Today is my birthday, a big one, and the world is shit. After last week's gutpunch of an election, I don't feel much like celebrating, but I do feel like trying to do something hopeful.

Lately I've been reminding myself to remember what Mariame Kaba says: "Hope is a discipline and we have to practice it every day." In hopeless times like this, it's important to remember: you have to work at having hope.

For the last year, like the rest of you, I've been watching the ever-more-dire, ever-more-hopeless situation in Gaza. The daily bombings, the hundreds of thousands dead, the utter destruction of homes and schools and hospitals. It is a nightmare without end.

And yet, from among the rubble of the atrocities there, I've found an incredible amount of hope in the Gaza Skate Team.

Rajab gives a hi-five to a young skater in this pic from their instagram. In the caption, he writes "How beautiful childhood is, you find innocence in their smiles and simplicity in their dealing."

The Gaza Skate Team was founded by Rajab al-Reefi and some friends a few years ago. Since the bombing began, Rajab and his team have been working to bring a little bit of happiness to kids who have lived through too much. In the background of every picture they post on their Instagram is destruction, but the foreground is filled with pure joy on kids faces as they try out a skateboard.

A few years ago I wrote "I've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first," and it's true. Even though I haven't been on a board in a minute, it's a part of me that will never leave. A big part of that is the freedom I felt as a child on a skateboard; being able to navigate the city, to see it as a series of obstacles to overcome, it changed me forever.

In an interview with GQ Middle East, conducted just before the horror of October 7 and the nightmare that followed, Rajab reflected on the role skateboarding plays for him: "Skateboarding, for me, is the most important thing I have. It offers me and my friends freedom—I get to feel like a bird in this prison we are living in."

Rajab addresses a group of kids in this still from from an instagram reel.

The children that flock to the Rajab and the Gaza Skate Team don't deserve the hell they are living through. No one does. They deserve to be kids like I was, like you were. I love that Rajab and his friends, in the absolute worst conditions possible, are trying to give kids a sense of freedom and hope, even for a moment.

We live in hopeless times. Anyone practicing the discipline of hope, and spreading that hope to others—especially to kids—deserves praise and support.

And so, for my birthday, I'm asking you to donate to Rajab and the Gaza Skate Team's Gofundme. He's only a few thousand Euros from hitting his goal, and I think we could get there, today.