Running the marathon — in Gaza!

Bob Mayo There was a time when running a marathon was considered a sufficient feat for people to be willing to contribute to whatever charity was the beneficiary. Since then a proliferation of marathons and donor fatigue among friends has led to people being less impressed by the idea of someone running 26 miles. I ran a marathon in Luton where we had to run twice round the same route to make up the 26 miles and no one had thought to close the roads to the traffic and so we ended up running down the hard shoulder of a busy main road. Even the London marathon has become a leisure activity rather than a test of endurance.

There is a need for us marathon runners to up our game and I have done just this and met with a resurgence of interest from people when I tell them that I am going to run in the Gaza marathon on 10 April. It has been a strange experience running in the snow to prepare for a marathon in the desert but one worth doing to highlight the ongoing “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.

Places always have stories attached to them according to what has happened there. With churches or schools this is evidently so. With communities the stories are multiple and less obvious. In Gaza the story of what is happening is evident. The lives of the children in Gaza are overwhelmingly characterized by ‘conflict, poverty and despair’.

The United Nations-organized marathon is a statement of intent. It is a message that Gaza can be like any capital city in the world and organize its own international event. It will create a new narrative for the area, not shaped by the fact of Israeli occupation. One thousand children will run the route of the marathon in 1 km sections and create an occasion for friendship, fun and solidarity, all things that we can take for granted but they will know only too rarely.

The marathon will raise awareness of the dire situation in Gaza but it will also create a context for meaningful conversation and conflict resolution. Herein lies the work of Amos Tr ust, whose mission statement is to ‘nurture local responses to situations of injustice’. The Amos Tr ust is the marriage mediation course of the Middle East. Instead of getting couples to talk to each other, they create a dialogue between Palestinians and Jews and take the pressure out of a volatile situation before it becomes unbearably so.

In a stroke of genius Amos Tr ust introduced a Street Child World Cup to run in parallel with the real thing. A tournament took place for the first time in South Africa (2010) and is now preparing for Brazil (2014). The raison d’être of Amos Tr ust is that it is not so much money that people need to rectify their situations as cohesion and mutual respect with those different to themselves. “Love your neighbour as yourself,” (Mark 12:31) takes on a different timbre when it is solving social and political problems in its wake.

The Amos Trust has recognized what Vaclav Havel called the ‘power of the powerless’. In his famous essay, written in Czechoslovakia at the height of Communism, Havel argued that young people should be called ‘students’ rather than ‘dissidents’. Calling young people ‘ dissidents’ made communism the norm and young people the outsiders; calling young people ‘students’ made them the arbiters of their own destiny. In the Middle East the parallel is between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The Israelis have the political power but that does not make the Palestinians ‘insurgents’. They are people with a story of their own, that has not simply been dictated to them by their powerful neighbour. It is this story of which the marathon will become a part.

The raw human intelligence of Chris Rose, the Director of Amos Tr ust, will take the idea so far but the real power lies in its simplicity – it is our story rather than the story of what is done to us that has the real power. We cannot choose what happens to us but we can choose how we experience it. This is as true for us in England as it is for those living in Gaza. The London Diocese think highly enough of Amos Tr ust to make it the subject of their Lent appeal. A few extra pennies

would not go amiss Log onto http://www.justgiving.com/Bob-Mayo-Gaza

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