Soda: Season 2, Episode 4 of My Life as an Ansari
I have a delightful encounter at a local restaurant
Here is Season 2, Episode 4 of this article series — the story of my personal experiences and struggles as I became an Ansari (Helper) of Gazan refugees (Muhajireen). List of all episodes can be found here.
In the days following the days-long scare with my brother in Gaza, I settled back into my previous routine. Various psychosomatic symptoms of anxiety continued as usual in my body — my hairline receding due to accelerated hairfall, my eyes being impacted by stress, and my wrist not recovering fully, leaving me unable to hold even mildly heavy objects using it.
While these long-term manifestations of stress continued, I still did manage to continue my recent streak of improved daily routine, Alhamdulillah. I stuck to a basic morning routine, which was good for my self-esteem and stress levels. I consciously ate more food to avoid my usual under-eating, and Alhamdulillah, my weight slightly began to improve from being underweight (as the body weight machines at my office kept showing me). Despite my all-over-the-place activism for Gaza throughout the day, this I managed to stick to, Alhamdulillah.
Watching that video (about Muslims needing to check in on their brothers) had made me reach out to my brother in Cairo, ask about him, and offer to have a call to catch up. He had already postponed the call once. When I contacted him at our agreed date that weekend, at the start of August, he postponed it again, and did not call me back when he said he would.
I reached out to him a few days later, checking in with him, asking about his arm and if there was any news about his family in Gaza. He replied, thanking me for asking about him. He told me that he would need to wait and see if his arm’s bone re-formed fine without surgery, or if it would require surgery. He apologized about the call a few days back, saying that it was not because he had been busy or anything, but just because he was feeling “something like depressed or stressed”.
He said that he’d been able to contact his family members in the south of Gaza, but not those in the north of Gaza, with no internet there nor calling facilities.
“Wallah, my brother, my heart is broken. My heart is broken,” he said. He said he felt very depressed because they didn’t have a lot to eat or for other things. He prayed to Allah for their protection.
I replied, praying for his arm to be healed without needing surgery, and for his family and their rizq. I told him that it was no problem about our call, that I could imagine the situation for him. And I reminded him that Allah was with him. And I told him he could call me anytime he felt the need to talk to a brother.
Another person I hadn’t had a call with was … my brother in Gaza. Ever. Despite having known him for so many months, despite texting him and stressing for his life multiple times, we had never actually spoken to each other over a voice call. Only text messages. I had not taken his offer to talk that day around Eid, and since then we’d never had the chance to have a voice call — Alhamdulillah in every situation.
After the nearly week-long hiatus of communication between us, we texted each other normally over the coming few days. His family moved back into their camp with him, so Alhamdulillah he was no longer alone. He asked about me and I told him about my struggles with my wrist, which hadn’t fully healed since almost a year now, and being able to do only light exercises because of it. He encouraged me to keep going with exercises for my wrist. He shared an amazing video of an Arabic poem being recited, which was a reminder of Allah’s ultimate control and the inevitability of death. I loved that poem and listened to it a bajillion times.
Yet in the days following that, his response frequency began to decline again, with me having to wait for days for his responses. I felt a strange … longing for his responses, while waiting. I didn’t understand too deeply about my anxious-avoidant attachment style at the time, but my anxiousness seemed to get triggered by the gaps in his responses. Maybe it was because my attachment style had gotten used to being triggered and repeatedly fearing for his life. And waiting for him to text me back, even without the panic of his life being in immediate danger, felt a bit testing for me.
As I publish this post, the engineered famine rages on. Are we even listening anymore? Normalized, so normalized is their intense pain for us. Starvation from below and bombs from above.
What to do?
We must do whatever we can. Act. At the very least, work to have an excuse in front of Allah. Do what is in your capacity; that is what you are responsible for in front of Allah.
Donate. Whether or not you can donate, pass on these links to at least one person. Do something.
