Crafting hope under fire, story of Karima Afana
Standing a few meters away from the children’s courtyard at Abdul Rahman bin ‘Awf School in Gaza City, Karima stares at the youngsters as they play alongside her fellow volunteers. A single word flutters in her heart: hope—the very hope and belief that filled the hearts of her young peers at the “Together For Hope”.
Karima Afana is a 24 young leader from North Gaza. She has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Al-Azhar University in Gaza. Her first experience of displacement began on the sixth day of the war. In Gaza, displacement becomes a repeated ordeal, so no one is displaced just once. She now shelters in the “Hassan Salameh” school, which she had believed to be a safe refuge—until it too was targeted while she was inside, making her tragically “part of the scene,” as she coined.
“To Be in the Scene!”
“I used to see schools being bombed and targeted on a screen, but never did I imagine I would one day be part of the scene,” Karima says, her voice tinged with longing. She misses the comforts of her former life: the hiss of the home gas valve that most women in the besieged city now never hear, the bustle of traffic at Gaza’s main crossroads, the familiar scent of home and the warmth of family on winter nights—instead of countless displacement nights among tattered desks.
“I miss my friends who are now so far away,” she confesses, reciting the memories she yearns for, before the war. Yet she finds solace in remembering that her family is still surviving and alive.
As soon as the Social Developmental Forum (SDF) announced launching the “Together For Hope” network, Karima did not hesitate to sign up. She had earlier joined the fifth cohort of “Yalla Change,” a program that aims to foster youth leadership and agency in development, but the war deprived her, along with the entire cohort, of the opportunity just short before the program’s launch.
Read: “Together Towards Hope (T4H)”: A determined youth network in Gaza
Being part of the T4H network has been transformative for Karima. “The training we received in the early phase of establishing the network added immensely to my practical and academic knowledge of working with teachers and children, and it sharpened my peer-education skills,” she says.
Given her community-work background with various organizations, Karima believes that this is an invaluable opportunity. “My expertise has only grown by applying in practice all the theoretical information we learned,” she adds.
By children, with children
After completing a comprehensive training program that brought together network members and teachers at SDF’s learning spaces, Karima participated in the inauguration of two learning spaces by the Social Developmental Forum (SDF) in partnership with UNICEF.
“The inauguration was truly special and different,” Karima says, recalling how she helped welcome young students. Smiles never left their faces when they first saw the well-designed new learning space at Palestine and Abed Al Rahman Bin Awf schools, stocked with educational posters, books, worksheets, and fresh stationery—an instant reminder of the classroom environment they had missed.
Alongside her fellow volunteers and the teachers, Karima also helped organize the space’s contents and finalized all logistical arrangments. Once everything was in place, she led recreational activities to engage the children in the new educational atmosphere.
The children have been deprived of their most fundamental right—education. The war has gone on for over 400 days without schooling, and returning them to desks, even if just in a tent, is such an important step. It gives us, as young people, renewed hope and pushes us to try harder and help more.
These matters a lot to me, Karima says about her role in the learning space
She adds, “We were welcomed with tremendous engagement from the students. They showed an eagerness to learn, sat properly at desks and chairs as they used to before the war, and participated in structured recreational activities. This resilient approach to education is just inspiring.”
One of Karima’s favorite chapters of this experience was meeting and working closely with the other young volunteers. “Because we all share the same ordeal—hunger, displacement. We managed to leave all this apart, if only for a couple of hours, to immerse ourselves in a different setting during training, where we connect with our peers, try new things, help out, and learn new skills.”
She adds, “I met so many wonderful young leaders with enthusiastic spirit and diverse talents. We exchanged skills and created platforms for each other. Within our network, this was insightful, but on a larger scale, during the launch of our network’s learning space, I also connected with other members of the SDF. It was the opportunity I’d always aimed for: to meaningfully engage in the SDF’s family.”
Karima believes that being part of the “Together For Hope” network as a member of the SDF’s broader youth network is a remarkable milestone to keep striving, to live out the very hope the network stands for—despite the circumstances she has been enduring in northern Gaza, the hunger, and the siege. From there, she sends messages of hope all the way to the south, to fellow volunteers she has yet to meet in person.