Two Sisters From Gaza Who Chose to See a Beginning | Tala and Farah Mousa | SitWithAqsa | Episode 14

Episode 14 - releasing early because some stories can't wait. I went from knowing about Palestine, to crying about Palestine, to feeling helpless seeing Palestine, to raising my voice silently, to boycotting, and to now helping bring their story forward. All I feel is humbled and grateful that God chose me. Tala is 17 and Farah is 15. Two sisters who grew up in Gaza and like many of us, serve as each other's confidant. They have a brother too but as Tala said, you know how it is with sisters 💅🏼 and that is basically why when the idea of Build Hope came to her, the first person she ran to was Farah. Let me go back a little. August 2025. Their home was bombed. Not once, not twice, but five times. Tala carries everything she owns in one backpack because even now, living in a tent, she still does not know what the next minute holds. And yet, this teenage fervor in her got the better of her when she opened her school textbook and found hope. Not just the word but the feeling of it. Hope to not give up and hope, as Tala would put it, of seeing everything around them as a beginning of something new. I know you can find everything about their project online and every channel has covered it. But here I want to give space to two teenage girls who gave their family, and most importantly their grandfather Samer, a chance to yearn for Gaza again. A free Gaza. When I asked Tala about the moment this idea came to them she made sure to tell me it was not a pleasant story. And you know what humbles me to this day? That this 17 year old girl, in the middle of everything, still cared about not making me sad. She talked about the displacement, the sadness, the melancholy, the wave of depression that surrounded them, and how a textbook idea, literally, made her and Farah choose to rush to their mother rather than surrender to what was around them. Before any prize, before any recognition, this idea was mostly a gateway. A way out from the reality they were forced to look at every single day. And I use the word choose deliberately because when you give yourself that freedom to choose, to go against everything telling you to just wait for the next destruction, there is a power in it. A power that stops the world from being able to define itself for you. You know what my favourite part was? Imagining these two girls running to their mother Samar, an industrial engineer, who helped them see it practically and understand what it could become. And you know what the chef kiss moment was in all of this? Their grandfather Samer, who was more excited than they were. These teenagers, so self-aware of their own inexperience, went to him and in doing so gave him something I do not think they even fully realized they were giving. Relief. Relief in his two young granddaughters who wanted to teach the youth, the women, how to be self-sustaining and rebuild their Gaza with their own hands. And then they did exactly that. They built their prototype in the outdoor space next to their tent, the same place where their family cooks and does the laundry. The first time they built it for someone else was when winter knocked their neighbour's tent down and their blocks ended up stabilising it. Out of 6,095 teams across 169 countries, Build Hope Palestine went on to win the Earth Prize 2026. But what moved me was not the number. It was that before any of that, two girls in a tent were already using what they built to protect the people living right beside them. We see the destruction online and we lose hope. We break from the idea of ever seeing Gaza whole again. But Tala described how the people of Gaza love living. How they want to grow. How they are more capable than all of us combined. They yearn for normal while we dread having one more day of it. Tala dreams of studying international law, of becoming a lawyer or an ambassador for Palestine. Farah dreams of studying translation so she can carry Palestinian stories to the world in other people's words. These are not extraordinary dreams. These are the same dreams people like you and me have. And I say that deliberately because so often when we see things online we unconsciously start giving them a different version of what normal means. But these girls are just like us. Like our daughters, like our sisters. This is the story of Tala and Farah and their family. But it is also the story of the oppressed looking the oppressor in the eye, undeterred, and rebuilding the home that was taken from them.   / buil.dhope     / talamousa0     / tala-mousa-7b8368381