Reviving Gaza (I really endorse them; I’ve met the people behind them): Instagram (see their work): instagram.com/reviving.… | Donate to them online: chuffed.org/project/123…
Relief 4 Palestine: Instagram (see their work): instagram.com/relief4pa… | Donate: gogetfunding.com/gaza-d…
Jazakum Allah khair for donating; may Allah reward you in this life and the next for your efforts. Make dua for your brothers and sisters undergoing this difficult trial. May Allah keep their hearts firm upon iman with patience, bless them in their rizq, give them safety and security, and destroy our enemies, the enemies of Allah.
A small but delightful incident happened with me. I went with my family to a local restaurant chain (obviously local — we’re not giving our money to the tax-paying businesses of certain genocide-supporting Western countries, as much as we practically can, Alhamdulillah). We ordered, and I forgot to tell the guy at the counter to cancel the soda / soft drink that came as part of the meal. We’d anyways been boycotting this popular soda / soft drink brand for years, but especially now with the genocide, buying and supporting this genocide-supporting soft drink feels just criminal.
Now, whichever country I’m based in (I won’t say which country), public calls for boycotting are not allowed. You can’t publicly organize or call for such things. When the food arrived and I went to the counter to pick it up, I returned the soft drink, simply saying that I don’t drink it. That was all I said. When I returned to the counter to order some side items I’d forgotten, the guy at the counter, by himself, also gave me a tin of what looked like the same soda / soft drink brand. I almost turned it down, but the guy at the counter pointed out that it was a local alternative to that brand. I was … a bit taken aback. I normally would’ve turned even that down, as such soda / soft drinks are full of ridiculous amounts of added sugar, terrible for health. But this time, I accepted it happily.
Remember, in the country where I’m based, supporting boycotts publicly and openly is risky. While many, many people do boycott on their own, unfortunately there are still many people who don’t boycott, out of ignorance or otherwise. It can sometimes feel like many people don’t appreciate the need to boycott.
I hadn’t even said the word “boycott”. No one even mentioned Palestine. But the guy on the counter knew. And I knew. Inside, I was on cloud nine; I was walking on air. Grinning as I came back from my new comrade, I filled in my family about what had just happened. Clearly, the boycott really was so popular in my area, that the guy at the counter just knew. It really was popular where I was, growing organically even without public organizing or announcements about boycotting. And that made my day. Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah!
I asked my brother in Cairo if he had shifted from his current accommodation, now that his roommate had emigrated, and he could no longer afford his current house alone. He told me he was looking for a new house. He was hoping to live with some other Palestinian in a similar situation as him.
“It is not good when you live alone,” my brother in Cairo said. “It’s not good, wallah. It’s better to live with someone.” Doing things together with a roommate and being friends with them — that’s what he was looking for. Additionally, he told me that he was looking for a safe place; especially because of his health condition, he did not want to live somewhere unsafe.
I asked around. I messaged Hafsah about my brother in Cairo looking for a new apartment, hopefully with a Palestinian roommate; she said she knew a few people living there alone and would ask them. I messaged Karima as well, and she said that she would, In Sha Allah, ask around. I messaged the Ansar too, explaining to them about my brother in Cairo, his situation, and what he was looking for; I asked them if they knew a house listing website or a house recommendation. One of the Ansar replied to me that they would ask around.
In the meanwhile, I myself wanted to change my own house too. The house that I was living in was the same one that I had been born into, Alhamdulillah, but it was very distant from my workplace, and the commute time (sometimes taking an hour, one-way, and sometimes another hour coming back) was really draining me — especially given my outside-of-work aspirations that I was looking to do as well, including Palestine activism, plus this very blog, too.
And on this Rising Muslims Substack, I began writing this very article series of My Life as an Ansari. Around the start of August 2024, I was just publishing Season 1, Episode 2: Leave Palestine Alone — only about 3 months behind real life events, at the time. I had for a while been daydreaming and planning out the narrative in my mind, how I would tell only the truth, but at the same time how I would build the narrative and frame the storytelling. As a writer, this topic was very interesting to me, and I began thinking a lot about it. Daydreaming, mapping it out, planning — here and there throughout the day. My initial posts took quite some time as I was finding my way, but this felt like a story I should tell.
To be continued, In Sha Allah, in Season 2, Episode 5: Niyyah Challenges