825: Yousef

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2024

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A series of phone calls to a man in Gaza named Yousef Hammash, between early December and now. He talks about what he and his family are experiencing, sometimes as they are experiencing it.

Act One: Over the course of one week in December, Yousef tries to get his sisters to safety, in Rafah. (29 minutes)
Act Two: Yousef is managing a camp of 60 people in Rafah, including his youngest sister, who is 8 months pregnant. Every day there’s talk that Israel will launch a ground assault in Rafah. Yousef and his sister make a plan for her to give birth safely, but it doesn’t go according to plan. And all 60 people in the family are looking to Yousef to tell them where they should go next and how to stay safe. (27 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From W.B. E.C Chicago. This American Life. I'm our glass.
0:05.0	Hello.
0:10.0	Hi, this is Youssef Hamash?
0:13.0	Yes, it is loud and clear.
0:17.0	Good.
0:18.0	Do you, is this still an okay time for you to talk?
0:22.0	Yes. Okay. But it's a bit crazy outside the lots of
0:26.4	crowdness. You know there is a lot of traffic special from the children. Let me find a
0:31.8	quiet place.
0:33.0	Close the door.
0:35.0	Yes.
0:37.0	For months, one of our producers, Rana Jaffi Wald has been talking to Youssef Hymash.
0:41.0	He's in Gaza. Back in December we put out an extra podcast episode, a bonus
0:47.4	mini episode with some of those conversations, but so much has happened since then. We wanted to come back to
0:54.0	you, Seth, and do a full episode. And that is what we have for you today.
0:57.8	It is a series of unusually frank conversations about what he and his family
1:02.1	were experiencing sometimes as they were experiencing it and about the decisions they made with the choices they had.
1:08.0	So what we're going to do is we're going to play you a lot of stuff from December and then what has happened since then.
1:14.0	Youssov is in his early 30s, got to kids and a big extended family.
1:18.0	He works for a humanitarian organization operating in Gaza, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the NRC.
1:25.0	And Kana started talking to Youssef in early December,
1:28.0	really knowing very little about him or his situation at the beginning,
	...

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