Studying in the Eye of the Storm (From a Distance)

It feels… surreal every single day. I wake up here, in my room in Cape Town. The mountain is visible sometimes, shrouded in mist, and there is the usual student buzz outside—people talking about classes, assignments, and weekend plans. And I go to UWC. I sit in lectures, open textbooks, and try to focus on theories and concepts that suddenly feel utterly detached from reality—my reality.

Because my reality is also... Gaza. Simultaneously. All the time.

Six months. I lived through six months of the genocide. Saw things. Felt things. Heard things. The kind of things that carve themselves into your soul and rearrange your understanding of the world forever. Then, a path opened, a chance to come here, work, study, and be safe. And I took it. Part of me knows it is important, necessary even, for the future, rebuilding, having a voice that perhaps the world might listen to a little more readily from here than from there. But another, louder part of me screams with guilt.

How can I sit here, in a quiet library, surrounded by books and the mundane comfort of stable electricity and readily available food, when my family… my mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, my friends… are living minute by minute? How can I read about history, economics, or computer science when their history is being destroyed before my eyes, their economy is non existent while the only computing they care about is whether a signal might briefly appear to send a single, life-affirming text message?

The hunger pangs they must feel, the gnawing, constant hunger. It is not just a physical sensation; it is a terror. Knowing your children are starving, and you have nothing. Nothing. This thought haunts me during lectures. I stare at the professor and hear the words. Still, my mind is conjuring images of empty shelves, distended bellies, and the sheer panic of not being able to feed the people you brought into this world.

And the danger. Oh, God. Every single second. Will today be the day the building falls? Will the drone strike hit their shelter? Will the sniper take a shot? The fear is a physical ache in my own chest, a mirror of the constant, bone-deep terror they must be living with. A phone call, when it rarely comes through, is a tightrope walk between desperate relief that they are still alive and the agony of hearing the weariness, the fear, the lack in their voices. They try to be strong for me, I know. And I try to sound strong and hopeful for them. But we both know the truth.

Being here feels like a betrayal. A profound, agonizing separation. Yes, I can work on PalestinianCauses from here. I can help amplify voices, build the platform, and connect with people outside. This work is fueled by everything I lived and everything my family is living now. It's the only way I can make sense of being here, that this distance isn't just comfort for me but a tool for them, us, and our future.

But the internal storm is relentless. The guilt is a heavy cloak. The worry is a constant knot in my stomach. I see students complaining about Wi-Fi speed or exam stress, and a part of me wants to scream. Don't they know? Can't they see? Is it really possible to exist in such parallel universes?

Studying here is not a privilege I can basically enjoy. It is a responsibility that is crushing me. It is a race against time. A race to acquire skills, build networks, and strengthen PalestinianCauses so that if my family survives, if our people can return and rebuild, there will be something or anything tangible to contribute.

Every theory I learn, every line of code I write, feels stained with the dust and blood of Gaza. It is an education paid for with suffering. I carry Gaza with me into every classroom, every meeting, every quiet moment of study. It is the ghost in the machine, the unwritten chapter in every textbook, the silent scream behind every academic discussion.

This is the weight of witnessing from a distance. This is what it feels like to study at UWC while my home, family, and people are being destroyed. It is a complex, unbearable burden, lifted only slightly by the desperate hope that it can, somehow, be turned into a tool for justice, for rebuilding, for a future where such a diary entry would be an artifact of a terrible past, not a reflection of a brutal present.

The ink feels heavy tonight. The thoughts are a tangled mess. But this is the truth, unfiltered. This is my diary from the eye of the storm, far away yet inextricably bound.