I am Palestinian, but I have never been to Jerusalem. My father described its beautiful narrow streets for years on end. I have also never been to Yafa. My mother described the smell of its oranges so vividly I could almost smell them.
I lost both my parents five years ago and they were never able to go back to see Jerusalem and Yafa.
I have been working across the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, over the past decade. And I have heard stories like mine more than I like to admit.
The stories people carry are what stay with me in my work, their insistence on dignity in the face of everything. Because here, in this region, crisis is not a moment. It is our daily life, and these stories are what give the humanitarian work its meaning; whether we are building infrastructure, providing clean water, or offering psychological support, community protection, and cash assistance to those who need it the most.
Let me tell you about Yasmin. I met Yasmin in a camp in Lebanon. She was 16 and had been displaced for years, living within the tight constraints of camp life, but speaking with a certainty that stayed with me.
“I am a mentor myself,” she said.
There was something in the way she said it that felt familiar. That refusal to wait. That decision to define yourself, even when everything around you is uncertain. She learnt wherever she could and then shared it, sitting with other women and girls, making sure knowledge did not stop with her.
I recognized that instinct. The need to hold onto something that is yours and to pass it on.
And then there was Asma. Asma in Yemen had faced life-threatening pregnancy complications, with no access to healthcare and no financial means to reach it. By the time support reached her, the situation was critical.
‘Without this [support], I don’t know how I would have survived”, she said
Her words stayed with me because they are about something so fundamental. Not policy, not programmes, but pure survival. It made me think about how often dignity is reduced to something abstract, when in reality it can be as immediate and real as this: being able to reach care, to live, and to continue.
Sara from Gaza lost 16 members of her family during Israel's genocide on Gaza. She was injured by Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate bombing and displaced and separated from her children. The scale of loss is difficult to comprehend. But you know what Sara did? As she regained some sense of relative normalcy, she started supporting other women, sharing her experience, and helping them navigate their own grief.
There is something deeply familiar in that, too. The way people hold each other up, even when they themselves are carrying unbearable weight.
In Syria, the situation remains challenging for many after more than a decade of war. Rana, a great friend of mine, told me how she suffered for years trying to find clean water easily. She struggled a lot to access this basic human right. I won’t forget how her eyes lit up when she described her joy after finally receiving fresh, clean water. She told me, “I feel everything is much easier now. I am alive!”
Across all these stories, I keep coming back to the same thing.
Dignity is not something distant or abstract. It is something people insist on in how they learn, how they survive, how they care for one another, and how they hold onto what matters.
And sometimes, what organizations like Oxfam can do is simple but essential: stand alongside people, create space where it is missing, and recognize the voices that are already shaping change.
Because dignity is not something we deliver. It is something people hold onto in displacement, even in loss, when everything else is uncertain.