I'm Haya from Gaza , from a family of 8 people: my parents, two sons, and four daughters (two of them suffer from allergies).
Dear Humanity,
I'm Haya from Gaza , from a family of 8 people: my… Ahmed Alshawish needs your support for Emergency: Help Evacuate My Fa
I've witnessed the evidence of the tragedy that has struck our lives in Gaza, where my family and I have survived amidst numerous previous wars. But today, we face the most dangerous and fierce battle in the current war. The urgent need intensifies for us, as we have nothing left and are unable to secure our basic needs such as food, water, and safe shelter.
Here is our story - On October 7th, our lives changed forever, my family and I evacuated from northern Gaza to southern Gaza, hoping to return soon, but it wasn't meant to be. Our home was surrounded, burned, and then completely destroyed, Our home, once a fortress of hope, now lay in ruins, a stark reminder of our shattered dreams.
The night before we left from the north to the south was terrifying. Shelling sounds were everywhere, making a loud noise that felt like it went through our souls. Every explosions shook the ground like earthquakes, sending shockwaves of fear through our trembling bodies. filling us with fear. The air smelled of destruction and blood, making it hard to breathe. When dawn came, we saw the devastation around us, realizing our home was now a symbol of loss and despair.
We ran into the streets and with each step we took into the unknown streets, we felt as if we were plunging deeper into the abyss of our shattered existence, leaving behind everything we own in our home: Clothes, important official documents, the car, and literally it's almost everything - the enormity of our loss weighed heavily upon us.
Our home it was where we found hope, safety, and made precious memories. Losing it felt like losing years of our lives, leaving us adrift amidst the wreckage of our shattered existence.
A brief video depicting the devastation that struck our home and our entire neighborhood in Gaza.
Desperate Plea: Escaping Gaza's Allergy Nightmare
I, Haya, suffer from severe allergy to penicillin-derived medications, and my sister, Amal, also suffers from severe allergies to medications from my family such as Paracetamol and Ibuprofen.
These allergies create a deep sense of fear and anxiety for us, as we live in a constant state of tension and fear of anything that may require a visit to the hospital. We fear being given inappropriate medications due to the unavailability of suitable treatments in Gaza because of war or lack of awareness and not informing the doctor of our allergies, which could lead to serious consequences threatening our lives.
MY Father Income
Our dreams are heading towards oblivion in the labyrinth of an uncertain future
My story, along with my siblings, represents a united team of four individuals, three of whom are skilled programmers and one graphic designer. We work as freelancers in the world of freelancing.
As for my younger sister, she is a student studying at the College of Architecture. She has always carried a big dream in her heart, a dream of being part of changing Gaza, of making it more beautiful and better. She looked forward to the day when she would receive her degree and start building this dream. But the beginning of the war changed everything. The destruction of infrastructure and universities cast shadows of despair over her dreams.
When I think of my brother in Belgium, I can't help but feel deep sadness. He has been suffering from unbearable anxiety and insomnia since the outbreak of the war. Sleep eludes him at night, and his physical and mental health collapses under the weight of these heavy burdens, negatively affecting his performance at work. Problems and challenges pile up in front of him without the slightest opportunity for rest.
We all feel psychological pressure and extreme anxiety. The war hasn't been limited to external attacks but has deeply infiltrated our daily lives. We search among the rubble for a little safety and the basic resources for survival. Every day comes with a new challenge that we must overcome.
As we sway amidst the rubble of shattered dreams, our souls wrestle and our hearts beat strongly challenging the ravages of war.
Our parents earnestly seek a way to rescue us from this hell, feeling the heavy responsibility for every moment we spend under the shadows of fear and destruction. They dream of a safe place where they can build for us a better future, filled with security and hope, for we deserve life in all its meanings of comfort and peace.
Perhaps this fundraising campaign represents a light in the midst of darkness, it is indeed the only hope we cling to firmly.
I appeal to the world as a whole to hear my cry and the mournful cry of my family in Gaza. We need the helping hand that reaches out to wipe our tears and build a bridge to safety.
Your donation is not just a donation; it's an opportunity to rebuild life and brighten a better tomorrow. Be part of our hopeful story, for we need your hand to start anew.
The purpose of the fundraising campaign
The goal of this fundraising campaign is to rescue my family - my parents, my siblings, and me - through the Rafah Crossing to Egypt, which currently requires $5000 per person. This campaign is our only chance to stay alive, and I humbly request your assistance at this critical time. I will provide you with a comprehensive breakdown of the expenses, committing to transparency and clarity.
