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Assist Amr & Aseel's medical journey & Family stay in Gaza

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My name is Leena and I created this fundraiser to help a friend, Amr and his family in Gaza. Please read his story below.

Hello, my name is Amr. I am a sixth year medical student from the northern part of the Gaza Strip. For the past more than 6 months, my family and I have been through the most difficult struggle for survival of our lives. We have been displaced over 10 times. We are still living amidst a war in Gaza at this very moment. This war marks the fifth war I am living through in my 23 years of life.

With this fundraiser, I am seeking the kind support of friends from around the world to help me and my family make it through this difficult time and help rebuild for the future we were once meant to have.

Allow me to tell you my story. The 2023-2024 school year was supposed to be my final one in medical school. I had worked hard my whole life in pursuit of my dream to become a doctor. This was supposed to be the most exciting year yet of all of my schooling – I would have gotten to do my clinical rotations, applying everything I learned in medical school to date, to real-life patient care scenarios. I aspired to specialize in oncology and dedicate my career to cancer research and caring for cancer patients. I was even accepted into Oxford University’s prestigious elective program in the department of oncology. But alas, life had other plans for me. I won’t be able to start my medical clerkship at Oxford as planned. My university no longer exists. My childhood home was destroyed. In fact, my neighborhood is now beyond recognition and unlivable.


For those like my family that decided to stay in the north of Gaza, we live a life not worth living. We stayed in the north to protect our land. But the pledge to not give up on our land is proving costly and exhausting beyond words. There is no civil infrastructure left to speak of. Looking for food and drinking water is a real-life Hunger Games challenge every single day. The minimal aid that enters the north are retrieved by people who are not afraid to lethally assault each other in order to get the packages. My beloved uncle, who was a respected doctor, one of four pathologists in all of Gaza, died after being hit by a missile and bleeding to death in the streets. I found his body two days later, buried him, and life of the Hunger Games picked up right where it left off without even giving me a chance to grieve his death. There is no power, no running water and little access to the internet. We try to invent new recipes to make animal feed consumable, drink dirty water, sleep shivering in the cold and suffer illnesses and injuries without access to treatment. We walk into a dwelling with humans one day, only to walk the next day over its rubble containing lifeless bodies. Whatever food we can purchase from people selling stolen food aid is exorbitantly high. The cost of food in the north of Gaza is 20-30 times the normal, pre-war price. The daily cost to feed a family two meals a day is 80-90$ due to severely inflated prices resulting from famine-like conditions.

We are a family of seven – I have two older sisters who are married, Ola and Heyam, an older brother named Mohammed, younger sister named Aseel, and my parents are Jehad (father) and Salma (mother).

My family and I have near-death encounters on more days than not. My entire family barely escaped from a building we were sheltering in that got bombed, with my younger sister Aseel getting seriously injured in her hand and foot as a result. She has not been able to get proper treatment to this day. My older sister Heyam suffered a broken ankle but also could not get it treated as there was no safe route to a hospital. She had to walk in agonizing pain for weeks carrying her two year-old son Zain until it healed. My mother’s rheumatoid arthritis has been chronically exacerbated during this war and my father developed a hernia in his abdomen, neither of which we could seek treatment for.

In addition to our childhood home, Heyam’s apartment was also destroyed. She worked hard, saving up for years to buy her first apartment to live in with her son Zain, only to be there for two months before the war.



My family and I have no political affiliations. We want to live in peace. We love our land and we want to stay on it. But the sheer fatigue of this harsh lifestyle is unsustainable, and the mental anguish would wear down even the most resilient.

My younger sister Aseel, like me, is a medical student in her third year of study. We want nothing more than to be able to continue our education; however, this is no longer an option in Gaza. This means that we will need to leave Gaza to continue our studies. I would like to make it to Oxford for my medical clerkship, which has been a longtime dream of mine. My older sister Heyam only wants a normal childhood for her son Zain and a chance for him to have a future. However, we need your support to be able to do this.



We hope to be able to raise funds totaling 70,000$ that will be used to cover the following:

● Our living expenses for the time we remain in the North of Gaza, which include food, medications, sanitary products and other essentials for daily living.
● Rebuilding a house for my family to live in.
● Exit fees and travel expenses to leave Gaza across the Rafah border crossing for two people, my sister Aseel and I, so that we can do our speciality training once the border is open again. The current cost of this is 6,000$ per person.
● GoFundMe transaction fees that amount to 2.9%. + 0.30$ for every donation.

While I would normally never ask other people for monetary donations, I am compelled to do so now as I understand it to be the only way my family and I can survive. Your donations will be nothing short of a lifeline for my family. Thanks in advance for your generosity and compassion – it is the only thing that can help me and my family stand back up again.
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Donations 

  • Tizha Shi
    • $100
    • 15 d
  • Anonymous
    • $21
    • 6 mos
  • Tizha Shi
    • $75
    • 6 mos
  • Megan Marsh
    • $25
    • 6 mos
  • Jill Taylor
    • $10
    • 6 mos
Donate

Organizer

Leena Sfar
Organizer
Chicago, IL

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