Crips for eSims for Gaza w/ Jane Shi & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (01/22/26)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Jane Shi and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about their work organizing Crips for eSims for Gaza, a mutual aid project which has facilitated keeping countless people connected in Gaza over the past years of genocide and heightened blockade, and about lessons and legacies from Alice Wong, who cofounded the project with them.
Support Crips for eSims for Gaza here: https://chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza
And more on Crips for eSims here:
https://cripsforesimsforgaza.org/
https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2023/12/25/crips-for-esims-for-gaza/
As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Find our new Bookshop.org page here (still under construction), where you can find books by past guests and book recommendations from the hosts: https://bookshop.org/shop/deathpanel
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:33
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I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and I'm honored to be joined today by my two guests, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Jane Shi, joining me to talk about a project called Crips for eSims for Gaza. Leah is a disabled writer, editor and disability and transformative justice cultural worker. They currently organize with Crips for eSims for Gaza, and they are the author or co-editor of 11 books, including The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Tongue Breaker and Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement, co-edited with Ejeris Dixon, and the forthcoming The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, which will be out in March 2026 from Arsenal Pulp Press, a Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner and five-time Publishing Triangle shortlistee, and is currently building the Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts residency. Leah, welcome to the Death Panel.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 1:58
Thank you. I'm really glad to be here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:00
And Jane is a poet, writer, editor and organizer. Her debut collection, Echolalia Echolalia, published by Brick Books, was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. She co-founded the mask bloc, Masks 4 East Van, and currently organizes Crips for eSims for Gaza, a disability justice mutual aid collective. Her recent essays can be found in Read This When Things Fall Apart, published by AK Press, which we recently covered on the show with the book's editor, Kelly Hayes, in We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities, published by Haymarket Books, in Midnight Sun mag, and in the Disability Visibility Project blog. Jane, welcome to the Death Panel.
Jane Shi 2:36
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:38
I'm so glad that you both are here today. I'm really grateful for this conversation, and I wanted to bring us together to talk about Crips for eSims for Gaza as a project, but also to document it and to talk about how disabled people built and sustained an internationalist mutual aid project under conditions of genocide, siege, grief and ongoing responsibility to keep this work up, a very sort of living practice of endurance, and of course, also to remember our comrade Alice Wong, who was your collaborator on this project. Crips for eSims for Gaza has raised and moved millions of dollars to purchase and maintain eSims So Palestinians in Gaza can stay connected to the internet under siege, so people could communicate with family, coordinate care, share information, bear witness, talk to other people. Just get through conditions where connectivity itself has been repeatedly weaponized, targeted and destroyed. It's how we've been able to talk to our listeners in Palestine. So thank you for that. So what I'm hoping we can do together in this conversation is offer a very clear and grounded account of how Crips for eSims for Gaza came into being, how it has been organized and sustained over time, how disability justice, language, justice and mutual aid shape every part of this project, and also what it has meant to continue this work after Alice's death, while holding grief and responsibility and collective care all together at the same time. And my hope is that this conversation could be, you know, both almost like an oral history of the project, but also a resource for people who are trying to understand how their organizing can be more accountable, or how a disabled-led project can look like in practice, because this project, again, has kept people in Gaza connected when communication itself is repeatedly weaponized, and this has been done through disabled leadership, with an insistence that solidarity also has to be persistent and material and accountable. So to start us there, I just want to go back to the conditions that made this project possible and necessary. Also, I just want to begin us by situating back in late 2023 when Gaza faced intensified attacks -- which, again, are still ongoing -- destruction of infrastructure, destruction of water desalination plants, of basic sewage infrastructure, destruction of schools and hospitals, shelter. Communication networks have been repeatedly targeted. You know, hospitals have been overwhelmed or destroyed. Everyday life is unsafe in ways that go far beyond immediate physical danger. And these conditions also made it very clear -- for some people, for the first time; for many people, this is something that they've known for many years -- that Palestinian Liberation is inseparable from disability justice. The siege, the targeted destruction of infrastructure, the weaponization of debility, all create material vulnerability on a massive scale. The stakes are very embodied and urgent and immediate, and people's survival is dependent on their ability to communicate, which is part of what this project is trying to intervene in, and also to create the capacity to maintain social, familial and political networks, which are also under direct attack of the Zionist entity and part of the project of genocide. So recognizing that this reality demanded a very concrete response that could actually support life and agency in Gaza and not just express outrage, but to do so from afar, how did some of the circumstances of the moment shape your early vision for intervention and understanding of what could be done and what you were going to try and do as a group?