Dear Humanity,
I'm Haya from Gaza , from a family of 8 people: my… Ahmed Alshawish needs your support for Emergency: Help Evacuate My Fa
All of our important links are here https://linktr.ee/hayanahed
Verified by :
⭐️ operation olive branch, number 26 on their spreadsheet. (On Master list)
⭐️ Project watermelon,line 249 on their spreadsheet. Or you could see it as number 212 here is the photo for more clear proof
so grateful to be working with these folks, so grateful for my beloved community.
tired, can't sleep because of my big feelings for B and anticipation. and because every day feels like christmas when i get to use it for things that i truly believe in and care about instead of my stupid fucking job. tired because i'm on week 3 of chronic sleep deprivation (talking 4 hours a night help). also having trouble eating. so that explains the wired part too.
going to teach a class on long covid in february!! so excited. to be teaching again. to be taking the next step towards realizing my herbalist dream. to be shining, to be radiant, to be seen and heard.
black cohosh, snake medicine for transforming, shedding old identities and fears like a skin grown too small.
just wrapped up my third week of being unemployed. i thought i was going to have so much time to study herbalism and long covid, write, and work out, but all my time has been spent prepping for this action and in community care. which is good, no complaints.
starting to feel like i don't want to leave my city, even though herbalism school is only 1.5 hours away. it's actually really hard for me when i go a day without seeing my friends. i know at herbalism school i'll have the plants, but i need my friends. i need a hug from b every day. i don't want to leave moon home.
i am scared about having to find housing when i come back, ugh.
but if i don't go to herbalism school, i don't know how i'm supposed to get any closer to becoming self-employed and an herbalist. this is increasingly important, being able to shape my work, as new viruses like the bird flu, emerge.
ay. i don't want to work. i want my labor to be caring for my community and the earth and making art. but i've also been spending way more than i budgeted so i'm going to have to find some kind of part-time gig, but i'll deal with that in december.
i just want to enjoy these months. i just want to have s-x and spend lazy days in bed before another full-fledged pandemic.
from alice sparkly kat's november 2024 horoscope for libra:
"November is about revitalizing your bones. I’m talking about your actual bones. Make some bone broth. Drink it. Get out the pressure cooker if you have one...In November, Venus moves into a sign where it can relax for the first time since fall.
Take it easy. Rest a bit. Let your whole body relax not just by laying down but by taking in good nutrition. Eat well and eat a good amount. Make honeyed teas and enjoy some soothing fats. Massage yourself or ask for one from a lover. Ask them to touch you bone deep, to touch you in a way that you can feel in your bones. You know what I mean.
November is for pleasure. Have a good time with good people. Enjoy yourself."
i got a slow cooker for $8 off nextdoor last night and 2lbs of beef bones from the butcher, who, while at least a decade older than me, i felt a glint of attraction to. he went into the back to find me bones and then cut them lengthwise and crosswise so i could get the marrow out more easily.
the bones and some nourishing herbs are in the slow cooker now. rosemary oil is in my hair. every night i put jojoba oil and tallow on my face. i have been doing yoga 3-4x a week and will start strength training soon. it feels so good to breathe deep, and slow, and steady. i have not had much appetite.
i am reading sacred pleasure by riann eisler and softmoon rising's substack on desire, pluto, and eros. like me, she is a scorpio rising with pluto in her first house. i don't know if i believe in astrology, but i believe in desire, i believe it is the engine the world runs on, i want to tap into mine and embrace it, shed shame like an old skin grown too tight.
last thursday, b told me to put my feet up against his when we were sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, in t's room, the three of us stoned on my weed and herb blend. t watched from his bed as b grabbed my hands, pulled me forward into a deep stretch. i wanted to moan, i wanted to pull on top of me. before that, he brought me a cup of water while i waited in the car for them to get tacos for me. he brought me a foam roller when he saw me stretching. he helped me do pull ups the night before. i love the way he looks at me.
i am tired. i am caring for everyone. it is good to care, i want my whole life's labor to be care for others and the earth, but i am ready to be cared for too. i am ready for a bone deep massage from b. i am ready to be seen as and for who i am and loved. i am ready to dissolve into pleasure.
i forget i'm attractive. i forget who i am, or don't believe it. sometimes, often, i feel so much younger than i am because i am still trying to make sense of the world (which is good, i never want to stop trying to understand what is around me) and because i am still tripping over the knots of things i wish i had been able to heal already.
from the lebanese perspective at least it feels like lebanon and the diaspora + surrounding countries have been standing on the edge of a cliff waiting for this moment to happen for months, just wondering when. the wondering for everyone is a form of torture in itself. terrified of all-out war.
this may surprise some of y’all non-arabs but we don’t actually love war and blowing each other up isn’t something arabs “just do,” it’s not normal. we’re not used to it and we never will be because it’s not fucking normal.
when i was younger, i did not realize that i was beautiful because i did not feel like anyone treated me like i was beautiful. people didn't tell me how pretty i was, men didn't swarm to me like flies on honey.
now i'm older and i look back at photos of myself from even as recent as 2016 and think "wow, i was so pretty."
i'm probably still pretty, but people don't treat me like i am, so i continue to think i must not be.
