Reading stories like this it’s not hard to point to aspects of life for women and girls that reflect certain shared types of experiences. We are miles apart and yet… there is still the anxiety about bodies changing in adolescence, the prying eyes of men, the rebellion against controlling parents. And yet, and yet… we can’t forget that for the women in Sheikha Helawy’s stories all this happens against the backdrop of surviving against the odds as Bedouin people in Israeli occupied Palestine. The women in these stories are vibrantly, vitally alive…unique, individual, assertive of their own identities, they also carry the memories of others, of the village that they have lost, the huge oak tree, the football field, the tyre swing. They have their secrets also and rich lives lived in ways you might not guess.