Jane Shi 6:06
So one of the things that happened for me personally, just seeing on the Canadian side of things, is that a few people were arrested during the Scotiabank -- what was then called the Scotiabank's Giller Prize Gala, because Scotiabank has a direct stake in Elbit Systems. And at the same time, there was this blockade on aid. Aid was not getting in. And I think that I just saw on social media that people were purchasing eSims, and that was a tangible way that people could support people on the ground in Gaza. And one of my friends, Divya Kaur, an organizer for Under the Table reading series in so-called Lower Mainland, she basically reached out to me asking, hey, do you want to like raffle stuff together for eSims? I thought that was a really great idea. And of course, sometimes life gets in the way, and so I just decided to raffle my immunocompromised people are worth protecting stickers, which I had been selling for a few years after it -- the graphic went viral, to raise funds for people who had experienced the impacts of the floods and fires in the interior in British Columbia. So I used that to raise money for eSims, and then also a little bit of legal money for the people who were arrested at the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It raised a little bit of money, and then I purchased my first few eSims. And my friend and co-organizer at the time of Masks 4 East Van, Vivian Lee, they taught me how to purchase one. Because I was like, oh, how does this work? There's so many instructions. And then, after I was taught once, I was like, okay, I understand how this works. And then I waited a few days, and then I was like, whoa, my eSims have activated. This is wild. It was just like, you know, for the first few weeks, I was feeling this sort of distance, of like -- despite having been very pro-Palestine, for as long as I've been part of movements, I've never actually done a lot of Palestine organizing work. So this was the first time where I was like, oh, wow, I'm tangibly connected to somebody. And the reason -- so, just a little bit more of context. So a few groups actually began these eSim projects. One of them was Mirna El Helbawi's project. She is an Egyptian writer, an activist, who started the group, Connecting Humanity, and she was connected to a few of the major journalists out of Gaza. And then there are other groups that we later learned about and got connected with, such as Gaza Online. Yeah, so they figured out that eSims were one of the ways that they could get people connected to the internet through using Israeli wi-fi, often on elevation. They had to -- some people pulleyed their phones to a higher elevation for safety reasons, other people up on the roof. So yeah, that's sort of how it came about for me, like how I encountered eSims. But then a few weeks later, or, I don't know how many days later, Leah and Alice reached out to me, saying, hey, why don't we make this a thing? Why don't we raise money and purchase a shit-ton of eSims, as Leah wrote in our article and, the rest is history. Do you want to add anything?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 9:59
Yeah. I can totally jump in. So this is Leah speaking. So a couple of things. One is, I mean, like Jane, I also got introduced to Palestinian Liberation and solidarity politics in my early 20s, as I got involved in radical social movements. And I've had a lot of Palestinian and Arab and SWANA friends and comrades, including a lot of whom are disabled. And it's just been 25 years of it's always bad. There's always Israeli encroachment and violence against Gaza and against Palestinians. And then there's periodic upswings where the IOF really loses their shit. But with October 7, 2023, I think a lot of us were kind of like -- we were hoping this wasn't true, but there was a feeling of like, this isn't going to be the way it was before. But at the beginning, there was this feeling -- because from the beginning of the IOF's escalated genocide, we were like, fuck, this is worse than it's been. Like, this is some real next level brutality shit. And so the feeling that I had, where I was, was that -- I mean, I agree, people felt really stunned, but also there was the feeling with a lot of the folks that I was in touch with, of, okay, they're going hard, the IOF, but if we all go really hard, we can crush this. And so for me, I think Jane and Alice and I were all connected on Twitter, online. We were aware of each other's work. Alice and me had worked together for years at that point. And, you know, I think a lot of crip organizing, Disability Justice organizing really comes from pissed off late night texts and DMs, like, what the fuck are we gonna do? And I remember, I don't know who did it first, but at some point I was just like, Alice, what the fuck, what do we do? And then I don't remember, I think Alice probably was like, well, Jane's doing this thing with eSims. And I was like, oh, wow, that's so cool. What the fuck is an eSim? I don't know. I don't travel. And it just became this idea -- but what came to me was, you know, as we've written about collectively, like the power of the Disability Justice practice of the crowdfund, right? Which, has been both for like, individual, pay my medical bills, whatever, but I've crowdfunded to help buy a friend buy his wheelchair accessible van back in the day, like pill sharing. You know, the example that really came to mind was Stacey Park Milbern, our friend and the brilliant Korean, queer, southern Disability Justice organizer who passed away in 2020, when she was buying her house in East Oakland, which she made a very much not a nonprofit grassroots Disability Justice center that she called the Disability Justice Culture Club, she was just like, all right, we need $20,000. And it was the most successful crowdfund I've ever seen. We -- she raised that money mostly from other disabled folks sending $5 or $10 in the first five days of the month after their checks hit, or just from the little we had, or like collective stuff, and we raised that barn together. And so, yeah, as Jane said, I was like, let's raise some money and buy a shit-ton of eSims, but I thought we'd raise $5,000. I really was like -- I was like -- and I also was like, maybe it'll be over by February, you know? Like the idea that it would be, as we also said, two years, what the fuck, you know? This year is just really beyond. But that was the origin story. I mean, it was really just like, what can we do as disabled people, not in spite of our disability, which also is a really big Disability Justice practice. I'm more interested in like, what are disabled-made