Hello world, I'm Rawan

Please read this as if you were a member of your own family. Maybe your sister, your daughter, or your friend, as if my family that is dying now is your family.

My name is Rawan. A newly graduated engineer from Gaza, a new engineer who was supposed to start her career and achieve the dreams she worked for, but she found herself losing the city in which she lived and losing any hope for a better future with it. After 5 full years of study and training, the war had another idea.

Since the war on Gaza began, it has lost almost everything

On October 14 last year, just one week after the war started, I lost nearly 30 members of my family (my husband's family) in one second. One missile was enough to end their lives. My husband’s uncles, their children, and their grandchildren. Some of them even remained under the rubble. My mother’s sister (my aunt) lost her children, children who were no more than 12 years old, and none of them survived.

This was a huge shock not only to me, but to my family because they lost their relatives and families in the blink of an eye.

My loss does not end here, because for us Gazans, death knocks on our door every day, and every new day under the war is the possibility of a new loss.

This cycle of loss did not end here. After more than 5 times of displacement and having to leave our home to escape missiles and death, what saddens me is that I was not able to take anything from my home, clothes for me and my children, my husband’s laptop that he was working on, and some important papers, anything. We have a memory.... We left with only the clothes we were wearing, and this was by order of the army when it told us to go to the south because it was a safe area and not to carry anything with us. Frankly, at that time, nothing was important anymore. The important thing was that we flee and survive this. In the crazy bombing, we took refuge in the city of Rafah and I gave birth to my very beautiful child, Julia. I wished that time would stop so that she would not come to life, and we were not in our warm home in the middle of our large family. She had everything she needed. I wanted her to stay inside me for fear that something bad would happen to her, but the opposite of what we had planned happened. Unfortunately, it arrived...

Before

After

Eliana, my three-year-old daughter, whose birthday we were supposed to celebrate on October 13, was impatiently waiting for it and always asking what we would do, how we would decorate the house, and what dress she would wear, but the war made her forget this day in all its details and everything she had planned for her due to the intensity of her fear and shock, but she returned.

To remember her beautiful dress and the bag she wants to wear.

I understand that she wants us to return to our home. Every place we go, she tells us that it is not beautiful and she does not want to stay there. How could she not, when we moved from a beautiful, very large, secure house in which everything was clean and healthy, to a small, dark room? We sleep and wake up and cook with it in Rafah and then to a room in a destroyed house in Khan Yunis. She misses our house and asks when we will return so she can play with her toys and watch her favorite cartoons on TV (Coco Melon). She does not know that the house has been destroyed and only its memories remain with us. What saddens me is that All her words became bombing, evacuation, a plane, a tank, and wounded, and fear filled her eyes.

My husband is a talented person who loves his work very much, and he was always striving to develop his knowledge. He obtained a master’s degree and was preparing to study for a doctorate in software engineering and to get a promotion at his job. He wanted us to allocate a room for him to work with a desk and everything he needed, in our new house, but the war broke out. Faster than that and he lost everything and his main job now became just trying to provide the few basic necessities of life (food, clean water).

I initially introduced myself as an engineer from Gaza with dreams, a girl in her twenties with professional plans and goals she wants to achieve, a person who has lost a lot in a short period of time. But the most important thing in this war is that I am a mother who sees the future of her children being lost before her eyes. I also see my daughter who was supposed to begin her journey in education and was supposed to be in kindergarten Kg1, and my daughter who I gave birth to two months after the beginning of the war at a time when Pampers and milk were cut off and she was adopted. Completely on natural milk, even though we did not find food or even care for myself, and my husband, who found himself forced to start from scratch when he was supposed to catch his breath after we built the house we dream of, and it cost us years of effort to build it and everything we had to get by.

A stable life, but unfortunately we did not complete the year living in it, so I made it a mission to save myself and my family and support my husband to save our future and the future of our children from all this and escape from Gaza.

All I have left is my family, me, my husband, my children, and my husband’s family (my mother and his two brothers only). My mother, father, and my sisters and brothers were able to leave Gaza, and before I lose anyone from my family, I intend to evacuate my family of 8 members from Gaza:

* Me, my husband, and our children (Rawan, Ahmed, my daughter Eliana, Julia, Younis)

* My husband’s mother and his two brothers (Muhammad, Abdullah).

The situation after almost 9 months of this genocide is that the Gaza borders are unfortunately still closed and no one can get out of them, of course unless you pay the largest amount of money to save your life and cross the Rafah border to reach Egypt. Crossing the Rafah crossing costs about 7000 to 9000 A dollar per person, and as a family of 8 it seems impossible to afford the amount we have to pay just to get to Egypt.

So here's how the money will be spent:

*Payment of approximately $7,000 USD for each member of my family of 8

Individuals to cross the Rafah border and arrive safely in Egypt

* About $6,000 covers GoFundMe transaction fees (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction)

* The rest of the money will be for housing, food, etc. for a period of time in Egypt.

Asking for your help is the only way I have to save my family's life and future. May your help become our hope when hope is far from us under these circumstances. Every dollar you can help may save a life, bring hope to the life of a tired heart and save the future of young people.

Please don't read this story as a tragic story, I'm here to ask you to stop it from getting any more tragic and help us start our lives over. I am here to ask for your help not your sympathy, to ask you to take action whether by donating or by sharing this with everyone you know who can help, please read this with your heart and take action as if it were your family or your mom, your siblings who are living in these circumstances.