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She entered the room quietly. At first glance I thought she was forty. Perhaps a little more. The kind of face one sees on women who have already lived through many winters. I asked her age. She answered softly: “Twenty-six.” For a moment I did not understand the words. Twenty-six. I looked again at her face, as if time had written the wrong number upon it. She was younger than me. And suddenly an uncomfortable thought came to me. If she is younger than I am, and this is her face what must my own face look like? Perhaps I should go home and look in the mirror again. What has this young woman already seen in her short life for time to leave such marks on her face? What burdens has she carried for her voice to sound like the voice of someone who has already lived fifty years? This was not the first time I had noticed such a thing. In the clinic I often try to guess the age of those who sit before me. It has become a quiet habit. I look at the face. I choose a number. Then I ask. In Gaza the numbers rarely match. But there is something else. It happens most often with women. War claims to strike everyone equally. But suffering, it seems, knows how to choose its shoulders. The hands of these women were not meant to spend their days lighting small fires beneath metal pots beside thin tents. They were meant to be held. They were not meant to stand in crowded lines for bread. Bread was meant to be placed before them with kindness. They were not meant to carry whole families upon their backs while the earth trembles beneath them. And yet they do. Women who wake before dawn searching for water. Women who cook beside fragile tent walls while smoke climbs slowly into the sky. Women who quiet their children during bombardments while their own hearts tremble in silence. Women who grow old before their time. When I look at their faces I remember another moment in history. A man was walking toward his execution. Women were weeping in the crowd. He turned to them and said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children.” Luke 23:28 Sometimes, when I sit in the clinic and look at the faces of the women here, I feel that those words have never stopped echoing. They have simply found a new place to live. Today the world calls it Women’s Day. Peace to the women of this earth. And peace, all peace, to the women of Gaza. #WomensDay #WoundedGaza