KENT GUSTAVSON :: GAZA CHILD

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For Solo Violin

I spent several years working with children from Palestine and Israel at a camp called Seeds of Peace in the woods of Maine. I also spent 6 months in Jerusalem studying Arabic and the the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1999. I returned to Jerusalem in 2000, and initiated a program in conflict resolution through music called 'Sound Music'. The day that fighting broke out, September 29, 2000, my program was slated to begin. I soon had to leave my home in Bethlehem, and all of the children I was working with behind to return to this country to my safety.

"Gaza Child" is partially my expression of what I saw in my frightened young friends in Palestine.

One girl told me how she had just gone to the funeral of a boy killed in a demonstration in Bethlehem, on whom she had been sweet since elementary school. Another girl was on the floor of her home, calling me as the bullets came through her windows, afraid to move. One boy invited me into his home in Gaza and told me what it was like to have soldiers come into his house and take his brother away. One girl told me she was going out to throw stones with the men. One boy put a note inside his shirt pocket before he was killed that listed his name, lest he be forgotten as a martyr. The same boy rolled up his pant legs so that his mother would not see the dust on his pant legs and know that he had been at a demonstration.

My friend Asel was taken in the fighting, in the first days of the conflict. He ran the wrong way in a demonstration, running towards his friend who had just been shot. His parents were watching from a hilltop (there in the attempt to get his attention so that he would come home) as he was dragged into the woods. He was beaten and shot, and he died at an Israeli checkpoint after waiting for 45 minutes to be let through to his own country's hospital (he was an Arab-Israeli, a citizen of Israel). He died four days after my program, Sound Peace, was scheduled to begin.

This music is for all of these children, and for the children in all of the world, and in us, that are abused, and lose their innocence. I, too, left my childhood behind in Palestine.

Purchase Gaza Child Score and Recording from the Ninety and Nine Records Store