Tears for Tarshiha

Tears for Tarshiha 

by Olfat Mahmoud (Author), Helen McCue (Author), Dani Cooper (Author)

Olfat Mahmoud's confronting autobiography asks when the world will deliver on its promise and allow her people to return home to Palestine.

Olfat Mahmoud is a stateless Palestinian refugee. Born in a refugee camp in Lebanon, she is a descendant of the Christian and Muslim people who were forced from their homeland at gunpoint by the Israeli military in the 1948's Nakba, 'Catastrophe', and who fled Palestine in the period leading up to - and after - the subsequent founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

Tears for Tarshiha follows Olfat's career - as a registered nurse, the director of an international NGO, an internationally recognised peace activist, and most recently, the recipient of a doctorate - amid the death and destruction of Lebanon's many conflicts; she chronicles the Palestinian people's remarkable capacity for love and bravery in the most extreme conditions. Olfat's extraordinary story is emblematic of the Palestinian plight, illustrating their continued survival and determination that has become an inconvenience to the international community. 

About the Author

Olfat Mahmoud was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Olfat started her career as a nurse, then became a nurse educator, later joining the Faculty of Human Sciences at Beirut Arab University, earning a PhD in Psychology. She is currently an instructor at the university and the General Director of the Palestinian NGO 'Women's Humanitarian Organisation'. She also works tirelessly at both a local and international level as an activist for Palestinian and women's rights.

Note: Sadly, Dr Olfat Mahmoud died this year (2023). She was director of the Palestinian Women’s Humanitarian Organization in Beirut, one of MECA partners in the region.

Helen McCue is best known as a co-founder of Rural Australians for Refugees (2001). A trained nurse educator she worked with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Middle East in 1981, was then seconded to the United Nations Relief and Works Organisation (UNRWA) in Lebanon, and subsequently worked as a volunteer in refugee camps in Beirut 1982-83. In 1984 she co-founded the trade union aid body Australian People for Health Education and Development Abroad (APHEDA), and was its first Executive Director and regional adviser in South Africa and the Middle East until early 1994. She founded the Women Refugee Education Network (1996) and the Wingecarribee Community Foundation (2001), and was involved in the establishment of Wingecarribee Reconciliation Group (1997).

Dani Cooper has worked as a senior journalist on national newspapers in the UK, Ireland and Australia, including as Foreign News Editor at The Australian. For the past decade she has worked as a freelance science journalist, editor and writer. She has previously written Livelihoods and Liberation Struggles - the history of the ACTU's aid agency, APHEDA-Union Aid Abroad.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wild Dingo Press, 2018
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 218 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0648066361