+
but i also have to wonder if people don't treat me like i'm pretty because i don't act like i'm pretty, thanks to the conditioning of being an awkward middle and higher schooler, then a college student bound in semi-fundamentalist christianity, and now a woman at odds with beauty culture.
if i'm honest, men don't treat me like i'm pretty because i scare them. and i love that.
these days, men can feel that i don't need them. that i don't give a shit what they think of me. and what is less attractive than a pretty woman you can't manipulate?
i was going back in time, circling back like a hawk, narrowing in, descending to, a place i loved. a time i loved. when the light was beautiful like it is in october, in that beautiful way where it’s caressing the earth as the earth slides further from it. i was going back in time, time was folding back on itself. i was going back in time, but it wouldn’t be the same. it was, i realized, like weaving. the warp would wind back up in the front of the weft again, and in the back of the weft again, but it would be slightly different each time. lower down each time, closer to the ground, or higher up, closer to the sky. oh i loved how the sky looked in the place i was going back to, the place i was folding time to get back to. was i folding time, or was time folding me?
how i'm feeling about potentially moving back to the east coast, my home state, but farther north, for two years, to study herbalism:
scared that i won't come back to this place, these mountains and my river, because it is expensive here
grief at leaving the sierras and my favorite river
grief at leaving when my whole community has been decimated here and further south
grief at a chapter in my life coming to a close, and so many parts of permanently closing -- i will never go back to kaliedoscope home, i have lost so many friendships that were doorways to specific spaces
afraid i'm pulling a geographic and hoping things will be better there
scared about community. i don't think i want to stay there, but i want community.
tired at the thought of making friends in one place for 2 years only to leave again and have to start over
scared that no one there will take covid seriously and i'll continue to be really isolated and it's even harder to hang out outside in the winter
scared that i won't be able to have this career either
worried i'm making a stupid decision again, and that i'll be on to some other crazy thing in another few years, even closer to 40
scared that no one there will be organizing or doing liberatory work
relieved that no one there might be organizing or doing liberatory work (i'm so tired, it doesn't seem to be working, i want more time and space)
guilty about wanting a break from organizing
guilty/scared that i am just running away
anxious about working in a clinic where people will be sick and i'll be exposed to covid and will probably be the only person masking
scared about ticks, getting lyme disease again, and generally feeling unsafe in nature in a way i do not feel here (there are ticks here too but way fewer)
excited about fall and seasons
excited about lakes i can swim in
excited about returning to a smaller landscape, even though i love the bigness here
excited about studying with this teacher, he reminds me of my italian uncles, i feel like i can hear the coffee and cigarettes in his voice and i love how direct and straightforward he is
excited about doing hands-on clinical work
excited to be 4 hours from some of my beloveds
excited to be able to visit Sr. HM
grief that nun farm does not exist anymore
excited for what i hope will be cheaper rent
anxious about moving my possessions across the country (it's expensive) -- what about my houseplants?
excited to be on the road again (it will be 10 years since my road trip)
excited to be working with people and plants and the land again
concerned i'm only into this because i can't figure out another way to escape this terrible job that i need to stay at to save money since i won't make much money for the next 2 years
scared about not making much money for the next 2 years and then starting a business .. this is 20s shit, not late 30s shit
like i'm a failure, i couldn't make it work here, why not?
2011: occupy, brooklyn apt, prepare for excommunication
2012: life with f in woodhaven. stop painting, start going to farmer's market
2013: mardi gras with r, nun farm, lyme disease, herbalism
2014: CT farm + e love affair
2015: on the road, sweetness with ml on lake michigan, black hills, wenatchees, olympic wilderness coast, farm in oregon
2016: on the road year two (sierras, mike, kelsey, SLO)
2017: SLO, kaleidoscope home (tortured love with c), molly
2018: c heartbreak, journalism, lonely in the town, working at TJs, JMT
2019: substitute teaching, journalism, socialists
2020: pandemic, zoom school, union organizing, political awakening part 2 (thx to DNC fucking over bernie, reading poor people's movements and the george floyd uprising), give up on journalism at outlets collapse and realize i want to write finely crafted things that take time
2021: 8th grade english teacher, deepest love in the room
2022: quit, start to get serious about writing, writing class, attempt to enter "villain era," slumlord cottage, bardo time, abusive relationship with JP, false sweetness with M, moon ritual on abandoned hill
2023: anvil season, moon studio abundance course, crazy love with S, non-profit joke job, moon home, moon hikes, adult corporate job (monitor misery), genocide begins, start to get serious about herbalism
2024: friendship with S immolates, deep isolation (lose so much of community over genocide & covid), one year of celibacy. inanna and paradox as guiding, keeping me alive. never enough time, overwhelmed, organizing.
