2002, I went into an Indonesian cyber-café in Banda Aceh and bought the domain www.mindzoom.dk. Six months earlier the name had come to me as I was driving down a main road in Copenhagen, Denmark. The wide use of the Internet as we know it today was still at a relatively infant stage. I bought this name because I wanted to share my photography, poetry and bit of writing with the world. I had entered a path of journalism and photography and it was a perfect platform on which to display my work.
However, the allure of virtual reality did not and has not ever taken over my love for actual reality. I was far too busy exploring to have time to update the website, write code or take care of all the things necessary to build an online presence. What I had instead was patience. Passion to do what I loved doing and not for the sake of ambition or recognition but because I loved it. This drive if you like, fuelled by somewhat alternative ideas (I am trying to be carefully diplomatic here), took me on my journey around the world. If you had asked me ten years ago whether I saw myself living in Perth, Australia, I would have said: ”I have never thought of that happening!” Why would I? But here I am.
Life is indeed change. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing stays the same. Not even our thoughts. To be able to change our thoughts gets harder the older we get, but change it does. Big changes happen when we set our mind to it so to speak, even changes that revolve around our way of thinking.
When I began the website back in 2002, the idea of zooming in on my mind seemed appealing because at that time, the awakening of understanding appears to be continuous. Until we discover that we become older, wiser, grow up and mature into individuals who are wanting to see change. And unconsciously I believe that is the place where we accept change as being life itself.
Mindzoom.dk became a display of images. I would have loved to upload more but the enjoyment of taking the images far outweighed the enjoyment of sharing them with the world. I still did though, as much as time allowed me to. There were images from encounters, professional work and abstracts that I enjoyed. And a lot more. The website also became a showcase of thoughts and poetry and short pieces of writing. As I understood more of the world, and became better at the languages I speak, I could share my story in a better way.
At the end of September 2015 I began livinginthestrange.com. This coincided with my decision to write the stories I saw working in conflict and development zones around the world as fiction. I had had enough of watching stories being forgotten, had had enough of watching the people in them being treated as numbers. I began working as photographer and a journalist (now the fancy word is a photojournalist) because I wanted to make a difference but what I found was that I was treading water.
Living In The Strange is an Egyptian saying. Its short explanation is being in exile because what is not Egypt, is the strange.
In this time I have published four books, two of them part of the series to my son Zaki. The other two books are novels from Gaza, Palestine. I also work more on creating stories that links images with stories. Still in the hope to give light and voice to those, the mainstream media does not find worthwhile reporting about.
The time has come for Mindzoom.dk to end. The website takes its last click on the 30th of November 2017. I no longer live in Denmark. The name that came to me on that dark and rainy autumn day carries a different meaning now.
In the next few months I will change livinginthestrange.com. It will include the option to purchase my work as many of you have been asking for that. It will also be easier for me to update and easier for you to share its content. I love what I do in this life. I love photography, I love writing, and I hope that you will keep supporting me so I can keep doing what I do. Without people purchasing my writing, my photographs, it would not be possible.
Thank you.
Salaam (Peace)
Morsi
I Took Something, Forgive Me
I’m in Jakarta and a young woman walks through the isle, handing out torn over envelopes. She keeps her head down, doesn’t say a word. She waits a while next to driver, hangs out the front door, her hair waving as the bus speeds through the polluted streets and stops with jerking movement for each batch of passengers embarking or disembarking.
The young woman returns through the isle, she collects all the half envelopes again. Some are left on the seat with a coin in them, some are handed back with a note. And some are just handed back empty.
I didn’t ask, I just took it, this picture. It’s one of my favourite pictures, it reminds me what I should never do.
I Took Something, Forgive Me.
UNIMAGINABLE
by Mohammed Massoud Morsi
The confined space in which they were living was a tiny wooden long boat of a sort, 5 feet wide and 20 feet long at the most. At the back a tractor motor or some sort of old recycled engine was mounted, running an immensely long shaft into the murky water. It moved their home against the current but it also served as a generator, providing just enough electricity to run the small television set or the transistor radio when listening to the call for prayer. Mostly the load was a lightbulb, mounted in one of those cheap ceiling fixtures that you can buy at any hardware store, grid aligned so the children wouldn’t burn their fingers and frosted so the light wouldn’t blind their eyes. I used to see people on these boats every day, usually they just blended into the backdrop, either congregated in groups of 4-6 tied up in the middle of the river, gathered around a single television set at the stern of one of the boats – or silently dragging a fishing net along the concrete banks of the promenade, whilst children jumped in and out of the mud brown water of the Mekong river.
