Disabled People Jury Rigging Internet Connections During a Genocide: A Thank You Note

today it’s one year since the Israeli escalated genocide of Gaza began. this is a thank you note Alice, Jane and me wrote to the 160+ volunteers who have directly worked on Crips for E Sims for Gaza and the over 20,000 people and groups who have donated. I wanted to post it here too. I don’t have a lot of words right now for what this year has been. But take this little piece of memory of one big small huge thing people have done, in the face of unending devastation.

Disabled People Jury Rigging Internet Connections During a Genocide: A Thank You Note

Dear Crips for E Sims for Gaza volunteers,

Today marks one year since the amplified Israeli genocide of Gaza began, on October 7, 2023.  When we started Crips for eSims for Gaza a few months later, Alice, Jane and Leah thought that this would be a modest fundraiser that would hopefully last a few months and possibly raise a few thousand dollars. However, Crips for eSims for Gaza has done work beyond our wildest dreams—because of you, the over 160 volunteers who have been diligently sending eSims for over 9 months, and everyone sharing our posts week after week.

Our over 160 volunteers support each other with troubleshooting the intricate and arcane web of eSims out there, and in reposting Connecting Humanity’s calls for more eSims in our renegade Discord server and on social media. We’ve created memes to circumvent Instagram shadowbanning, hacks to reduce cost, strategies for navigating the volume of eSims to track, and brought together our respective talents and communities to fundraise and send over 24K eSims and top ups. 

With all of you, we’ve raised and spent more than a million dollars CAD—far more than the few thousand dollars we initially thought we could raise. This is no small thing.

Palestinian liberation is disability justice. This work is a small piece of that work, made possible by the ingenuity and dedication of Mirna El Helbawi and her Connecting Humanity team of less than 20 people, of three disabled Asian writers in the diaspora, by everyday people like you who have even $1 and a little bit of time to spare. 

This disabled mutual aid work is a rebellious act against a hyper-capitalist, ableist world that insists we here in the west ignore our disabled kin in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, and beyond. For our disabled kin in Gaza and Jenin, we are refusing to let our disabled existence be used as cover for genocide and imperialism with every eSim we send and activate, with every cent donated. 

Our hearts go out to everyone doing this work with us, to all those who are hurting for and grieving their family members experiencing ongoing genocides, and to every person using our eSims on the ground, surviving an ongoing genocide. 

Highlights from the past nine months: 

• People donating from 50 different countries

• People raising tens of thousands of dollars just from 10 dollar donations or less

• Who donated: Artists, musicians, museum workers, drag performers, fiber artists, poets, writers, illustrators, academics, game designers, teachers, kids (!!)

• 160+ volunteers from all over the world spending an average of $5000 CAD each, sending an average of 77 eSims each

• This project inadvertently created learning opportunities and skills-building for many people (spreadsheets, accounting, credit card fraud alerts and financial institutions, eSim tech, web interfaces vs apps, sustainability, tech education, web development/coding, etc) 

• We sent eSims directly to doctors, nurses, parademics, journalists, family members, and students, from those covering the Flour Massacre and the massacres at Al Shifa Hospital to students downloading PDFs for their online classes, after their universities and libraries have all been destroyed

• Feeling worried and panicked about the safety of those we send eSims to and feeling relieved when we realize people are confirmed safe and that the eSims worked 

• Testing the limits of what eSim apps, which are mostly designed for tourism, can do, pushing them to accommodate more eSims purchases and improve their user interface 

• Received support from the Design Justice Network care pod to sustain our work/offer care to volunteers

• Translating our fundraising calls into Spanish, traditional and simplified Chinese, and Korean, and creating a tutorial for how to join our project

• Being featured on Kelly Hayes’ Organizing My Thoughts newsletter and witnessing other disabled Palestinian solidarity projects share about our work.

• Volunteers creating an unofficial meme page (@crisps4esims) to circumvent Instagram shadowbanning and to offer camaraderie and levity amidst the continuous work of sending eSims

• People around the world, with small/modest social media platforms to those with larger reaches sharing our posts, both in disability communities and beyond 

• Being a project that has inspired other disabled Palestinian mutual aid and resistance organizing

• Building a sense of community and hope against despair amongst people doing eSims volunteering and people donating and fundraising—as well as being a possibility model for wilder communities of folks wondering “what can we do?”

Latest stats: 

• 14000 eSims purchased and sent

• 12024 top ups of currently active eSims purchased 

• 4211 currently active eSims

• Estimate of total eSims activated since project began: over 10K

• $1.29 million dollars CAD ($948K USD) raised 

• $1.28 million dollars CAD ($945K USD) spent 

• Monthly cost on keeping currently eSims active: at least $110K CAD 

• Additional minimum funds we need to raise to keep sending new eSim: $33K CAD

When we started this project, the three of us, Jane, Leah, and Alice, weren’t sure how long it  would continue, how long we had capacity to keep it going and how it would change and grow. Being in conversation with each other and being in community with all of you helped guide our decision-making and our collective ability to keep this work going. This project takes a lot of work, however,  our commitment to mutual aid and to the liberation of Palestinians remains indefinitely as the genocide reaches its one-year mark.

 It is overwhelming to think of the protracted death, suffering, and violence but knowing we are part of a broader movement helps. We are powerful together and are filled with gratitude to be in solidarity with all of you. History will remember that in a time of genocide and despair, disabled people and allies from around the world came together to jury-rig a telecommunications network that saved lives.  

We send this thank you note with the deepest respect and gratitude for your part in being a part of that solidarity, love and resistance.

With love, respect and resistance, 

Jane, Leah, and Alice

For more readings, check out the Palestine x Disability Justice Syllabus

ID: Graphic with a white background and yellow elements such as dots and squares. At the top in cursive, THANK YOU. 3 cropped photos from left to right: Leah, a mixed-race Sri Lankan and white  nonbinary femme  in their late 40s with teal curly  hair, sand color skin and big metal glasses, looks contemplatively and with a slight smile at the viewer.  Their hair matches the teal wall behind them, and their dark hot pink lipstick matches the hot pink velvet couch heaped with cushions behind them. They wear a black t shirt with the sleeves cut off and a gold hoop earring that reads “Burn It Down,” one double spiral tattoo is visible on their right shoulder.Jane, a person with pale-tan skin with her body away from the camera but her face smiling towards it. She’s wearing a blue jean jacket that reads “Nobody Loves You” in the back, embroidered in white calligraphy. Her hair is nearly shoulder-length with dark red highlights at the end and she’s wearing large round black-gray glasses. The background is a park during the day-time. Photo credit: Joy Gyamfi. Alice, an Asian American woman in a wheelchair with a tracheostomy at her neck connected to a ventilator. She’s wearing a pink plaid shirt and pink pants. She’s smiling and behind her are a bunch of trees. Photo credit: @allisonbusch_photography.