100 mile hike for Palestinian medical aid

I am walking 100 miles in 5 days to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians. This is a charity that helps provide the urgent and desperately-needed medical care and provisions for Palestinians suffering in Gaza (as well as helping in the West Bank). I will be trekking with my fiancée and building a wider team of participants with rPart, a social network aimed at sharing social and environmental initiatives, in order to fundraise as much as possible.

Please donate so we can get more aid through to hospitals in Gaza to stop preventable deaths and heal those who have been wounded and need it most.

Please read this poem by Hiba Abu Nida, a young female Palestinian poet and teacher who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in 20th October 2023. 

Yesterday, a star said

to the little light in my heart,

We are not just transients

passing.

Do not die. Beneath this glow

some wanderers go on

walking.

You were first created out of love,

so carry nothing but love

to those who are trembling.

One day, all gardens sprouted

from our names, from what remained

of hearts yearning.

And since it came of age, this ancient language

has taught us how to heal others

with our longing,

how to be a heavenly scent

to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh,

a gasp of oxygen.

Softly, we pass over wounds,

like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief,

an aspirin.

O little light in me, don’t die,

even if all the galaxies of the world

close in.

O little light in me, say:

Enter my heart in peace. 

All of you, come in!

Please let us donate so we honour the memory of her words; so that we respect the resilience of Palestinians suffering grievous injuries; and we help find respite for their pain. 

As was  reported on 25 March 2024, Konstantina Ilia Karydi, an anaesthetist who is a member of the visiting emergency medical team, which includes Medical Aid for Palestinians, described harrowing scenes at the European hospital near Khan Younis.

“The situation is unimaginable,” said Karydi. “This hospital had an original capacity of just 200 beds, and at the moment it has expanded to 1,000 beds.

“There are around 22,000 people that have been displaced from other parts of Gaza sheltering in the corridors and in tents inside the hospital, because people feel that it’s safer to be here than anywhere else.”

While the team’s surgeons said they had completed successful complex vascular and orthopaedic surgeries on patients, some of the patients later died due to infections in the hospitals and the inability to provide post-operative care, a problem that has plagued trauma care in Gaza for months.

Please donate so we can help stop preventable deaths and be like 'a hint of relief', in Hiba Abu Nida's words--let us do our part to heal the suffering.