I forget exactly where I saw the initial post asking for volunteers, but on July 10th, I reached out to the listed email. Jane, the organizer, got back to me right away and within an hour I was added in their discord.
Up until this point, I had been maintaining an average 8 ESims myself, so I already had experience checking in on them on a daily basis. The folks there helped me onboard with the spreadsheets for keeping track, and now it’s very easy for me to catalog new ones I buy and record daily data usage. The whole process takes me maybe 20-40 minutes a day depending now on how many ESims actually need to be topped off.
Jane has been very up front with lots of the group’s information, with frequent announcements about the groups current funds and amounts of daily ESims sent out. She and the others have been super helpful with getting funds to us when needed, and I’ve almost never had to actually spend any of my own money for any of this.
In the time that I’ve been volunteering, they figured out how to run a Business account with the Nomad ESim company. Which means that now and then they can just send 15 or so ESims my way, and I just catalog them and send the QRcodes towards Mirna and the Connecting Gaza folks. No more wasting time with the purchasing process, while getting a bit of a bulk discount on top of that.
We also share updates on whatever brand of ESims are most needed. When folks on the ground tell us that one network doesn’t seem reliable, we are able to switch over for a while until either the networking issue is fixed, or we all pressure customer service enough to replace them for us.
There’s also lots of complaining about new UI updates an general website bugs. There’s surprisingly a lot of them and it’s good to know other folks are getting info from customer service when things go wrong.
In August they made a meme channel
Anyways….
Lets get into some stats for myself. In 2 months (July 10- Sept12) I have:
Send off 171 ESims
Maintained around 60 active ones
Topped up these active ESims 139 times
Spend over $6400 donated dollars
I have multiple power users who have burned through close to 100GB. 2 of them have broken 200GB. These are most likely being used as hot spots.
Why am I sharing all of this? Mostly to show how easy it has been to make a marginal difference. I have helped at least 60 people stay connected with the outside world in just 2 months. Probably more if we assume some of the power users becoming hotspots for other folks. This is 20-40 minutes of my time a day, and I honestly regret not signing up to do this sooner.
I was specifically limiting myself to this workload because I wanted to test the waters. Those stats was me specifically not wanting to push myself and see what impact a normal person could make with 20 minutes a day. At this point I think I will be taking more advantage of Nomad’s Tuesday discounts to really bulk up my numbers. It’s pretty easy to buy 15 or so every Tuesday, and then send em over.
If you would like to join us in this endeavor, please reach out to Jane at cripsforesimsforgaza(at)gmail
We are specifically looking for people in European time zones, since a lot of us are in the Americas and that’s quite a difference between us and Gaza. If not, that’s no problem!
If you can’t participate, that’s totally fine, but please donate what you can! Folks like you are the ones who keep us going!
I hope this information has been useful in some way. Like I said, I wish I had heard about this group sooner, with how easy it has been to do. I can track my direct impact of what my daily time is doing for folks, and seeing the data be used up a little bit more day by day gives me hope for everyone in Gaza.
Thank you for your time.
Anonymous
