Pen Thoughts

Rot and Renewal, week nine. What I concluded about organisations in January 2020, and what six years did to that conclusion. The road to Riad el Solh The uprising began on the evening of 17 October 2019, after the government announced it would tax petrol, tobacco and WhatsApp calls. I wanted to go that first night. My wife Jihane asked me not to, and I stayed home. By the second evening staying home was not possible. I apologised to her and took the car, a Jeep Liberty assigned to me by the organisation I worked for, which turned out to be the right vehicle for that road. I had never seen my own city look like that. Rubbish containers burning in the middle of the carriageway. Roadblocks every few hundred metres. The smell of fire and burnt tyres. Darkness, because the power was cut, so the only light came from whatever was alight. I drove at walking pace, bumping over rocks and shredded tyres and whatever else angry people had dragged into the road. There were people standing on b...

  Rot and Renewal, week eight. Two institutions that came back, and the difference between the two ways it happened. The road south On the night of 29 November 2010 I drove into the south of Lebanon for the first time in my life, following a location someone had sent me on Google Maps, which most of us had only started using that year. I had been driving for close to two hours and still had half an hour to go. The phone was the only thing that knew where I was going, and the phone was dying. I stopped at a kiosk in a village whose name I never learned, in an area I had been quietly warned about all my life. I asked if there was somewhere to plug in a charger. A man showed me the socket, then brought me a bottle of water I had not asked for. Ten or so men were sitting in front of a television. I looked up to see what they were watching and it was the Clásico. Barcelona were dismantling Real Madrid at the Camp Nou. It finished five goals to nothing. I stayed for it. I laughed wi...

  Rot and Renewal. Twenty years in this sector, and a question nobody at the table wanted. The table was the first thing I noticed. One slab of wood, beautifully made, longer than my office. The chairs were hydraulic, with a lever under the seat so you could raise or lower yourself, and I remember thinking I would like one of those for my desk. Then I thought the table had probably cost more than I earn in a year. Then I decided to stop thinking about the table. This was a sector coordination meeting on livelihoods and social stability. Thirty or so project coordinators, sector leads, a few technical advisers. Everyone spoke English. Not because English was anyone's first language, but because it was the only way to be certain that no international colleague present was excluded from the conversation. I have sat in dozens of these meetings over the years. I have never once heard the reverse consideration raised. When my turn came, I said something I thought was ordinary. I said tha...