What are they thinking? They’re thinking there’s going to be a day when people can buy Coca-Cola. That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that this thing is almost over too.” Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant there in 2016 that uses more water than all of Gaza has available to it each day. And they weren’t just in rich districts - they were everywhere. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. So why is KFC doing that? Why are they subsidizing free delivery? I also saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. I’m a KFC addict and, like any KFC addict, I recognize that stuff is shit and it’s shit when it’s fresh. I mean, you had to pay for the chicken, but the delivery was free. Then I got there and guess what? KFC was delivering chicken through the tunnels for free. When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Now I’m sounding like I’m fucking crazy, but hear me out. The occupation is collapsing right now, so if we were to run a project that was aimed solely at disaster relief - which is what some people think we should be running - then what would we do after the disaster of occupation is over and we’re left with the other disaster: capitalism? What’s really difficult to understand until you spend some time there is that it’s obvious that the occupation’s days are numbered. They’re like, “Oh my God, the occupation has been there for seven million years and it’s going to be there for seven million thousand more years.” I’m guessing you’re in the United States?Īmericans are the most hopeless people on the Israel-Palestine conflict. When I looked around, I realized that what we actually needed wasn’t medical devices. The problem is that, quite literally, the Israelis stop us from receiving equipment, from getting training, from doing anything. The problem in Gaza is not a problem of the place being poor or the people being stupid. The Egyptians were junior partners in the blockade of Gaza by the Israelis, so we in turn were also subject to the whims of the Israelis. All subject to the whims of the Egyptians. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Egyptian tunnels, but there were 1,800 tunnels between Egypt and Gaza at one point. So we started bringing things in through Egypt. When I would train my residents in Gaza, they would say, “Great training, but we don’t have access to any of this stuff.”Īt the time, Egypt was a little bit open. There is a lack of training, but there’s also a lack of access to medical devices. When I went, however, I realized that the problem is actually multi-partite. But I’ve been so indoctrinated with white privilege from living in Canada that when I first started going back my thinking was, “I have this great Canadian education and I’m going to teach them how to be good doctors and then everything will be fine.” They think it’s just about 3D-printing medical devices for Gaza. That can be confusing to some people who aren’t familiar with the project because they look at it and they think it’s about technology. The Glia Project is first and foremost a project about independence. It was picked remarkably quickly and for no good reason.Īhead of this conversation, I was reading about your work and I have some sense of how I might summarize it, but I’m wondering how you frame what you’re doing in the world. We didn’t really care about a name, but we needed one to apply for a medical license and The High-Quality, Low-Cost Open Access Medical Device Project just didn’t seem like the thing to write on that application. One of the engineers was like, “Glia… I like Glia.” Okay, great. It just sounded medical and we all liked it. We sat down with him to talk about his work. Loubani is also distributing the means of producing that hardware - 3D printers - and training Canadian medical students and regular Gazans to print medical equipment themselves. Loubani founded the Glia Project to work on the stethoscope problem and the blockade problem at the same time: in the same way that drug manufacturers copy brand-name drugs and sell them for less as generics, the Glia Project makes generics of medical hardware. Reliable access to more expensive equipment is out of the question. What’s merely irritating in Ontario presents a more serious barrier to care in Gaza, where Loubani has been taking regular trips since 2011 and where the Israeli and Egyptian blockade ensures that he rarely has access to basic medical equipment like gauze and plastic gloves when he’s there. The Palestinian-Canadian doctor is an emergency room physician and professor based in London, Ontario, where he has set up a factory in his basement to print more affordable stethoscopes. Tarek Loubani thinks it’s fucked up that doctors and nurses have to pay $200 for a stethoscope that can be 3D-printed for $3.
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