Somewhere in the southern end of Gaza, a community of 42 families is spending their second winter under canvas. Outside the reach of aid agencies, they rely largely on donations from friends and families overseas, and strangers who donate to their crowdfunder. There is never enough for what they need – food, tents, hygiene supplies, medical care – and the overcrowding, cold and wet make survival a daily challenge that is hard for most of us to imagine.
So when recently the truck that was bringing them a food delivery was attacked and turned back, it was a disaster. A shipment of flour, rice, cooking oil, potatoes and onions which was supposed to last three weeks was gone, with no prospect of a refund. The team of seven who support the community, making daily rounds and coordinating supplies, were forced to scrape together what funds they could and buy emergency supplies on the black market.
Trading from broken down shop premises and warehouses, an informal network of suppliers buy stocks when they can and sell them on at inflated prices, several times higher than they should be. Because the banking system barely functions payment is often in USDT, a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, which is also how they receive funds from overseas. It’s an irregular system, but it means that the community can eat for a day or two at a time, while waiting for more funds to arrive.
It wasn’t enough, of course, and in the aftermath of the truck attack food supplies regularly gave out completely. For Khaled, a photographer by profession but now volunteering full time for the organising team, being unable to feed children who are crying with hunger is one of the hardest things to bear.
“When regular food supply chains break down, it feels like losing the life savings of an entire community all at once. Everything people depend on disappears, not just food, but stability, dignity, and any sense of security. It is a slow, painful collapse that affects everyone, especially the children.”
A few weeks later, things became much darker when a member of the team was stabbed and robbed on his way back to the camp with food. Not only did they lose vital supplies, but they were now obliged to spend scarce funds on hospital bills. With even less to go round, tensions began to erupt, and the community felt noticeably less safe.
“When formal systems collapse, communities fall back on whatever social infrastructure already exists – family ties, neighbourhood relationships, informal leaders, shared norms of reciprocity,” Khaled explains. “But when things stop working and people feel there is no stability or support, it becomes very easy for people to turn on each other.”
The team are feeling the pressure. All they can do is to double down on their attempts to raise funds for a new bulk order, and to maintain a dignified and fair system of distribution. That means communal cooking to provide meals for the most vulnerable, and boxes of essential foods to distribute to the families.
“Nothing here is anonymous or distant. You see the faces of the people you are helping. You see who eats and who doesn’t,” he says. “This is not a system. It is a series of human relationships under pressure, adapting day by day to scarcity.“
It is a tragic situation. But it is also an inspiring story of human resilience and the determination to maintain dignity under awful circumstances. Somehow they just keep going, and here is the lesson for us. As the global scene becomes more and more chaotic and we start to feel the shocks in the rising cost of living, their story can wake us up to what is at stake, and prompt us to get behind the values of cooperation and care that are the basis of peace.
It is mutual aid that keeps Khaled’s community going – both the self-sacrificing care that members show for each other, and the generosity of supporters around the world who want to alleviate the pain that they see on their phone screens and televisions. Mutual aid is by its nature informal and personal, individuals sharing their lives in letters and gifts, perhaps through organised programmes such as Gaza Champions or by chance encounters on social media.
It can however also be large-scale, as in the case of The Sameer Project, where a few Palestinian exiles have raised millions to fund a team of 150 workers in Gaza who know their communities well and can make sure that food, water, tents, winter clothing, medical care and companionship reach those most in need. Donations come from individuals and solidarity groups, and they run a social media campaign that shares news on the ground and emphasises individual stories.
To the extent that these connections are direct and personal, they are transformative. It isn’t just that people in Gaza are encouraged to know that strangers care about them and are willing to help. The people who donate and see the difference that it makes develop greater confidence in their capacity to contribute to the well-being of others – something we all need. They find their agency, and this benefits their home communities as well.
This is crucial, because global humanity needs to find its determination to create a better future. If we are to have a healthy, compassionate and wise society, not one cowed by extractive corporations, misinformation and greed, then we need to choose and act accordingly. We especially need opportunities for practical projects that bring us together in service and gratitude, allowing us build a shared positive vision and form the teams that will do the work.
Gaza holds special relevance for us because of our historic and religious connection with the area, giving us an many opportunities to engage and learn. Our situation in Wales is of course very easy in comparison, but for much of our history life was harder, and at some level we know that food security could become a concern for us too, as geopolitics unsettles our comfortable world. How would we cope?
Tim Lang’s Just in Case report on food security in the UK spells out just how unprepared we would be for a shock to our food supplies. Behind the scenes, our governments do consider how we would respond to threats such as cyber-attacks on supermarkets, storms and power outages, all of which have of course happened in recent years. Many of us know how reliant we are on imports, how little food is stored for emergencies, and how vulnerable we are to short term threats.
However, it is one thing to be vaguely aware of this, and quite another to look it in the face. At a recent conference on food security in rural Wales led by the Dyfed Powys Food Resilience Project (who are holding a summit on 16 March), we considered scenarios where a community or a local authority has to deal with a sudden collapse in food supplies. How would we organise ourselves so that there was enough to go round, how would we identify the people most in need, how would we deal with panic buying?
It became clear that we have work to do if we are to create a society that can respond to such challenges with dignity and not live ‘nine meals away from anarchy’. The rudiments are already here. We do after all have people who are homeless, cold and hungry now, and we have a network of food banks, community kitchens and gardens that can help. Then there are visionary initiatives such as Our Food Trust in Powys who are rising to the challenge of ‘making food security happen‘ by setting young people up to grow vegetables on small farms. We just need the imagination to scale this up and make it a priority.
We could learn from the communities of Gaza. They are practising what in Wales we have been calling the ‘well-being economy’, and what Build Palestine calls the ‘solidarity economy’, one rooted in care and dignity. If we start supporting and learning from them, as well as getting behind food projects here at home, then we can have the satisfaction of knowing that we are doing something to protect the world from the storms that may be coming our way.
A group of people who came together at last year’s Wales Real Food and Farming Conference is talking to the Sameer Project about a fundraising collaboration based around food and farming. Please come to our webinar on Wednesday 6 May if you are interested: book here. You can donate to the Sameer Project here.
