A Day with Diaa’ Al-Haqq
Posted by: John Phoenix
I arrived a few minutes past 11:00. Alex, our driver, her partner Jesus and our interpreter Meda had just contacted me to let me know they were running late. Diaa and his hostess Nora greeted me at the door. They graciously suffered my broken Arabic as we greeted each other and engaged in small talk. My linguistic skills exhausted, we switched to English and I commented on Diaa’s recent skiing trip and how I had seen a video of him barreling down a hill on his third attempt at the sport. “He’s fearless,” I remarked. Nora’s reply was curt, “He’s from Gaza.”
We arrived in Manzanita a few hours later. Diaa was proudly wearing a pair of voice activated Ray Ban’s he had received as a gift and eager to take photos of nature. When I last wrote about Diaa in Dece...










