The Gaza Strip is a pit.

To friends and family, that’s how I describe my 1995 visit to Gaza.

Only a few images come to mind when I think about my day trip to that tiny piece of beach-front property sandwiched between Israel and Egypt. I was 21 and a student at the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem when the opportunity to visit a children’s orphanage in Gaza was offered by the school.

You might be thinking, what kind of tour group goes to the Gaza Strip for a day? Actually, it was a bus tour sponsored by World Vision, the humanitarian organization that offers sponsorships to poor children for about a dollar a day. It was an eye-opening experience. Thirteen years later, I still remember some of the sights I saw that day in Gaza, and I’d like to share them with you now.

The first one I think of is a huge gateway banner spanning the roadway near the border inside Gaza. On one end of the light blue structure was a picture of Yasser Arafat. On the other was a newly painted Palestinian flag. Arafat is surely gone, and now perhaps the whole contraption is gone due to recent fighting.

My next memory is of an Israeli military outpost on a small hill somewhere in southern Gaza. It was there to defend the few Jews who were living in southern Gaza at the time. These Jewish settlers have since been moved out. I can still see the fortification’s thick concrete walls bleached white by the sun, surrounded by thick barbed wire. It wasn’t too big a place, maybe 10 feet square. I remember thinking if a thousand unarmed Palestinians wanted to bust their way in, those Israeli guards probably wouldn’t have stood a chance.

My next memory is a panorama of a refugee camp, more specifically a pile of garbage amid the buildings of a camp named Rafah, on the Egyptian border. The pile was topped by a sure-footed, hungry goat. In my mind, that rubbish pile and goat seem to merge with the landscape. The garbage pile, in other words, extended in all directions.

Next, we went to a lab (yes, there was/is a science laboratory in the middle of Gaza) run by World Vision. There, we listened for about a half-hour as hydrogeologists told us about drip irrigation and new ways to efficiently nourish crops in arid climates. I remember being bored and looking out over the adjacent dusty fields. It was rude of me, I know, but now I can remember there are fields in Gaza. (Think about it, you don’t see Gazan fields on the nightly news.)

What you see a lot on the news is Gaza City. I remember slowly driving past a street on which Yasser Arafat lived. It was like Pennsylvania Avenue, Gazan style. It was a little nicer than average but not by much. I also remember being at an intersection of a few streets (similar to Woodford’s Corner in Portland) and looking up at decrepit concrete buildings. Bare bones. Nothing fancy. The buildings looked like skulls with the windows the eye sockets.

Another memory was eating lunch on the beach. The Mediterranean was beautiful. I remember drinking 7-UP out of a reusable green glass bottle. I remember wondering if they bothered to wash the bottles in between uses. No OSHA inspectors in Gaza, I believe.

Last, but not least, I remember listening to the World Vision tour guide as she lectured at the front of the bus. She was a pretty, young woman from Ireland with curly red hair. After all these years, she’s the vision I recall most often, and not because she was pretty. I remember her standing there telling us spoiled American students how much God loved those Palestinian orphans we had visited earlier in the day, an experience I oddly can’t recall. “He loves them as much, if not more, than He loves you,” I can still hear her say. As students, we were stunned. He loves them more than he loves us? No way. That’s not theologically correct. God loves everyone equally, we retorted amongst ourselves, then and even weeks afterward.

Now, years later, I realize our tour guide was right. God must love the helpless, motherless, defenseless and destitute more than he loves the war-makers. No matter which side you blame – Hamas for its 6,000-plus missile attacks and years of suicide bombings, or Israel for its policy of building and perpetuating soul-eroding refugee camps in Gaza – right now they are all war-makers and making life miserable for those trapped with no hope inside Gaza.

John Balentine, of Windham, is a former editor of the Lakes Region Weekly.