It was night when we got on. Tee Yom, sitting on the deck, sized me up, then sized up my companion, removed a plank from beside where she was sitting and started scooping out water from the hollow space underneath. I presume to make up for the extra weight of us boarding the tiny vessel. She smiled a bright smile and I smiled back feeling welcomed. My bicycle, lying flat, was wider than the deck and both myself and Drew, much taller than average, sat down and crossed our legs with our feet reaching over the side. Sonle, the father, a short and skinny man with a dark sun-worn face, pushed the boat away from the muddy bank and started the engine with a home-made string mechanism.
It was indeed a tropical night at its best, stars in a panorama setting, still hot and moist air and a backdrop of shimmering lights in the distance. The main strip alongside the river of Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh was alive at this time of the night. Bars and restaurants filled up with customers, most of them tourists or western foreigners living in the city, expats as they liked to call themselves. A well-known meeting point to socialise and network with other foreigners and affluent Cambodians, was the FCC. A French colonial setting offered 5 dollar cappuccinos and a nauseous sentiment of bourgeois superiority. For more than the average Cambodian earned in a day you could enjoy a mango smoothie whilst looking at the mighty Mekong River coming together with the equally deep and muddy Tonle Sap, flowing slowly all the way past Ho Chi Minh City in neighbouring Vietnam before reaching the South China Sea. Taking in the view, you might also be able to spot the slim longboats in the water, maybe even drift off to imagine the seemingly careless lives fishing, playing and lazing on their floating homes.
Tee Yom had eight year old Hanafi as the eldest, Lina was four and the youngest was Happiny. Nearly 2, she slept soundly in the hammock all the way, only uttering small squeaks when her mother stopped rocking her. Hanafi and I found a curiosity for each other. I would take a picture and hand over the camera, he would then look and almost smile, but eventually just hand the camera back and turn towards his mother – and then smile properly. Hanafi’s teeth were so rotten, in such a state, that he didn’t even want to open his mouth. He was eight and what could have been laughter was restrained to squelches of joy, hidden behind a sense of shame, fed by his peers as Tee Yom gently explained to us.
The crossing was long enough for me and Tee Yom to take a deep look into each other’s eyes and exchange silent heartbeats. In reality I don’t really know what it means, what I just wrote. But that’s what happened, right there and then, and I can’t think of better words to describe it. As we left the boat, I made sure we had a way of getting in touch with them again and I asked Drew to make this a priority, which he honourably committed to. Through the months that followed I would receive several updates.
When we boarded their tiny home, we knew it didn’t smell right. Contrary to common belief, people that don’t have the luxury of a running tap make an extraordinary effort to keep themselves and their homes clean. And when that’s not the case, it’s because their access to clean water is very limited or even non-existing. It was clear that Lina, lying in front of me on the floor was suffering from severe mal-nutrition. Her legs were very skinny and her stomach bloated. Thanks to Drew and the effort of Theany, his Cambodian wife, the family was able to see a doctor. The following are extracts from our correspondence.
“I was just thinking of you this weekend as the fishing family has been finally getting some help. The mother went to the dentist again. The baby spent the weekend at the hospital (as well as the mother), and needs care for some time for malnutrition. My doctor friend said that the liver (or kidneys?) shut down which causes the bloating like what we saw. I will now look for another NGO to take care of the baby. I think she needs an IV drip for a few months since her system can’t handle food quickly. It is really hard for the family to be at the hospital. We bought them cookware and a mosquito net, gave them money for food and will buy them a big bag of rice. Apparently the mom needs to help dad with the fishing. The boy also was treated for an infection in his foot, from a fish bone that was lodged in there. I hope they can get on top of things now. Still lots of work to do.”
I am aware, through my work, that Tee Yom and Sonle and their family is just another story in a world becoming increasingly imbalanced by each day passing. I mean this in a spiritual way. I think it’s clear to most of us that we have collectively lost any sense of direction, that many of us are trying to reach through the deafening noise of greed and selfishness that we have allowed to devour our collective soul.
I return to a life in the West, increasingly deserted of compassion and where people’s notion of ‘freedom’ is abstract. I have no words to explain its lack of realism for the component of life that truly matter. The bloated egos and the emotional emptiness accompanying materialism is causing us to believe in an untenable self-image, where ‘freedom’ lacks the courage of showing, even to ourselves, the sides of us that are unacceptable. We cannot deny the actions that create happiness, and those actions will originate from our own personal sense of happiness, and freedom.
Rumi said:
“Take someone who doesn’t keep score,
who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest,
even in his own personality.
He’s free.”
In meeting Tee Yom and her family, in meeting many others, living under similar or worse conditions, I understood that I wasn’t as free as I wanted to believe I was – and that there are lives, that I simply cannot imagine living. In the silent exchange of heartbeats, in the silent exchange of souls, I have found that the only way for me to be free, to find my state of mind calm in happiness, is to reciprocate the kindness, benevolence and freedom I encounter in the lives I meet. Lives in my everyday life, those shared through my writing and journeys in the time I am alive.