These days I feel very old at the ripe age of 23.
I know how that sounds. But there is something about this age that nobody warned me about. The weight of it. The overthinking that never stops. The feeling of being simultaneously too young to know anything and too old to pretend you do not know what you know.
In the middle of all of that, Rachel Corrie found me.
I have attached her voice to this email. A little girl, fifth grade, standing at the front of her class telling the world she is going to end hunger by the year 2000. Listen to how certain she is. That is not a performance. That is a girl who looked at the size of the world's suffering and felt it land on her personally and decided, without hesitation, that it was hers to fix.
I know that feeling in my bones.
That is the thing that keeps pulling me back to her. Not her death. Her before the death. The ambition of her. The specific beautiful stubbornness of a girl who wanted too much and meant all of it.
She grew up and she went to Gaza and she stood between a bulldozer and a Palestinian family's home because that is what you do when you are that kind of girl. When the world's pain is not something you can file away and forget about. When looking away was never really an option.
She was 23 when they killed her.
The same age I am right now, sitting here, feeling old and overthinking everything.
And that number has not left me since.
I have been thinking about what 23 means since then. At 23 I have built something I am proud of. I have lain awake at night carrying the weight of other people's suffering and chosen, every single morning, to get up and do something about it anyway. I have had my heart broken by this work and come back to it because I did not know how to stay away. I have been that little girl at the front of the class, the one who said something too big and meant every word of it.
Rachel was all of that too and more. She was ambitious and idealistic and furious at injustice and completely unwilling to look away. She was a girl who became someone the world could not contain. She was 23 and she was just getting started. And then she was gone.
I think about her when I look at our numbers.
1,000 meals a day delivered into Gaza. Into the same streets she walked. To families like the one she died protecting. She wanted to end world hunger at ten years old and gave her life at 23 trying. And here I am, the same age, fumbling forward in the same direction, doing the smallest fraction of what she had the courage to attempt.
I do not take that lightly.
Every meal that reaches Gaza is a day she did not die for nothing. Every family we reach is proof that the thing she believed in at ten years old, standing at the front of that classroom, was worth believing in.
She does not get another 23.
But today exists. And what we do with today is the only answer available to the question of what her life meant.
Listen to her voice.
And then do something with the feeling it leaves in you.
For Rachel, and every meal delivered in the place she loved enough to die for,
Hafsa
