What Remains of Our Humanity..

Not all visits are measured by time, nor do all places leave us when we leave them. There are places you enter and come out of as a different person, even if just a little. This is what happened during my visit to the SOS Children’s Village in Bethlehem. I thought, as many do, that I was going to a humanitarian institution filled with files, reports, numbers, and statistics about children without family care. But I discovered from the very first moment that I was heading to a quiet human exam, to a place that redefines the meaning of family, the meaning of survival, and the meaning of remaining human despite all the pain one has endured.

Before you set foot inside, you imagine an institution similar to others: offices, instructions, a cold daily routine. But you are completely surprised. You hear the sound of a child laughing as if challenging the world, see small drawings hanging on the walls, and find scattered toys that do not depict chaos as much as they express life. There, in that village established in 1968, you don't feel like you are in a "care center", but inside a profound human attempt to mend what life has broken in the souls of small beings who have only the name of childhood.

The first thing that caught my attention was the painful contradiction between the lightness of the children and the weight of what they carry inside them. Children running, laughing, and playing, but behind every laugh is a story of loss, fear, war, or absence. Some came from Gaza, specifically from Rafah, from places where the war did not leave a stone unturned nor a memory untarnished. Children emerged from under smoke and rubble to reach a home trying to tell them that not all the world is destruction.

At one moment, a small child grabbed my hand without any introductions, as if he had made a quick internal decision that this person is safe. It was a seemingly simple moment, but it shook something deep inside me. I realized then that children do not test people with words, but with feelings. A child does not inquire about your position, your title, or your political ideas, but rather instinctively asks: Will you hurt me or will you comfort me? Will you stay or will you leave like many others?

A little girl caught my attention a lot. She was the youngest of her siblings, having arrived at the village at just one year and eight months old, struggling with speech and integration difficulties. Perhaps the war had stolen something greater from her than her ability to speak; it robbed her of her first feeling of safety. But the calm care, human patience, and daily embrace gradually restored her back to life. She began to attend kindergarten, sharing toys with other children, and laughing without fear. It seemed like a small miracle, but in reality, it is the outcome of love when it turns into a daily silent action.

In this place, miracles are not made with grand speeches or big slogans. They are made with small details that no one may notice: a hand patting the shoulder of a frightened child, psychological support for a girl who fears sleeping alone, or a foster mother spending the night next to a sick child until he calms down. Here, embracing becomes a form of human resistance against cruelty.

What also provoked my thoughts is that the SOS Children’s Villages do not treat the child as a "human case" in need of pity. Pity reduces a person to their weakness, while this institution tries to see their potential, future, and natural right to life. Thus, its role is not limited to care; it extends to protecting the family itself from collapsing, through economic, psychological, and social support for vulnerable families, because saving a child sometimes begins with saving the home they belong to.

Since the outbreak of the war on Gaza, this role has turned into an existential necessity. Tens of thousands of children and families needed urgent support to regain some balance amid the complete collapse of all that is normal. But what is most thought-provoking is that the workers there continue their work calmly, away from the noise and showcase. As if they believe that the most sincere humanitarian acts are those done without expecting applause.

When I left the place, the feeling was not pity, but rather a kind of harsh internal reflection. I felt the helplessness of humanity in the face of this amount of pain, but I also realized that acknowledging helplessness is not always a weakness; sometimes it is the beginning of truth. The worst thing about helplessness is for a person to become accustomed to the scene until the pain becomes ordinary for them.

I left there thinking that children do not need the entire world, nor great wealth, nor lengthy speeches about human rights. They need something simpler and deeper: to feel safe, to find someone who will not leave them alone, and to be granted the natural right to simply be children.

And perhaps for this reason, a part of me remained there, between a drawing hanging on a wall, a child's laughter that resisted the war, and a small hand that was looking for temporary reassurance in a troubled world. There I realized that humanity is not measured by what we say about mercy, but by what we do when we face the fragility of others face to face.

Note 1: One of the families evacuated from Gaza - from the SOS Children's Village that was in Rafah before evacuation, consists of a group of biological siblings (8 children - the youngest is a girl aged 5 years and the oldest is a boy aged 13).
They lived like other children without family care in the Rafah village, but upon evacuation, they were brought to Bethlehem after their father died during the war after their evacuation to Bethlehem.

The youngest girl who arrived at the age of one year and eight months was suffering from difficulties in speaking and integration, but with specialized follow-up and stable family care in the Bethlehem village, she improved, and she now goes to kindergarten and participates in all recreational activities with her siblings and other children.

Note 2: The SOS Children’s Village in Bethlehem was established in 1968 and today includes 131 children in 24 houses. Another village was established in Rafah in 2000 but was destroyed during the war on Gaza in May 2024, and the 68 children were evacuated to Bethlehem, along with the establishment of an SOS camp to care for about 90 other children inside Gaza.