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The Plant Theory

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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...
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Survival Is Not Renewal

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  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...
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Accountable in One Direction

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  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...
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Reform Promises Nothing

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  Rot and Renewal, Week 6. Two faith-based institutions, twenty years apart. One decided. One did not. The ledgers I joined the finance department of a regional church network a few weeks after the "July war"  ended in 2006. I was twenty-five. My job was to report on a humanitarian program that was rebuilding water and sanitation systems in the south and getting farmers through a season that had been destroyed along with everything else. It was not the biggest thing I had worked on. As a junior auditor I had carried client portfolios worth many times it. But those were other people's books. I read them from the outside, wrote my report, and left. This was the first time I was sitting inside the institution the numbers belonged to, and I was glad to be there.  It took me about a month with the ledgers to understand that the institution carrying it was dying. The problem was arithmetic, and it was not a secret from anyone who could read a balance sheet. The cost of running ...
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