Urgent Appeal: Help support me and my family

After the cannon's sound overshadowed every beautiful sound...

These words, taken from my life and steeped in disappointments, victories, and mundane thoughts, are for anyone who has felt a spark of humanity.

My name is Raouf. I spent years of my life striving to become a global artist. I learned singing and playing the oud and piano through personal effort because there was nothing in our city to support the arts. I nurtured my talent by learning online until I became a music teacher, instructing students in several places. I missed out on many opportunities and international engagements due to the blockade and closures that drained the vitality of my youth. If I had seized those opportunities, you would be hearing my story differently now. I completed my university studies and held my concerts in my beloved city of Gaza, eagerly awaiting the moment when I could convey a message of peace to the world through my talent.

After a while, I decided to open a café bearing my name, especially since I poured part of my soul and the fatigue of years of my life into it, making it a world filled with love and peace for me and everyone who visits.

As usual, I woke up from my sleep, reaching out for my cup of coffee that my mother prepares for me in the early morning. Then, I prepared to start my day, heading to my own café (Raouf), and ending my day with the melodies of the concerts I held in the elegant hotels of my city, Gaza.

And on a day...

I woke up to the sounds attacking the solitude of my sleep, slapping it from left to right until I found myself standing on the balcony of my room, hearing sounds ripped from hell.

This was the beginning of the war.

Our house was bombed, and we emerged from under the rubble, displaced from one place to another in search of some semblance of safety, fleeing from the sounds of shelling to the cries of children.

We fled to a place we thought was safer, hoping to find some security there. I did not expect to experience bitterly cold winter nights as I had only heard about them in poems and verses, finding nothing but my mother's tears mingled with the raindrops that soaked our tent, to which we fled. My siblings and I sat, pondering where our new escape would be, but the rockets and artillery did not give us time to think. We fled without knowing our destination.

This is a brief account of our situation after 137 days of tragedy, after losing my warm home and the source of my livelihood, which I spent years building. I express in it the loneliness of our nation and send a message of peace far from the horrors of war and the dirt of politics. And here I am, pleading with you to salvage what remains of my dream or my body, exhausted by war.

Until when? To where? War has made us forget the past, becoming both the past and the present, and I fear it will become the future.

I lost my home, I lost the café, I lost the oud, I lost the piano, I lost safety, dreams faded away, and the dove of peace was killed.

But:

May my words reach the ears of your hearts and find a chance to grant me and my family remnants of life to compensate for the cruelty and deprivation of these days, enabling me to start anew and try to showcase my talent and art to the whole world.

I need to leave Gaza, which is no longer the same as I once knew it, and the cost of our departure is high. I need to pay $6,000 for each member of my family, consisting of 18 people, which means I need almost $120,000 to rescue 18 souls from the horrors of war.

Note: I did not delve into the details of the suffering we face daily, which you hear about through television screens and social media.

Raouf Al-Belbeisi