Hi,
The longer I am in military reserve duty, the harder it gets to stand the low hygiene we are living in the time we been called up to serve. After staying several day in a location (where you throw your garbage and poop outside of the window), it getting hard to stay in this location.
It is not the only mentally hard to stand it, but the fact I physically suffer from it. When we were in the south, we were sleeping several days in a building which was not completely done and was only concrete and concrete blocks. I found my legs covered with wounds, probably from bites of mosquitos, bedbugs and sand flies.
It might have also may socks and high boots that had too much pressure on my legs and made my skin much more sensitive to all the above or other infections and viruses.
We are also sleeping packed, one on top of another (I found myself sleeping on a kitchen counter once, my brothers in arms slept on the kitchen floor). And we have already sent home several soldiers who go the flu, and I am sure some of them got it here.
My eye suffers from an infection each time I go down south as well. I now learned the easy way to deal with it is to prevent it, to take a paste in the first place, and to cover my eyelash with.
It was Mark Twain who wrote in his book The Innocents Abroad (1867)
about how he saw a kid with black eyes, without any white of the eye ball around the pupil. Only when he got closer did he realize that the kid’s eyes were covered with flies.
That was the Holy Land in the 18th century, and now I am afraid we are back to this level of hygiene in Gaza.
Take Care
Gad
The piles of garbage outside the place we were staying for couple of weeks
All those small little dots on this wooden pallet? those are all flies…