Dr. Curt Rhodes

Ten years.  A long time of yearning by my daughter for a baby. Years of medical stuff. Piles of adoption paperwork. Then, out of the blue, a phone call. “Come over to the hospital and meet your new baby” – one day old! And so, we met Natalie Grace on Saturday, June 8th. Wow! 90 minutes prep to welcome someone who will dominate the next 21 years of her parents’ (and grandparents’!) lives!

That 7-pound Natalie person is always on my mind. Of course, I don’t have to feed her, burp her, change her, carry her around at 2am. (Being Grandpa is marvelous, let me tell you!) But she is always there. In the background rhythm of my every day, this little person Natalie is always fizzing with joy and wonder.

Seventeen years. A long time of yearning for safety for babies and mothers in Gaza.  From 2007 until today, Israel blockades everything – all food, medicine, supplies – by land, sea and air. The numbers of people permitted “out” is almost zero. So, in one generation (17 years), the population of that thin slice of 140 square miles of Holy Land has doubled – from 1 million to 2 million. Same space, double the people.  

Babies born when that blockade began are now young adults, aspiring to go to college - learning hi-tech skills, attached to their cell phones, anguished at seeing nothing except the struggle to get through today. Their phones prove to them that there are good life opportunities somewhere else, but for someone else. Why? is the logical question of this generation.

Babies in Gaza today and those who were babies 17 years ago are always there, on my mind.  The background beat in my head throbs through my days. 38,000 Palestinians have died inside that narrow strip of Holy Land, 14,000 of them children. Another 20,000 children are “lost,” mostly presumed dead. And starvation (malnutrition and death) is now at catastrophic levels. Seriously? This is happening in the 21st century, just 100 miles from my front door in Amman, Jordan?

For 40 years my rhythms sync with the heartbeats of those children and youth dispossessed and disinherited in the Middle East. They don’t have a choice about where to be born. That is the wickedness of collective punishment – children, young people, pay the price of collective judgement before they do anything to be judged for. Just for being born in a place, a time, a family.  

I don’t want – none of us want – children to die for any reason. No one of us wants any kind of violence, for whatever reason, to rip them out of our arms. There is no reason good enough for me, for us, to say, “it’s okay for them to die. Let’s look away.”

We need these children, these youth. We need to be their advocates, not their adversaries. We need them to grow and figure out a better world for them and for us. We don’t need their energies to be drained away into bitterness and cynicism about what happened to them as we looked away.

Pray for the end of this death-dealing violence. Act to stop this violence against them as the only option. Every child lost to violence is a child lost to all of us.

Don’t look away. Witness Gaza. Remember, one day they will witness that we could have, should have acted for them. We can make an urgent difference on that ground, with those kids, with your help, together.

Curt

PS Here is an interactive link to compare the size of where you live with the size of Gaza. Awesome. Feel the tiny sliver of space they live in when compared to your space. Try it!  https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20231009-gaza-strip-compare/index.html

Curt pic1
Founder & Chief Vision Officer

Dr. Curt Rhodes

Curt Rhodes has spent close to 40 years working with, and on behalf of, marginalized communities and young people across the Middle East.

As the recipient of the 2014 Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, Dr. Rhodes was recognized by Tufts University for his demonstrated compassion and tenacity in creating a highly effective and determined organization dedicated to the survival and nurturing of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised.

In recognition of his work with marginalized youth in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and in the region, Dr. Rhodes was awarded 2011 Social Entrepreneur of the Year for the Middle East and North Africa by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Dr. Rhodes began his career in the Middle East in the early 1980s, as Assistant Dean in the School of Public Health at the American University of Beirut. During the 1982 invasion of west Beirut, he volunteered in a community-based clinic alongside students and friends, doing around-the-clock triage for wounded and ill civilians. That was when the seed idea for Questscope began to take shape. Living and working with people in great suffering compelled him to find a way that he and others in the Middle East could assist the most vulnerable: participating with the voiceless ones in invisible communities.

In 1988, Questscope was founded with the goal of putting the last, first. From the beginning, Questscope worked closely with local communities, identifying their aspirations and together addressing their greatest needs.