forms of disabled resistance, right? And this definitely feels like one of them. And it might be something that I'll speak more about this later, but I think one thing -- well, I'll just say it: one thing that came up recently was that I was on a panel about care work and mutual aid, and one of the questions we got -- because the question to the panelists was like name a form of mutual aid you've been involved in, and talk about it really concretely. So I was like, oh, I want to talk about Crips for eSims. And in the Q&A, someone was like, wow, I'm really surprised that you would consider that mutual aid. And we didn't have a chance to speak to that. But I was really like, well, what else would it be? And I think -- and I don't want to assume where that person was coming, right we had no idea, right, we didn't get a chance to get to it. But Jane and -- we were talking about it, and I think, Jane, you were like, what, do they think it's charity? And I'm like, I don't know what that person thought. But what I do think is that sometimes people can fall into thinking of mutual aid as just being kind of soft and tender queer, like you bring each other soup and you're like, how are you? And like, I do all of those things. I am not a tender queer. You know, I just recovered from a major surgery, and people brought me soup, and it was wonderful. But I think sometimes people think -- can fall into thinking, oh, you know, if that's not me, how can I -- like, I'm too disabled to do that. And I think for me, Crips was very much about, like, you know what mutual aid can be? It can be disabled raising money and getting this weird ass technology of eSims to people who are then funneling the eSims to people in Gaza so they can stay connected. It really is the power of the wild ass disabled idea that happens in the middle of the night, that often, I think, happens out of frustration, where you're like, shit, you know, we can't fit into the inaccessible revolution. What are we going to do instead? We're our own revolution. Yeah, I'll stop there. That's just some -- those are some thoughts. And then, you know, as Jane said, the rest is history, and here we are, two years and change later.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:31
Yeah, no. It's wonderful to be able to share these moments of how this project came together, and that process of saying, like, I have limited capacity, I have limited physical capacity, and I have limited mental capacity, and how am I going to choose to use that toward Palestinian Liberation? And that's a very -- that's a decision that I think has been more part of the conversation the last two years than it has been previously. And I think it's really important to talk through that decision making of, I'm gonna do something else with that capacity that I have. I'm gonna take the energy that I have, and I'm gonna do what I can with the time and the energy and the capacity that I have. And this project is -- I was talking to a listener of ours who was like, this is great, because this is something we really need, but eSims as an infrastructure are not easy to use, like the purchasing infrastructure, the setup. It's a lot of mashugana and a lot of just sort of weird, technologic bureaucracy that you have to deal with. And they're like, what's so great about all these eSim projects that have popped up is that it's about material redistribution, yes, but it's about also, one, teaching people the kind of reality -- teaching people in the global north the reality of what that communication infrastructure actually is, because it's so often taken for granted, but also even when someone learns like, okay, this is the reality of charging your phone with a duct taped solar panel, taping it to a laundry pole and like hoisting it up out your bedroom window to get service using an eSim, right, when infrastructure is attacked, understanding that and understanding that reality and that sort of material reality, and wanting to support that is one thing, but actually being able to make that next step of like, and I'm going to purchase the eSim, and I'm going to figure out how to get it to someone, and I'm going to make sure to commit to re-up and keep purchasing these things, which that's why I kept mentioning sort of persistence, right? Because what we've seen, Leah, as you named, the last two years, we've seen a very persistent Zionist entity, a persistent escalation of genocide, even through a so-called ceasefire. And what I think is great is that y'all have been able to match that persistence with your commitment to not just material redistribution, which is a core principle of mutual aid, but also facilitating people's energy into being able to set up eSims, which, if we were to rely on a bunch of people individually going out and saying, I'm going to set up an eSim, and I'm going to purchase an eSim and I'm going to keep five eSims topped up -- that kind of commitment over the long haul, that kind of commitment, not just like I'm going to get you this one eSim, but we are going to figure out a source for people to rely upon these eSims, would not be possible without the kind of organizing that's happened in this project, that's happened in other eSim projects, right? But this is exactly what, as you said, disabled people are so good at. We're really good at sharing resources and finding a way to share resources in a persistent way, regardless of what the state says and regardless of what resources we're supposed to have access to, and whatever bureaucracy we have to engage with to get those resources. And so I think the kind of like being able to meet the sustained need, and being able to be persistent in meeting that need and deal with some of the facilitation that needs to happen around this bureaucratic tool, is such an important part of this organizing. And I think it's something that from the outside, you might just be like, oh, they're just fundraising, right? Maybe that person was like, oh, this is just moving money from the global north into Gaza, right? But what we're actually talking about in terms of organizing mechanics is something that's way different. So I guess I'm curious if you both would talk a little bit about that kind of recognition of sustained need and how that guided some of your choices made in those first weeks and months. And also maybe talk listeners through what exactly setting up an eSim entails, because I alluded to this, and as I saw that Jane's face had this look of recognition in also like, yeah, it is a pain in the ass. So I'm sure folks would be interested to hear from a back-end perspective, what is is involved in that.
