There was a clown in Gaza this week.
Face paint. Silly shoes. Standing in the middle of a camp, doing whatever it is clowns do, in front of a crowd of children sitting in the sand.
They laughed. Properly. The way kids laugh when a grown adult is making a fool of himself.
Some of those children have been in tents for two years.
We brought colouring supplies too. Paper, pencils, the things a kid needs to make something that belongs to them and nobody else. Because there is a version of aid that keeps a child alive and still leaves them sitting in a tent all day in the heat with nothing to do, and I don't think that's enough.
Now the rest, because there's a lot of it.
We're ten days into September. In those ten days we have served 1,000 hot meals every single day.
Not a delivery. Not a drop. Every day, without a gap.
Which means as you read this, someone in Gaza is being handed a hot meal.
Baby formula. There are mothers in Gaza whose bodies have nothing left to give, who are holding babies they cannot feed. Love doesn't solve that. Formula does, or nothing does.
It was formula.
Fresh water. Clean and drinkable. Which sounds ordinary until you know that a mother in Gaza has spent two years choosing between water that will make her child sick and no water at all.
That's September so far.
And here's the thing I keep turning over.
Every letter I've sent you this year has been about something being taken. A boy's toys. A girl's hair. The sky. Food.
This one is about things going back.
A hot meal. A clean cup of water. A tin of formula for a baby who was starving. Paper and colours. A man in face paint being ridiculous in the sand so that children could stop being brave for an afternoon.
None of that happened because the world came to its senses. It happened because people who will never meet each other kept giving when looking away would have been easier.
Our women are still there. They never left. They're handing out those thousand meals today, and they'll do it tomorrow, and the day after.
Twenty days of September left. A thousand a day isn't a number we picked because it sounded good. It's what the queue actually needs.
Help us hold it.
Thank you. From all of us, and from every child who got to be a child for an afternoon.
With something that finally feels like hope,
Hafsa