Please Help Save My Friends in Gaza

My name is Stephanie Fox, a small town girl from Minnesota who was inspired to see the world, and right its wrongs.

I've had the honor and privilege of living and working amongst some truly incredible human beings in my international career.

Much to my great surprise, it was the Gazans who led the way in teaching me true hospitality, humanity, and potential.

This picture above is the day 10,000 children flew kites on Gaza's northern beaches to win the Gunnies Book of World Records for most kites flown simultaneously, beating China. Can you image the tiny Gaza Strip of just over two million people beating China with over a billion?

I can.

I witnessed it.

I experienced this incredible potential, greatness, and human spirit. And all the while, the kids of Gaza were asking to fly kites with the kids of China.

The children of Gaza want to live and play with other children of the world.

I know this because for five wonderful years I worked in Gaza, creating human rights based educational programming and showing the world the massive potential that exists within Gazan's children.

I'm now asking for your help to save them.

I have literally dozens of requests from my friends and former colleagues to help them escape the scourges of war and build a new life.

These funds will be used to pay the fees being charged by the Egyptian company Al Hala to apply to enter Egypt, currently at $5k person.

Time is of the essence.

Please give what you can.

With all the love I know,

Stephanie

Here is one of the families that you'd be helping survive, that of my dear friend Rawia Hillis. I knew Rawia when she was a Principal at UNRWA's Khan Younis girls prep school. She loved and cared for those girls in her school like a mother and I'm sure she made a lifetime positive impact on them. She led the way in embracing all of UNRWA's new initiative from human rights education to Summer Games to our educational satellite channel. Whenever I need a host school to take visitors, including many US and foreign politicians, she always volunteered to open up her school.

When Khan Younis was flooded with refugees from Northern Gaza, she ran the world's largest Internally Displaced People's camp, bravely stretching very thin resources to desperate, innocent, civilians. Here was her desperate plea at that time, before she was displaced yet again with tens of thousands of others.

What her and her family have endured over the last 9 months is unconscionable. She spent her life savings on building a beautiful home for her family in Khan Younis, which was reduced to rubble, like hundreds of thousands of others.

Her family is now trying to survive in 121 degree heat in a tent with nothing.

Her kids and grandkids are drinking unsafe water, if they are lucky enough to find it.

She can't remember the last time they had fresh fruit or vegetables.

She has no words to comfort her severely traumatized family, who is looking to her for strength.

The feeling of hopelessness is overwhelming.

Please help me save her and her family.

Thank you.