Why I Chose to Ask Strangers for Help Instead of Staying Silent

There is something nobody tells you about being displaced in a war zone. The practical hardships are obvious. The thing nobody prepares you for is the erosion of your sense of yourself as a capable person.

Before October 2023, I was an agricultural engineer. I had a career. I had built a home, a real one, with my own hands and years of savings, in Northern Gaza. I had plans: a garden I was developing, a business I was growing, a school I had picked out for Ibrahim. I was not wealthy by international standards. But I was a provider. A professional. A man with a trajectory.

Then airstrikes reduced that home to rubble in a single night.

What Came Before the Campaign

For a long time after we lost our home, I did not ask for help. I want you to understand that. My instinct, strong and deep and cultural and personal all at once, was to manage. To find a way. To not be the person with his hand out.

In Palestinian culture, and I imagine in many cultures, there is significant weight attached to self-sufficiency. Asking for help from family, let alone strangers, carries a feeling of failure that is hard to describe to someone who has not felt it. I kept thinking: I will find work. I will find a way to earn. I will solve this myself.

But the war was not a problem I could engineer my way out of. There was no work to find. The infrastructure for my profession was damaged or destroyed. The money we had saved disappeared into six rounds of displacement, each one costing money we did not have. My wife was pregnant. Rent was due.

There is a specific moment when you realize that pride is a luxury your children cannot afford. That moment arrived for me on a night when I had less than $20 left and no income coming and rent due in eight days.

The Decision to Go Public

I started on GoGetFunding in 2023 because a friend who had fled to Europe told me it was working for other families. I was reluctant. The idea of putting my family's photographs on the internet and explaining our situation to strangers felt exposing in a way that was genuinely uncomfortable.

What pushed me to do it was a practical calculation. The discomfort of being seen was real. But it was smaller than the alternative, which was my family going without what they needed. I decided to treat it as a professional challenge rather than a personal humiliation. I would build the campaign the way I would build anything else: carefully, honestly, with attention to quality and transparency.

I wrote our story as accurately as I could. I did not exaggerate. I did not add drama that was not there. The situation was already difficult enough without embellishment. I uploaded my government ID. I made a video from our apartment showing the damage to the walls and the ceiling. I explained what the money would be used for and committed to posting receipts.

Then I waited.

The First Donation

The first donation I received was $30, from a person in the United States whose name I will not share to protect their privacy. They left a comment saying they hoped we stayed safe.

I sat with my phone for a long time after that notification came through. I am not sure I can explain what it felt like exactly. It was not just relief, though it was that. It was something more complicated. A stranger who had never met me, who had no obligation to me, had looked at our story and decided that we mattered.

That decision, multiplied across hundreds of donors over the years since, is what has kept my family alive. I do not say that for effect. It is simply true.

Why I Built This Website

GoGetFunding is a platform. It is useful and I am grateful for it. But a platform has constraints. It cannot tell our story the way I want to tell it. It cannot explain the actual prices we pay or the specific circumstances of Northern Gaza in 2026 with the depth that I think donors deserve.

I built donatetogaza.org because I wanted a place where the full story lives. Where you can read about what flour costs and why rent is $500 and what Ibrahim asked me and what the night of the flooding was like. Where you can see the verification documents and understand exactly where your money goes.

I am an engineer. I approach problems by trying to understand them completely and then building the most effective solution I can. This website is my attempt to build the most honest, transparent, and effective direct-aid campaign I know how to build. Not because I am trying to maximize donations as a goal in itself. Because I believe that transparency is what earns trust, and trust is what makes giving possible.

What Asking for Help Has Taught Me

I want to share something that surprised me about this experience, because I think it is worth saying.

I expected that asking for help would make me feel small. In many moments it has. There are days when I think about the life I had planned and the distance between that and where I am now, and I feel the weight of it completely.

But there have also been moments that I did not expect. When a donor wrote to me to say that giving to our campaign had reminded them what money was actually for. When a teacher from another country said she showed her students our story and they raised money for us from their pocket money. When someone told me they had been going through something very difficult in their own life and giving to us had given them a sense of purpose during a dark time.

These moments taught me something I did not know before: that asking for help is not only receiving. It is also, sometimes, giving something to the person who helps. The connection. The knowledge that their generosity landed somewhere real, on a specific family with specific names, and made a tangible difference.

Who I Am Beyond This Campaign

I want you to know that I am not defined by this crisis, even though the crisis defines so much of my current daily life. I am an agricultural engineer who is genuinely passionate about what plants need to grow, about sustainable farming in arid climates, about the future of food systems. I have opinions about soil composition and irrigation efficiency that have nothing to do with war or donations.

I am a father who makes up stories for Ibrahim at bedtime about a character called Captain Carrot who solves problems using vegetables. I am a husband who has a running disagreement with my wife about whether tea should be brewed in the glass or the pot first. I am a person with a sense of humor that occasionally surfaces even when everything is hard.

I tell you this because I want you to see the full picture. Not the simplified version of a Gaza family as an abstract humanitarian category. A specific family with a specific life and a specific future that they are working toward, day by day, with whatever resources they can pull together.

This is us. A family that existed before the war, continues to exist through it, and intends to continue existing after it.

What Happens When You Donate

I want to be concrete about this because I think it matters.

When a donation arrives, I use it for the most pressing need at that moment. If rent is due, it goes to rent. If the water ran out two days ago and the truck has not come, it goes to water. If Ibrahim needs something specific, it goes to that. The prioritization is always based on what is most urgent for the family's survival and stability.

After every significant purchase, I take a photograph of the receipt and post it to GoGetFunding. I write an update explaining what was bought and why. This is not a burden. It is a commitment I made when I launched the campaign and it is one I take seriously. You should be able to trace your donation from PayPal to a specific receipt for a specific purchase.

That accountability is something I am proud of. Not many campaigns at this scale maintain that level of transparency. I maintain it because I believe it is the right thing to do and because it is the foundation of the trust that makes the whole thing work.

A Final Note

If you have read this far, thank you. Genuinely. Not just for considering donating, but for taking the time to understand the situation with some depth rather than scrolling past.

The world moves fast and there are a thousand things competing for your attention. The fact that you are here, reading about one family in Northern Gaza, means something. It means we are not invisible. It means our story has been heard.

Whether you donate or not, I hope this has given you a clearer picture of what life is actually like in Gaza in 2026. Not the news cycle version. The specific, textured, daily version. The one where a five-year-old draws houses with gardens and wonders when the noise will stop at night and asks if the strangers who send money know his name.

They do now.

Mohammed Z. Al-Shanti
Agricultural Engineer, Father, Northern Gaza, 2026