Please help support this loving family

While we, Yassmin and Miakoda, recognize there are many, many heartbroken families and friends right now that are frantically trying to raise funds to get their loved ones from the Gaza strip into safety or to provide them with much needed resources/support during this incessant bombardment, we ask that there is the possibility to help assist a deeply beloved friend, truly she is like our closest family member‪.‬ She is the friend that everybody needs, I do not know a kinder person. Alaa Alhabbash, her mother and her 7 year old son, along with thousands of others, have had their home bombed and destroyed‪. She and her family had to move from one place to another under the reign of the bombs to escape the danger‪,‬ and now they are ending up in overcrowded place, awaiting a tent, and without knowing when their next meal will come or any water.

Our hope in reaching out to you is that we can somehow provide some amount of support or resources for her to have something to help her build up a livelihood and provide for herself‪,‬ her mother and her little boy, once the war ends. She has lost everything that she once owned and has no capability to earn money since this attack started and for the foreseeable future until infrastructure is returned to Gaza.

We have known Alaa for so many years and have witnessed her go through several wars, and now going through this Genocide. She is an exceptionally loving mother, daughter and friend; processing war, love, and life through poetry – and somehow she has always managed to maintain her light and her love even when being exposed to the cruelest harshness that none of us will ever (hopefully) have to experience. She brings to life the love and war that she has experienced that is tangible through her words, that I have never heard in any other writer, and I hope her words can be shared with the world one day. Though, reading the pain of her experiences, especially in knowing her gentleness, feels unbearable.

We want to acknowledge this shared pain within similar stories, as well as the generosity needed in order to continue to contribute to this community that is in desperate need of SO much right now, in every capacity.

Thank you for your compassion and support on this behalf,

Yassmin and Miakoda