Jane Shi 19:56
So basically, the project raised a lot of money very quickly in a way that I had never seen before, just because my experience with Masks 4 East Van and other crowdfunding never really went past a certain number. And so that meant that -- because I think that at the time, I was tasked with purchasing eSims. And then I was like, wait, I need other people to help me. I can't purchase this many eSims. Because what was happening was that I was at a holiday party, and I was purchasing Simly eSims the whole time, and then my card got dinged for fraud. And my other friend was helping had that too, because I was purchasing too many in a row, and it was out of ordinary for my credit card. And so eventually, the document of instructions for how to evade that happened, like that was created. And eventually there was a spread -- there was a time when there wasn't a spreadsheet, which is weird. There was also a time when there wasn't a Discord group, which is also weird to think about. But I was honestly just like reaching out to people I know. I was reaching out to writers I know, artists I know, people I was -- like reach -- like, I met at marches. Hey, do you want to help? Do you want to help? I'm doing a thing. Do you have capacity for this? Here's my little instruction manual that I created from scratch, because the thought of individually teaching everybody was -- like, there were people that found it more accessible for me to just have a call with them, so I did have a few. But largely, I was like, okay, please, I hope that this will help. So you were talking about -- Leah, you were talking about disability, how to create a form of solidarity that is more accessible for us and persistent and consistent, something that we can keep doing over time. And something that I found personally in my organizing experience is that I get really burnt out from interacting with people. So I think that I quickly realized that the act of like just looking at and managing a spreadsheet, this act of looking at these eSims, these boxes in my phone every day, I would even like top them up when I -- so it almost became like a stim, you know, like it almost became like, I am in the waiting room of the urgent care, I am running to the bus, I am in this social setting and I feel really awkward, I'm gonna just look at my phone. I'm not texting anybody. I'm topping up my eSims. That became something that was a ritual for me. And I think that this project created a way for a lot of people who preferred this kind of like more -- I don't know how to describe it, but just something kind of remote and something repetitive, like something repetitive that they could do, and once you learn how to do it, it's no longer that complicated. Of course, I think that there is, as you were saying, Beatrice, there's this frustrating -- one of the reasons why it was important for a lot of donors to send a lot of eSims to Mirna's project is because these Sims wouldn't work for some people in certain areas, so they would have to try another one and try another one. And so that is the kind of labor that they took on. And to some extent, we also take that on with our direct requests. But I think that the fact that the infrastructure of the project is almost like, just -- we're doing the same thing over and over again. There is no trick to it. It's just the same thing over and over again. I think I was writing in one of the articles I wrote about the project that, like, when you have a drop of water that falls on a piece of stone, the stone will eventually have a hole in it. It will have a crevice in it. And so that's what I think of eSims as. And I don't know, it's just like a form of labor that feels to me anyway, like it feels like something I can do forever.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 24:20
One thing I want to say is that all of this just evolved, right? Like, I mean, we didn't start out with any kind of two year plan of like this -- I mean, we didn't -- we were hoping that we wouldn't still be here two years later. And I think that part of the reason we are here two years later, more or less sustainably, is that we did it a bit at a time, and that we stayed open and awake to the conditions as they shifted. From when, like, oh shit, we can't post the watermelon logo anymore because Instagram decided that the watermelon is a hate symbol, and we can't say crips, and we can't say Gaza, and we can't say -- like our Instagram is literally Crisps 4 eSims. And there was a period, remember, where like -- Jane, you and other folks who are more on the ground, were making all these amazing memes that are just like, wow, they don't know that Crips for eSims is almost out of money. And all these things are like, 6-7 this, 6-7 that, why don't you send $6 or $7 to Crips for eSims? And all those things are just like -- it's not only shit that's involved in the moment, but also they're fun. And it's also us just being like, okay, fuck it. Like, here's a picture of my tits, and then I'll post about the fundraiser again so I'll reset the fucking -- you know, the algorithm. But something that was really coming to mind about sustainability, I think there's two things that come to mind for me. One is, Jane, we were talking about this recently. We were texting, like Mariame Kaba, in her Prison Culture blog that she puts out once a month, she was writing kind of a recap of like, okay, it's the end of 2025, we didn't know how it would be for Trump 2.0, here's how it's been. And she was mentioning a conversation she had with someone where the person was like, I don't feel like I'm doing enough. And Mariame was like, yeah, I think a lot of people are feeling that way. What she keeps telling people is, pick one thing and do it. And she's like, that often feels less like the right thing to do than to be like, oh my god, there's so many issues, I've got to do everything. But she's like -- she's kind of like, do one thing a mile deep instead of doing 40 things like an inch deep. And I remember, we were texting about it, Jane, and I was like, that's such an autistic way of organizing, and that's how we organize Crips for eSims. I mean, at least me and Jane, because we're both autistic. To my knowledge, you know, Alice was definitely a friend of the family, but I don't think she identified as autistic. But for me, some of the sustainability is I was like, I'm just gonna do -- I have other organizing commitments, but I was just like, yeah, I'm just gonna keep showing up for this. And just to second what Jane said, there's something about the soothing repetition of, like, it's the same shit. Like it evolves, but it's like -- it's like, you know, there's a Dunkin Donuts ad from years ago, time to make the donuts. I'd be like, time to buy the eSims. And so it really -- like, that part helped. There's some -- there's a line that we wrote together, like on our Two Years of eSims post, where we were just like -- I think, what did we say? We were like, Palestinians haven't given up, and neither will we. And also that we've learned from Palestinian concepts of persistence as resistance, and that we marry it with our own disabled crip form of persistence that sometimes is slow like a snail and sometimes lightning hyperfocuses ahead. And I think that -- I think that's an example of, like, what do you mean disabled forms of organizing? I'm like, that part, because sometimes we're just like, yep, I gotta check my eSims today and see who needs to get topped up. It's a daily practice. And sometimes like, oh, fuck, we're so in the red right now. What do we do? And it's like pa-pa-pa-pa, and it's like us in the Google document, writing an essay over like a 12 hour period. Some things I wanted to say too are that -- and this goes back to early -- early accelerated genocide, but it's continued, but definitely like early on, in particular, there was a specific way where, pretty early on, I think I personally was like, this is about Gaza living and dying, and about genocide, and it's also about trying to stay human, you know? I just was really like, as a Sri Lankan and Irish Ukrainian person living in the West, I was just like, there's a way in which the rest of the world viewing or not viewing Gaza -- it's like, it's just a big test of what can we make everybody else just look away from and get used to, right? Whereas people in Gaza have no choice. And so many people I know were just like, I mean, witnessing brutality after brutality, like the children dying in incubators in Al-Shifa Hospital, like so many tens of thousands of brutal things, and being like, how do we grow our souls, how do we stay in solidarity that doesn't kill us, where we're finally like, I can't stand it, I'm just going to look away and tune out. And for me doing this work in the ways that I've done it, and from being part of the organizing team, to also just topping up my own eSims every day, or doing my fundraising, it's helped me feel like, at the end of my life, I'm going to be able to say I did what I could and that I stayed true to my values. And I think there were so many people I know who are like, we feel like we are going into this grim time of soul death, and that's what solidarity is. Like, we fight in solidarity for Palestinian Liberation -- for Palestinian Liberation, but also for our own, right? It's that common cause. This is a round-about way -- I don't know if this makes sense, but that's part of what keeps it sustainable, and what really makes it mutual aid is that I'm not doing it to like feel good, but I am doing it to not die inside, and to be like, I'm not looking away from kin, and that helps a lot. Wait, okay, two things, then I'll stop. But I think like -- I'm just thinking about the moments of joy in the middle of it. Like I'm thinking about just the moments -- like, I remember, Jane, the first time you were like, oh, here's the map of all the places in the world people donated from, and it was almost every continent.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:20
That's so cool.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 25:06
Yeah. And this is a whole world, sitting up and standing up for Gaza, like that was beautiful. When the Itch bundle happened, and I was like, these gamers want to make RPGs to raise money -- I don't even know what the fuck is an Itch bundle is, but okay, this is -- this is wild. But I think the joy part feels really important to say, like the joy -- like the resistance is the secret of joy. You know, when Street Side Soundsystem in the UK was playing our messages and actually translated our initial essay into text and was beaming it on the side of the House of Commons, I think that if we weren't having disabled Asian joy in doing this resistance, we couldn't have kept it going.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 24:20
Something that I have been thinking about a lot is the fact that these eSim companies are created for tourism, which is a tool of colonialism ultimately, and capitalism. And they don't want us to understand exactly how the technology works. And so normally, if you're going to purchase an eSim for tourism, it's pretty straightforward, because you're looking at your own eSim. Oh, I have one gigabyte left or whatever, and that's pretty straightforward. But in a situation in Gaza, where you're remotely monitoring somebody else's eSim, that -- I think that there is something almost like -- like me having done it so many times, I understand how that works, but I think that translating that, or just offering the care of like, we will do this for you and explain that, hey, the reason that we're purchasing so many eSims is because people are being displaced. They have to relocate. They have to -- it stopped working because of the eSim corporation itself changed something big, and we had to repurchase a whole bunch. Yeah. And I just think that like the translation aspect of it, the making sure that what we're doing is as clear and concise as possible, is something that Alice really, really cared about and really persistently encouraged throughout this project, because that is Disability Justice. And that is just not leaving anybody behind in this whole process. Sometimes organizing language can be very academic. Sometimes not everyone has read the same theories, but people can understand, hey, this thing will help people upload a video, just making it really tangible. I think that -- I don't know, I just feel like that sort of commitment refuses to condescend against anybody who may be new to this movement or new to these ideas, or new to what we can do together.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 24:20
And I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about Alice, who I know we all miss very much, who is a huge part of this project. Her presence and her humor continues to inform, I'm sure, every aspect of what you all continue to do. So I'm curious if you all want to talk about one, carrying forward this work, right, and how you see that, but also to just make some space for us all to talk about Alice, because I know we all miss Alice, and she's such an important part of this project.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 24:20
