You've probably noticed I usually start these emails with a video I saw, a story that broke me, something I witnessed.
This time I want to tell you what happened to me.
I was fasting this week. Iftar came and I sat down, took two bites, and just didn't want it. Pushed the plate away. Got up and scraped it straight into the bin without a second thought. Then I opened the fridge to get water and I just stood there because I couldn't find space. The fridge was so full I couldn't close it properly. Containers stacked on containers. Leftovers I'd forgotten existed. Food that had been sitting there so long it had become invisible to me.
I didn't feel grateful. I didn't feel anything. I just closed the fridge and reached for my phone.
And then I saw them.
Two little girls. Barefoot on sand in Gaza. Someone had just handed them two bowls of macaroni. Plain, simple, nothing and they were celebrating.
Not eating. Celebrating.
Spinning. Laughing. Holding those bowls up like they were the most precious thing they had ever touched.
I stood there with my too-full fridge humming behind me and I couldn't move.
This is supposed to be the month we learn. The month we remember what hunger feels like so we stop taking for granted what we have. The month we become mindful, grateful, present. The month we stop wasting.
I threw food in the bin and opened Instagram thirty seconds later.
They got two bowls of macaroni and they spun in circles.
That gap between my fridge I can't close and their two bowls of plain pasta is not just distance. It is not just geography. It is a child going to bed tonight with the same emptiness she woke up with. It is a parent watching their child ask for water and having absolutely nothing, nothing to give them.
It is a fast that doesn't break at sunset because there is nothing to break it with.
Just more hunger. Just another night. Just another morning of the same.
And somewhere in that, two little girls got macaroni and it was the greatest moment of their week.
Our teams are inside Gaza every single day. One thousand hot meals. Clean water and baby formula. Delivered every single day because we refused to let this be just another month for them.
The photos from our deliveries are below. Look at them. Look at the faces of people receiving something on a day they had stopped expecting anything at all.
But there are more children. More bare feet. More small hands that have never once known what enough feels like.
You can be the bowl of macaroni. You can be the moment a child forgets, just for a second, that the world has been cruel to her, because today something came. Today someone thought of her. Today she gets to eat.
That joy in the video. That spinning, laughing, pure and unselfconscious joy, you can cause that. On purpose. Today.
Until a bowl of pasta is ordinary again,
Hafsa
