Our very first Sudan aid delivery...

This month I learned what it feels like to be truly afraid of the answer.

We have been inside Gaza since October 2023. Through every escalation, every impossible week, every time the world said it couldn't be done. We lost three of our team members there last year in an airstrike. Three people who chose to stay when leaving was still possible. I carry them with me every single day.

So when the weeks passed and nothing came through, no update, no pictures, no word from our team at all, something in me went very quiet. The kind of quiet that means you have already started to accept something. That you are preparing yourself for a version of events you cannot say out loud yet.

And then Sudan sitting on top of it. A place we have been fighting to reach for so long. Route after route closing. Window after window shutting. Women and children on the other side we could not get to, and silence from there too.

I have never felt the weight of this work the way I felt it this past month.

And then my phone lit up.

Pictures. From both teams. Arriving within the same hour, as if they had planned it, as if they knew we needed them at the same time.

I didn't sit with them.

I sent them to everyone I could find.

Because that is what you do when something has been pressing on your chest for a month and suddenly lifts. You don't keep it. You give it away as fast as you can. You send it to every person who has been carrying the weight with you and you say.

Look. Look. We made it. They made it. It's real.

These pictures are real.

A woman in Sudan holding food she has been waiting months for.

Children in Gaza whose faces I have been afraid to imagine this past month, alive, fed, looked after by a team that refused to disappear.

I cannot tell you what it means to see those faces after what this month has felt like. After the three we lost last year. After the silence that felt like it was trying to tell me something I wasn't ready to hear.

It means we held.

The chain held.

You are in that chain.

Every time you gave, you kept a team in the field. Every time you trusted us through silence you could not explain you made it possible for someone to still be there when the route finally opened. The food in these pictures has your hands on it. The presence we have maintained in both of these places through the most impossible conditions exists because you decided, again and again, that these lives were worth showing up for.

You could have stopped. The silence was long. The news from both places has been devastating for months.

You didn't stop.

Neither did we.

Please don't stop now.

Because next month the same women will need us. The same children. The same impossible routes, the same closed doors, the same fear sitting with me while I wait for the pictures to come through.

I want to be able to send them to you again.

I want us to hold again.

For the three we lost, and every person we reached because they stayed,

Hafsa