Samira Hamdan

Samira Hamdan shows up to do her shopping at the Gaza Safe Agriculture Society Farm in Beit Hanoun while we are interviewing the farmers. She jokes and laughs with them while she selects her vegetables, and her kids run off to play with theirs: She is clearly a regular client. We ask her why she shops at the farm, and she explains that she had started to notice lots of people getting sick for no reason and wondered why. She herself survived breast cancer after a mastectomy, and when two of her kids fell terribly ill to watermelon poisoning—a very common problem in Gaza—she decided something was not right. She asked around and came across the organic farm, not far from her home. “I love this place,” she says, as her kids romp among piles of pumpkins. “We eat these vegetables and we know what is in them, we know they are good for us, not like others.”