She counts out loud.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Her voice fills the silence where other voices should be.
The rope slaps against bare earth. Against stones that used to be someone's home. Her feet are bare. Calloused in ways a child's feet should never be.
Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
She stops.
Not because she's tired. Because there's no one there to say "keep going." No one to hold the other end.
Just her. A frayed rope. And wind through torn canvas.
I keep thinking about what that rope used to mean.
Recess. Giggles spilling into shrieking. Arguments over whose turn it was. Being surrounded.
Now it's a little girl playing alone because the children who should be beside her are gone.
And yet, she still picks it up. Still counts. Still jumps.
Because hope in a child doesn't announce itself with speeches. It announces itself with a skip. A rhythm that refuses to stop even when everything else has.
But she shouldn't have to hope this hard.
She shouldn't have to make childhood happen by herself, with bare feet and no one watching.
Childhood is supposed to come to her. Soft and abundant and easy.
Instead, she's had to trap it in ten small seconds of jumping.
We have to be the ones who step in.
Because this is how childhood disappears.
Quietly.
One child learning how to play alone.
In Gaza, hunger and cold are brutal.
But being unseen is worse.
Being alive and feeling like no one is coming.
That is what we can change.
Every hot meal says: you matter.
Every blanket says: you’re not alone.
Every act of care interrupts the silence she’s been forced to grow up inside.
This isn’t abstract kindness.
It’s intervention.
If we act, her childhood doesn’t become a memory she survives.
If we act, someone is there to hold the other end of the rope.
So don’t think of giving as aid.
Think of it as showing up.
As standing across from her and saying,
I’m here. Keep going.
Because childhood was never meant to be endured.
It was meant to be protected.
For the children who shouldn’t be alone,
Hafsa