I think that something that really strikes me about grieving Alice while continuing to do this work is just the fact that she really believed in this project, and really believed in me on a personal level. And that is not something that I really experience a lot from -- this is not to minimize other people that I cherish and love, but it's like there is a sort of very specific kind of being seen by a disabled Chinese auntie figure, it just -- there is like this -- like she never made me feel intimidated. She always made me feel very much like we're on the same team, like she's my neighbor who's just around the corner, giving me a wink and a nod at the things that I'm doing. She really felt like we were all doing this together. She really made me feel like we were all doing this together, and we're on the same team, and we support each other throughout all the difficulty, all the difficult things that we go through. And I think that being believed in is not something that I take for granted as someone who hasn't always had strong intergenerational support. Being in movements for many years can be difficult where you're like, oh, I kind of feel like I lost trust in you or something, or I kind of feel like I don't really -- I feel let down, or I feel unsupported. There's a lot of that that happens in broader non-disabled communities that linger in me for a very, very long time. And just kind of this grief process is making me realize how much of a sense of community during this very isolating time of this, you know, going into sixth year pandemic, it's -- like Alice made me feel, and I think that just that feeling alone, just that sense of like, oh, wow, I don't -- like, in the process of grieving Alice, I can keep this going. I can try and keep this little fire going, yeah. And I think that's really meaningful, because -- I really appreciate listening to Leah talk about all this movement history, because it feels like you're acknowledging so much of the nuances and complexity, just the everyday details of doing this work, and it feels like Alice as well is someone who brought out - like, sees that this is what you're doing, even though you're not noticing it yourself. You're taking it for granted sometimes accidentally, and so I feel like just naming it, just kind of letting ourselves feel that we have agency, and as disabled people, doing Disability Justice work, doing Palestine solidarity work, we have agency, we have wisdom. We have the capacity to change the world, just like Alice did.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 36:56
Yeah. Well, I -- [sighs] to be honest, it's like the day after my mom's death anniversary, so I'm a little shut down and having some like not able to be super articulate about grief and Alice right now. But for what it's worth, I think -- I think a lot of people, we knew, especially since her life-changing ICU situation and medical changes in 2022, that she was fighting a lot of stuff. But like, Alice, you know, when she wrote her obit in Year of the Tiger, it was like, yeah, Alice dies at 98 and she's living on the moon in an all Asian disabled punk band. And it was one of those deaths -- I've lived through a lot of disabled deaths in my life, and in the last five years, and there's some you see coming, and there's some that you don't. And with this one, it's one of the ones that's really hard for me, because I didn't see it coming and I didn't have a chance to say goodbye, like most of us. And we were -- I mean, like -- I mean, me and Jane wrote, we both felt discombobulated. For me, I had just been texting with Alice about projects, and not just Crips, but also about Disability Vulnerability, which is the third book in her trilogy. And, yeah, she'd had a lot of plans to the future. And I think -- I'm like, is this answering the question? I don't know. I'm just gonna throw it out there. Like, I think that to live disabled is both to know that the powers that be want to kill you, and also that like your body may not make it if you have a progressive disability, right? You might not have an average lifespan, you know, and it also may be cut short because of the MIC and all kinds of stuff. And to also -- so, a lot of crips I know live like tomorrow's not -- nobody promised you tomorrow, right? But that actually, simultaneously, we're holding that in one hand and in the other hand, we're like, no, we want to all live to get to be disabled elders in the typical sense of elderhood, like not -- you know, in disabled BIPOC world where like you're an elder at 40, right? I mean, one of the things that I got but I really hated was, you know, I turned 50 this year, and after she died, there were a couple of people who were like, oh my god, do we need to wrap you in plastic, like you're the last, oldest one left. And I was like, first of all, that's not true. There are disabled people older than me, including disabled Black and brown people. Do not get it twisted. But number two, yeah, like a lot -- we've lost a lot of people who we wanted to have around a lot longer. So, yeah, I'm just sitting in that grief. In terms of -- I actually hadn't heard anyone in my orbit say, oh, we feel bad moving on without her. I think what I feel and what I've taken in from folks I know is more just like, it's just an epic loss. It's just an epic fucking loss. It is an epic loss. Like she, like Sandy Ho said, nobody friended like Alice, you know? Like she was really, really good, and not just in a trivial, social way. It's like, that's how she -- like, she was a real person who built real disabled relationships and really showed love and really still modeled having boundaries and not -- and really resisted being pushed into some kind of universal mommy role, which, you know, people love to push disabled women and feminine people and disabled Asians and non-white people into, to be like, solve all my problem. I mean, she would curse you out, and she'd be like, no, fuck you. I'm gonna go have my delicious food now, bye. And it really surprised a lot of people, right? But, I think one thing, like on a good day, I think like a week or two after she passed, I was like, you know, she really did create this whole ecosystem while in the -- while she was alive, and specifically in the last like 10 to 12 years, you know, of her being really grassroots disabled activist in certain ways, of like, she mentored and saw the best in all of us and brought us up. I mean, I'm -- like, I wrote for her for the last eight years. She pulled words out of me. She believed in me. Crips was something where she believed in the project and us, as Jane said, and I don't just mean that as words. I mean that she was like -- she kind of invoked it into being. And I guess what I keep thinking is, you know, there's that quote that she left about like -- I'm gonna mangle it, but the thing that kept getting quoted about like, if somebody loves really hard, what's left is this beautiful interconnected ecosystem. That's not it, but basically, the web of what she left behind, I can look it up. And I have been left by being like, nothing can replace her. But you know, all of the thousands of disabled people whose lives were changed by her and who were mentored and loved, we're still here, and maybe we can touch the hem of collectively being like Alice. And also, she would have hated it if anyone lifts her above everybody else. And I'm not trying to do that. But just, she really birthed a lot of worlds and a lot of things into being. And I guess part of me feels just like some of the power of her love and realness is in that -- like right now anyway, I feel like we're both committed to like we're just gonna keep this going, fuck it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:57
