Sounding Board -- Husein Mashni

When I first started working at the Daily Pilot as an education

reporter, I used to take my guitar to work. I would play during breaks.

It was a great way to relieve deadline stress.

But one day, the guitar was missing. There was a lot of new

construction going on in the building, and the guitar disappeared.

A few months afterward, when I decided to leave the Daily Pilot to

work for a ministry in the Holy Land, my Daily Pilot friends bought me a

new guitar as a going-away gift. It was an answer to a prayer.

As soon as I got here, I started playing regularly at church and home

group meetings. I learned lots of church songs in Arabic and was able to

lead worship in both languages at once.

It wasn’t long before I found an inexpensive Israeli music producer in

Jerusalem with whom I started recording some original music. I took

students from the Jerusalem School, where I used to work, to his studio

and recorded my first CD “3:17,” a reference to John 3:17. It was the

musical equivalent of a family home movie -- awful, but lots of fun to

make.

The second album I recorded with my students, called “Let the Children

Sing,” was better, so much so that some of the songs were played on a

Christian radio station in Bethlehem. One of the songs, “Imla Ardi B’

Salaam” (Fill my land with peace), was played at one radio station in

Jerusalem that broadcasts to the whole Middle East.

At the onset of the current uprising, I wrote a song about 12-year-old

Mohammed Al Durra, who was killed in Gaza in the cross-fire of

Palestinian and Israeli bullets. That song was played for months on one

of the most popular Arabic radio stations in the West Bank and Gaza.

All these songs were written, played and recorded with that same

guitar.

I also added a few verses to a popular church song here, “Salaam,”

which says, “Peace to the people of God in every place.” The verses I

added include the names of cities and villages of the Holy Land, turning

the song into a prayer for peace. I played it with groups of children

backing me up in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Jordan. In Gaza, where I

live now, it was so well-received, I sang it with a group of kids on

television in front of a huge live audience.

The guitar has also been like a passport. Many times, while

approaching an Israeli checkpoint with the guitar, I’ve been asked to

play “Hotel California,” which is popular with the soldiers.

One Israeli soldier at the entrance to Gaza, Erez, actually jammed on

the guitar a little the first time I came to Gaza. Ever since then, I

never had trouble at the Gaza border.

For three years, I’ve carried the guitar around to most of the places

I’ve been to in the Holy Land and beyond.

One time, in Gaza, I forgot the guitar in the trunk of a taxi. I

didn’t know the driver, the make of the car or even the color of the car,

and there are thousands and thousands of taxis in Gaza. About four hours

later, I spoke to one officer who stood in the vicinity of the area where

I got out of the taxi.

Within an hour, the taxi driver came up to that exact officer and

handed him my guitar. The officer delivered the guitar to the Bible

Society, where I now work, that same night.

We seemed inseparable. Until two nights ago.

I was in a Jerusalem suburb. I was planning to move a few boxes that I

had left in Jerusalem, where I used to live, to Gaza. I called a taxi to

meet me at my house but was told that cars couldn’t come up the hill and

that I would have to carry my belongings to the checkpoint, where the car

could meet me.

Eager to get home to Gaza, I started down the hill with my six boxes,

suitcase and guitar.

I was stopped by a group of soldiers. I didn’t understand the Hebrew

but understood their motions to mean, “throw everything down.” I did and

threw my hands way up in the air. They called me over. They searched me

thoroughly and made me sit on a sidewalk about 30 feet down the hill.

Then a large white police van pulled up. The back doors opened and a

yellow, six-wheeled robo-cop came out and headed toward my belongings.

One by one, it picked them up with its robo-arm.

I was unable to see what was happening to my belongings at the top of

the hill, but I had an enjoyable conversation with the soldiers about

religion and politics. They spoke really good Arabic.

I did hear occasional gunshots by the top of the hill, but I didn’t

know what was going on.

After about an hour and a half, they told me I could go see my things.

Everything was in a huge pile in the middle of the street. I didn’t

really care about all the household stuff, but I scanned the dark street

for the guitar. There it was, lying on the side of the street with four

huge bullet holes through the face.

The soldiers gave me a paper and told me I would be compensated for

everything that was destroyed.

I’m not overly sentimental and, compared with the things that people

are losing here every day, a guitar doesn’t even register. But we did

make lots of music and touch a lot of lives together to where I guess

it’s all right to write this epitaph.

* HUSEIN MASHNI is a former Daily Pilot education writer who now lives

in the Gaza Strip as a Christian missionary and writes to his second home

occasionally.