When my mother told me she wished
she had gotten a divorce before I was
born, I could tell from her tone
that this was different from all the times
she’d look at me and ask God,
like I was God, why
he had punished her with me.
It wasn’t about trying to make me
wish I was a better child, just that I was not
a child anymore and she felt
she had to warn me not to repeat her life
but continue it and perhaps
by continuing it, set it right.
Once she made me kneel
facing the wall and stretch my arms
as high as they would go,
and watched my little back tremble
until I could hold my arms no longer.
When she asked me what I’d learned
I remember I wanted to scream
I hate you but knew somehow
it would hurt her more if I screamed
I hate myself, I hate myself,
so I did, over and over, I knew
when you watch a person you love
collapse into themselves you want nothing
more than to run into the boxing ring, the battleground
of them, take all the blows they deal,
all the shots they fire into the enemy
of their own being. If I could I would
without a second thought unravel the knot
of my mother’s heart into something
like sense, and if it’s true what they say
about how when you have a child
your heart begins to live outside your body
I would undo my life and throw it to her
like a rope, like I were a climber at the top
of the mountain and she’d left something
up there before making her way down and needed
to go back for it one more time. If I saw
my own heart, helpless and unknowing
creature, living outside me, I would also
want to tell it to kneel against the wall
and raise its arms until it could account
for what it had made of my life.
In a note she left in my bag
when I went to sleepaway camp
she said to be my mother
was the greatest joy of her life
and I knew, even at ten, there were greater joys
she had wanted, they lived in her dreams
and disappeared when she woke
to make my breakfast each morning,
and I wanted so badly then
to be those dreams, to disappear.
I guess it depends on whether they're acting like spambots. If you're mass-sending asks to people you don't know or glomming onto the comments of an unrelated post claiming to be a person in need, then that's spambot activity.
I've seen reblogged donation posts but I've also seen ask and comment spam. One is fine, the other is not.
#that said I have NO idea what real people are doing vs actual spambots
#I have no idea what tumblrites are doing and whether they're going after posts or simply defending themselves from spam
#if I get an ask or a comment on my post from someone I don't know asking for donations out of the blue then I report spam and block
#if I check a blog to verify and it's nothing but asking for donations?? I have no way to know that's a real person and not a scam#there is definitely some nuance here and no one is wrong or at fault for blocking spam on their blog
Sorry if you weren't looking for a response but I take offense to every suggestion that Wafaa and any of the Palestinians asking for help are "scams" and I think its really shitty that you just block people without knowing if they're real or not.
First off, it's actually quite easy to distinguish between a scammer and a real Palestinian. On Tumblr, @/nabulsi and @/el-shab-hussein compiled a spreadsheet of all the Palestinians (and a couple Sudanese) evacuees they can vouch for. Operation Olive Branch has also compiled a huge list of all the families they've vetted and support. There's also an entire blog called @/vetted-gaza-funds.
You can also Tumblr search the person's URL to see if anyone else has reported them as a scam, go into the notes of their blog, check to see if @/90-ghost has reblogged from them since he only shares vetted GFMs, etc. In recent weeks I've gotten more asks than I've ever seen in my life and it's a lot to handle but I've been able to navigate them fairly easily. I don't see why verifying an ask, an activity that takes maybe 5 minutes to do at most, is too much to ask from people, when the alternative is ignoring someone who could get murdered by the state of Israel.
Every human being, especially those in the imperial core where our currency has more weight, has a responsibility to donate as much as we can. I frankly don't care if these asks are annoying! Your family getting murdered is annoying. Going so hungry your body stops producing breast milk and your newborn baby suffers malnutrition is annoying. Constant drone noises and bombs dropping on your head is annoying. No peaceful Tumblr experience that comes at the cost of Palestinian lives is worth having. Sharing their post is the absolute least you could do!
And then there's the accusation of spam, which is the worst part of this. Palestinians in Gaza have been "spamming" asks, comments, and posts because they are desperate. I want you to imagine being in their situation and trying to act any different. You can't.
On Tumblr, if enough people report a blog it will get terminated without review. So if you're Palestinian, if enough people report you for spam, Tumblr will take away your ability to raise money for yourself, which means you get stuck under Israeli bombardment for longer. Reporting Palestinian blogs directly contributes to the genocide.
Fuck you for reporting those blogs and fuck you for endorsing that kind of behavior.
Anyway, since you chose not to reblog the version of this post with Wafaa's gofundme, I'll repost it here. If anything I said resonated with you, consider donating to her. she's so close to her goal and word is spreading that the Rafah crossing will open soon so hopefully she can get her kids to safety ASAP. Luckily someone just donated €600 so shes closer to her goal! Just €4k left for her goal!
Hello, my name is Wafaa. I am 42 years old and I am calling on the free p… Yasmin Hadscho needs your support for Please save Waffaa and her
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