Hell yeah.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 41:58
And like, I really mean it, she's still here. Like Suheir Hammad said the other day, "Alice lives!" And I was like, she fucking does. And right after she died -- I'm going to tell the story. Right after she died, somebody was like, you know she's gonna hunt the shit out of us. And I was -- I'd been flipping through Year of the Tiger on the toilet, you know, in a beautiful crip practice. And there's the piece that she wrote in there, like How I Spend My Caturdays and Every Day, where at the end, where she like moves us through a typical day, and then she's like, I fall -- at the end of it, she's like, I fall asleep, ready to appear in someone's nightmare [laughter]. And then, okay, so I had this hip replacement surgery six weeks ago, and I was really, really scared because I'm from an intergenerational disabled family that really -- I was really taught by my mother especially, to lie to doctors and to just -- you're always fine. You're never depressed. My mom was a polio survivor who didn't get care, and the independence, the being able to live outside of her family that she won, she won through lying and minimizing about her disability. So she was like, you're always fine, right? And so because of that, and because of the ways my disabilities play out, where there's just not a lot of medical care that works, I just was like, yep, no, I'm just gonna go learn the herbs and stuff. And then my femoral head collapsed. Like I had a vascular necrosis, so the bone just died. And I finally got a doctor, after five years, who's a really brilliant Black orthopedic surgeon, who was like, I'm really sorry no one read your scans right, but you're fucked and you need to get a hip replacement. And I was terrified I was gonna die on the table, because Stacey died after her surgery, right? A lot of our people die through treatment. And I was just -- but I was like, I can't -- you know, I almost canceled it, and then I talked to so many crip family, and Alice was like -- she really held it and she was like, I think you're gonna be okay. In the group thread, in my long distance Signal support thread, she sent a photo of her with this koala named Stacey at the zoo, and she's like, your surgery is gonna be okay. Stacey's here also. But then, okay, this isn't the haunting part. So 10 days after she died, I go downstairs and there's a fucking package in the mail to me from Alice. And I was just like -- and it's in the back of my adaptive tricycle basket in the hallway. And I'm like, oh, fuck. And she made it for me I think, you know, a week before she died, and then her sisters mailed -- like, you know, she was the queen of mail, as we've talked about, and there were a lot of letters and packages that she had ready to go in her apartment, and her sisters mailed them out. Thank you so much for doing that, if you're listening to this. And in it, among other things, she had a card -- because we had joked -- I was joking once I saw what my hip replacement was going to look like, I was like, it looks like a Hitachi magic wand. So I started calling it my sexy dildo hip. And she was like, hi Leah, I'm gonna be dreaming of your dildo hip all night long. And I was like, girl. And, you know, I mean, yeah, she made that before she died, but I think like that's -- our ancestors are not perfect, but they're powerful. And I was like, that's you reaching out to me, being like, yo bitch, tits up. Like, you know, the work continues, and so do we. And I'm staring right now at a print that a really amazing disabled Asian printmaker made of Stacey's quote, "My ancestors and I are learning and loving. Together." And sometimes that's harder to live than others, because sometimes I'm like -- like, my ancestral altar is way too thick. I'm just like I want them alive. Fuck this. I hate it. I hate it. It is not the same thing. Like, I want to just be able to text Alice some bit of gossip, or be like, oh my god, you know that white bitch, she's a problem [laughter] [inaudible] -- what food are you eating? Or you know, or she'd be like, what's going on with your love life? And I'd be like, oh, let me tell you this thing. And she's like, oh god, you know? Like, I just want that. But I do really feel like she's blessing us, and she's pushing us to do the work, but also to have -- like, I mean, she was a crip pleasure activist. She loved joy, she loved food. You know, she loved her note cards and her pens and her cats. And she'd want us to thrive, even in the middle of the pandemic, eugenic, climate crisis, fascist apocalypse that we're in. And I really feel her, and I do feel like some -- I mean, she always said, you know, one of her many famous quotes was good shit takes time. And we've written about, we've both talked about how we were working on the initial article about Crips for eSims for a while, and then released it around Christmas because we had shit come up. Jane, you wrote really beautifully in our memorial piece about how we're both Mad people and we both would miss deadlines. We're like, Alice -- I mean, it's like, Alice, I'm sorry I had a meltdown. She'd be like, it's fine. I think there's something about the steadiness and the sustainability that she modeled and practice about, like, yeah, take more time. Take the time that you need, that I feel like has just set us up to continue this work. And on a good day, I have these really excited thoughts about what happens when Gaza wins, when Palestine wins, and where wi-fi is running on Palestinian made technology, and where the relationships that have been built through Crips for eSims, like between Palestinians who use those eSims and those of us who are doing the organizing to get the money and the eSims to Gaza, when those continue, when we can travel back and forth, you know, when we have learned from this example. So like, in the -- you know, when Trump cuts off wi-fi to North America, we can figure out how the fuck to run a -- Seriously, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:58
[laughing] Yeah, no.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 47:29
