Our team almost missed this woman.
She wasn't screaming for help. She wasn't desperate. She was quiet, calm and decided. She had a surgery date. Eleven days away. A stranger was going to take her kidney for $800 and she had made her peace with whatever came after.
Our volunteer asked her, what if you don't survive it?
"I don't know. Maybe I die. Maybe I can't work. But he eats."
He. Her son. That was the whole sentence. That was her everything.
She wasn't selling her kidney out of panic. She was doing it out of love. The most devastating, total, selfless love I have ever witnessed. She had looked at her own body and thought. This is all I have left to give him. So I'll give it.
This week, across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, millions of people are observing one of the holiest seasons of the year. Days of fasting, reflection, and prayer.
But for the women we work with, fasting isn't a choice. It's just Tuesday. And Wednesday. And every day before it.
They fast all day because there is no food. And when the sun goes down, there is still no food to break the fast on. No meal waiting. No table set. Just another night of watching their children sleep hungry, calculating what they have left to give.
For too many of them, the answer has become: their body.
In Afghanistan, women are selling their organs in rickety back rooms, not because food doesn't exist, but because the system has left them with no way to afford it. Their bodies have become the only currency they have left.
These are mothers. Sisters. Daughters.
Women who love their children so ferociously that they will sign away pieces of themselves. A kidney, a piece of their liver, years of their health. Just so a small person they made can eat.
They are doing this while fasting. While praying. While holding on to the belief that something will change.
You can be that change.
This season, your donation can mean emergency aid delivered in time. Food parcels placed in a mother’s hands before sunset. Clean water. Hot meals. Bread on the table so a child does not go to sleep hungry.
So she does not have to sell a piece of herself.
So her son eats and she lives.
While families around the world gather to break their fasts together, please give so that a mother doesn't have to break herself.
Let this be a month of mercy for her.
For every mother who should never have to choose between her life and her child,
Hafsa