Surya McEwen

No, no, four missions.

They just all didn't get to sail.

Yes.

Is that right?

That's fair.

It's a peculiar space coming back from –

where we've been and like the transition back home and all of the it's confusing all of the feelings that come up being in safety again hugging my mom and my friends but then also being devastated about all of the people who were left behind who are still in Israeli dungeons being tortured and experiencing that violence

um yeah it's confusing it makes sense to feel that way yeah it'd be like a culture shock coming home almost and you'd feel like you were not really here is that how i mean it's also just like physiologically there's like doing these doing these missions it's like months of quite intense energy and being really really focused on on the mission building it from the beginning and doing trainings and

getting prepared and then being at sea and um yeah it's it's a lot coming home

That's right, that's right.

Absolutely, like the political moment and the media landscape has changed so much.

I mean, especially since the fake ceasefire, there's been this sense, which was just after we returned from the last mission.

So there's this feeling among populations like the genocide is ongoing and it's as brutal, even in lots of ways it's more brutal because it's so silenced and because it's like the slow, quiet deaths and suffering that the world doesn't see.

um but you know the bombing's still happening the shooting's still happening and everything's been destroyed so if you destroy all of the infrastructure and people can't uh people can't live people are living in tents in the cold there's no there's no hospitals there's no medicine there's there's like a tiny amount a tiny fragment of the aid

That would be required to feed people and nourish people is coming through and so the situation on the ground is like incredibly desperate and horrific, but nobody really sees it and With the war on Iran and other things that are happening that kind of take people's attention And also the extension of the genocide to southern Lebanon as well Which is just absolutely brutal

it was it was an interesting moment strategically because obviously there's some worry about trying to build enough media attention to add meaning to a mission like this in a moment when it's totally silenced but then on the flip side it's like because it's so censored because nobody knows about it it's like an opportunity to go and bring eyes onto gaza and

and bring the attention back to what's happening on the ground as well.

So it felt like the most important time to do it even though it was a tricky landscape to try to do that work in.

So we gathered in different ports as we do.

I was in Sicily.