I have been sitting with something for the last thirty days and I don't quite know how to put it into words. But I am going to try.
Every year, I watch this month arrive. I watch it change the air. I watch something shift in people that I cannot fully explain and have long stopped trying to.
Over two billion people on this earth choose to go hungry together. By choice. Every single day, before the sun comes up, they eat. And then they stop. No food. No water. Nothing until sundown. And they do this for thirty days.
And every single year, without fail, they become the most generous version of themselves while doing it. Not despite the hunger. Because of it.
This year I kept asking myself why. What is it that makes someone reach into their pocket at two in the morning for a stranger they will never meet?
I think it is this. When you choose to feel empty, you stop being afraid of someone else's emptiness. You recognise it. You reach for it. You understand that their hunger and your hunger are made of the same thing.
And that is exactly what I witnessed this month.
I witnessed you give before I finished asking. I witnessed you show up again and again, not because you were asked twice, but because something in you hadn't finished giving yet. I witnessed people who had never heard of us find us and decide, without much convincing, that they wanted to be part of something larger than themselves.
And because of you, our team was on the ground in Gaza. Yesterday. Just like every single day before it.
They sat in what used to be a neighbourhood. Rubble on every side. Dust on everything. The kind of stillness that only exists in places that have lost too much.
And they shared a meal with the women and children there. A meal that existed because of every donation that came in at midnight and every person who gave twice when once would have been enough.
And those children laughed.
They laughed the way children laugh when the world disappears for just a moment. In the rubble. This month. Because of you.
I have been holding that image close ever since. Joy does not wait for the right circumstances. It survives anyway. Those children carried it through everything, through loss, through hunger, through a year that took more from them than any child should ever lose, and it was still there.
Whole and real and loud.
Because you showed up for them.
This month is almost over. And what a month it has been.
Before it closes I want you to feel something. Not urgency. Not guilt. Something quieter and warmer. The knowledge that you did something extraordinary. That you were part of something that reached all the way to Gaza and made children laugh in the rubble.
That is not a small thing. That is everything.
You still have tonight. Some people will read this tomorrow and wish they had one more chance. You have it. Right now. In your hands.
Gaza's children will wake up tomorrow still hungry. Still waiting. But they woke up this month knowing someone showed up for them.
And tonight, you can do it one more time.
Use it. Not because you have to. Because you already know what your generosity looks like when it lands.
You have seen it.
For the happiness and hope I will carry with me long after this month ends,
Hafsa