Emergency Fundraiser & Poetry Reading: Support Gaza Translators

Please help us support our friend Gheed and other Palestinian linguists to find food, find hope, and keep doing their essential work of translation for refugees amidst the war. 

Gheed, based in Northern Gaza, is the Co-Director of RCT’s Arabic Team. In this role she leads and supports RCT’s Arabic translators, including many also based in Gaza, who work tirelessly translating and interpreting for thousands of Arabic-speaking asylum seekers around the world even while themselves surviving genocide, displacement, famine. RCT’s Arabic team has delivered over 700 hours of Arabic-English interpreting services for people in crisis and movement organizations across more than 500 sessions. 

We have known and worked with Gheed for years. Now Gheed is sheltering among ruins, and yet still continuing to help asylum seekers fill out documents in English so that they can access safety and dignity.

We have set up a fund to provide Gheed with food in the short term, and a path to safety when border crossings open in the long term, so she can pursue a masters program abroad to increase her qualifications for doing translation and cross-cultural work. Our goal is to fundraise $30,000 for Gheed. Anything raised beyond this will go to support 11 other Palestinian translators based in Gaza who work closely with Gheed. 

To launch this fund, we will share poems online on August 24, poems written by Gheed herself — and poems written and read for Gheed by Naomi Shihab Nye of Texas, and Kim Stafford of Oregon.  

There is much we can’t do in the face of chaos and terror. But helping Gheed and other Palestinian translators is one thing we can do. Donate and spread the word so we can reach $30,000+ and keep hope alive.

In Gaza, the Sound of Rain

My friend writes from where she cries until
she sleeps. Her sisters gather rain. In the streets,
dogs eat bodies of the dead. If you go out to find
food, you may be shot. She sends me the sound
of calling birds, of shelling, the sound of rain.
Marching south, if you raise a hand to brush flies
from your cheek, you may be shot, so you walk
staring straight ahead. What can there be, after?
She wants to be a global citizen, to teach children
to see beauty, to simply live. Her students are alive
but afraid. What can she tell them? Now, she says,
she is kidnapped from life to an ugly nightmare.
She wants to share the good and make the world
a better place for aspiration. Or she wants to die
at home, where she knows the color of the wall.

—Kim Stafford

Throw Away

This person did not kill that person.
This person is a baby.
She had a notebook and a doll.
This person was in second grade.
She was doing well.
For a few months she
whimpered every morning,
but now she’d grown brave.
This boy hoarded seashells
in a cardboard box that once held
French fries. This girl had a map.
Her grandpa kept books
from 1947 by his bed.
He couldn’t remember
not having them.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

You can also donate through this link: bit.ly/RCT-Gaza-Poetry *

*Donations are tax-deductible. Respond Crisis Translation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, (Tax ID: 84-5120142)

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