The Architecture of What Remains: Farah Al Helo

Farah Al Helo measures time in fragments.

A semester that ended mid-sentence.

A home left behind without locking the door.

A calendar filled with drawings, not dates.

She is 22, in the final year of studying architectural engineering, a discipline meant for structure, for form, for future. But what she lives now has none of that. What she draws now is not theoretical. It is personal. Collapsed buildings, broken streets, faces blurred by dust.

“I worked on academic projects that reflected the cultural essence of my city,” she says. “The true identity of Gaza; its beauty, simplicity, and architectural richness.”

But even beauty here is fragile. Gaza, she says, exists in layers. You peel one back and find memory. Peel another, and find grief. She sketches both the buildings and the absences inside them.

There was a day, early in the war, when she stood still. The silence in her body louder than the noise outside.
That was the day she lost her university. Her neighborhood. Her rhythm.
That was also the day she picked up a pencil.

Her first painting after displacement wasn’t clean or composed. It trembled. It didn’t try to make sense of anything. It simply said: I am still feeling.

“I realized I still owned something no one could take from me.”

Farah draws like someone remembering in real time. She draws the places she walks through as if she’s afraid they’ll vanish by morning.
And often, they do.

She drew an illustrated calendar while displaced - a year that should have been her last at university. She filled it with scenes from her unraveling: the waiting, the walking, the pausing before looking back. She never printed it. She couldn’t. But it exists. That’s what matters.

This isn’t resilience.

This is what it looks like when a mind trained to build must sit with destruction, and still make something from it.

Sometimes, she writes. Sometimes, she meditates. She draws when she can. Other times, she doesn’t because even creating can feel violent when your world is burning.

She doesn’t claim strength.

She claims space.

In sketchbooks. In memory. In linework and light.

And being a woman in this war means carrying silence differently.

It means moving through fear with your shoulders squared.

It means trying to hold both your grief and your body with care while the world asks you to carry more than either can hold.

“Through my art and dedication, I proved that a woman’s voice in war is no less powerful than any weapon.”

Farah does not shout. She draws. She listens. She endures in ways that can’t be counted but only felt.

“Even if everything around me changes,” she says, “I still have the ability to create something beautiful.”

Farah’s story is not a clean arc from despair to hope. It is jagged. It is unfinished.

She dreams of rebuilding her city, not just in form, but in feeling. A Gaza made of colors that no longer have to come from pain.

And to the world, if it’s listening:

“We are not just numbers on the news. We dream, we love, we create. We teach life, sir.”