You know, and when we've also learned that we actually can keep this going. I think the last thing I'll say that's like an Alice thing, and it's not, is that like something that's meant a lot to me is just hearing Palestinians say, the fact that you guys have kept it going, when a lot of people just were like -- not, not totally, but there's been some Palestine Solidarity that's like the issue of the moment and then people get bored or burnt out, or they want to -- they turn their attention to something else, or it's just too overwhelming, you know? They're like, it means a lot that you've kept it going. And I think Alice had a lot -- really developed some skills and stamina in her life, and I think that that showed up in the work and in the project. I'll stop talking. But those are -- those are my Alice ramblings.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:15
Thank you for the Alice ramblings. It really means a lot to -- I mean, she'd want us to be cracking up, you know, and it means so much to get a chance to laugh with her. Because, it's like, I think a lot of people miss Alice's very daily presence in their lives. And that -- that stamina, and that relentless love of cats, which is Bert and Ernie -- sending love to Bert and Ernie. But I think the -- also talking to our listeners in Gaza, who also appreciate the fact that Crips for eSims has continued to show up, continued to keep this project going and hasn't fizzed out, I think one of our listeners was like saying to me, you know, I would have totally understood if they ran out of energy to keep it up, and the fact that they're continuing to prioritize us means the world, because it's like, I can sort of hang on the fact that there is someone prioritizing me, even with everything going on in their life. And it's really important work, and I'm really glad that we had a chance to talk about it today. And I know we've been going on for a while now, and I want to be aware of everyone's remaining energy. Really quickly, if folks are listening and they want to help out, what is helpful, what isn't helpful, what does Crips for eSims for Gaza need right now? What could you anticipate needing in the future?
Jane Shi 49:45
So Crips for eSims for Gaza is always running a little bit low on money, partly because after -- so if you keep up like a -- if you purchase X amount of eSims, you also have to keep them topped up, so the fees just kind of continue and continue. And that's -- so we have a Chuffed which can be found on the Disability Visibility Project blog. There is also instructions for Venmo and PayPal on there for other options. For people in the UK, there is a specific link. The reason that's there is because we have volunteers in the UK and the US, and we want to reduce the amount of money we give to PayPal for exchange fees. Yeah, this -- the volunteer crew has become an international crew, and that meant that we had to learn how all this conversion fee stuff works, and how to convert between and still keep one single -- anyway, accounting. Yeah, so that's -- those are places to donate, I think, yeah, I've really enjoyed just how many different kinds of fundraisers people are putting on for Crips for eSims. The Itch bundle one was amazing because one of the gamers -- sorry, one of the game developers that I really love -- Baba Is You is a game that I really like -- this person just donated like $14,000 to the Sameer Project, and then donated their game to the Itch bundle. So I just -- anyway, it's just -- those kinds of things are always appreciated. You don't have to ask for permission. Yeah, just ongoing donations to keep us going. We have a pretty solid team of volunteers keeping things active behind the scenes, so yeah.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 51:45
I want to say that if you have any sort of platform, it's helpful to keep reposting. I mean, because we're always thinking about Crips for eSims, I'm just like, oh, people must know we're still doing it. And then people are like, oh, are you still doing it? And I'm like, oh, fuck, we have to keep reposting and being like, yes, it's still happening. It didn't go anywhere. So I think that just between the nature of algorithms and people's attention spans, and also, you know, I know that when I look at an Instagram story, I'm just like, oh yeah. And if I don't save it, it is down the memory hole in two days. So I think reposting and letting people know about what we are, like, where -- I mean, and you can have a big platform where you can have your friends, or like three people, I think that's really helpful. I will say there have been a few times where people with wider platforms have posted about us, and that was super helpful. Like, I don't know if I should name names, but they're different activists and organizers with a pretty big social media platform who reposted. And we were like, thank you so much for the influx of donations that came from that. So if you are that sort of person, feel free to do that. And, yeah, I don't know. I mean, Jane, do you want to mention, what's the email -- like I know that we have people being like, can I volunteer? And is it just Crips for eSims at Gmail that we're using?
Jane Shi 53:05
cripsforesimsforgaza@gmail.com. Yeah. I think that the Crisps4eSims is on Twitter/X is where people in Gaza can reach out to us if they need an eSim.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 53:23
Yep, yeah. And just know, you don't have to be some kind of rocket scientist to volunteer, like at all. We aren't, you know? You can just like -- you can just hang out on the Discord with a bunch of other nerds, and we'll just figure out ways of doing stuff together, and it'll be cool.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 53:29
Hell yeah.
I think that's all I got.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 53:35
I think that's a beautiful place to leave it for today, and I'm so grateful to you both for being so generous with your time and for this conversation today, and for a chance to laugh with Alice together and talk about this project. And I hope that listeners throw anything they have towards supporting Crips for eSim, doing whatever weird project is on your mind and you're interested in, just fucking go for it. We're gonna put links in the episode description for everything that we mentioned, the Chuffed and all that'll be in the episode description. And Leah and Jane and Alice, thank you so much for being with me today and for this conversation. Really appreciate it so much.
Jane Shi 54:15
Thank you so much.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 54:16
Thank you so much for having us. It means a lot.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:19
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[ Outro music: “Tezeta” by Time Wharp ]
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