Why I Write About Institutions

I was born on a Wednesday in July 1981, in Saint Joseph Hospital, a short drive from the shelter where I would spend much of my childhood. On paper, Lebanon's civil war was six years old that summer. Growing up, I learned it had been rehearsing its provocations long before its official date. My family likes to say I was born in a shelter. It is a metaphor, but only barely. The first nine years of my life kept making it true.

The shelter was the minus-one of my grandparents' building: a warehouse of perhaps two hundred square meters, cleaned out and claimed by the families above it. It had two entries, one from the parking, and one from the lobby, where you stepped over a concrete lip and climbed down a ladder someone had built by hand. We strung electric lamps against the dark. When the battles intensified, bread could vanish for weeks at a time. During the worst sieges, it reached us only rationed, passed down through the militias that held the area. My grandmother Teta Victoria, the glue of the family, answered the shortages her own way: she toasted the Lebanese pita over the flame until it dried and darkened, so that it would keep, week after week, until the roads opened again. At its fullest, that basement held forty, maybe fifty people: my grandparents, uncles, some twenty cousins, the neighbours from upstairs, and strangers from other buildings who arrived as refugees and, within weeks, were simply family.

Here is what I need you to understand about that basement. Nobody ran it. There was no committee, no chief, no written rules. Order was held by something harder to name: unspoken agreements, the visible care of every family for every other, and conversations. Endless, ongoing conversations about everything. I was nine when the war ended, and I may be missing things a child's memory would miss. But I do not remember a single clash. Fifty people, years of siege, one dark room, and it worked.

We were not spared the war; we only learned to live beneath it. Sometimes the fighting pushed us from one shelter to another, from my grandparents' building to our own, and every basement turned out to be the same: different faces, the same unwritten order, the same lamps against the dark, all of it better organized than whatever was happening above us. It was during one of those stretches, pinned down in our own building's shelter because the shelling was too strong to move, that a shell found our neighborhood. A young man of seventeen was killed. Three more were injured, and one of them lost a limb, a few meters above where we sat. I tell this one memory because it is not one memory. It is the story of thousands of families in that war, and in almost every one of them, the people went back down the stairs the next evening and continued.

Before I ever read a word about governance, I lived inside a functioning institution one floor below a failing state.

I will not pretend those years were only warmth. They taught me something darker too: we normalised everything. Death became weather. Catastrophe became culture. For years afterwards I could feel it in myself, a flatness in front of events that should have shaken me. I have since learned that organizations do exactly the same thing. People inside a declining institution stop flinching. The decline becomes weather. That numbness, which I first found in my own chest, is the disease I have been studying ever since.

I did not know it yet. At twenty-two, working for an audit firm, I was sent to a large factory for a cost analysis I was too young to be trusted with. There was simply nobody else. I approached it the only way I knew, with a computer scientist's mindset: I drew the flows, mapped how information moved from the production line to the accountants to the executives, and marked where it broke. The breaks were never technical. Every fracture in the diagram, when I traced it to its source, was politics: someone protecting a position, a comfort, a version of the story. I had gone looking for a systems failure and found human beings.

The real turn came at twenty-six. I was a financial officer at the Middle East Council of Churches during its hardest chapter, the years when donors were quietly losing faith and a large organization was learning to survive on less. I sat in executive meetings that could take your breath away: patriarchs and archbishops around one table, men whose churches counted millions of faithful across the region: Iraq and Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and the Holy Land itself. The weight in that room was real. So was the diagnosis. The MECC department managers laid out the organisation's condition honestly, each from their own corner of the organization, in their own way, and most of what they said was true.

And then one of the senior clerics responded by asking why a larger, better-funded organization was raising more money than our program did.

My first reaction was anger; these were my friends being judged. What has shaped everything I have done since was not that anger, but the reflection that followed it, the slow work of turning blame into learning. He was not malicious. He had listened to all of it, and received almost none of it. The information was in the room; the readiness to understand it was not. He reached the first layer, the results, and stopped there. That day I understood that an institution's problem is rarely a lack of communication. It is a lack of deep listening. The basement of my childhood held forty people who heard each other perfectly. That hall held holy men who could not.

I left those meetings convinced the organization could not recover within a decade. I was wrong. It came back: changed, smaller in some ways, different in nature, but back. I mention my misjudgment here because it exposes a habit all of us share: we look at an organisation as a set of functions and assume its trajectory accordingly, even though it is a living, breathing thing.

I saw renewal from the inside, too. At the Middle East Council of Churches, I spent years helping rebuild its dismantled development arm, the Inter-Church Network for Development and Relief, from a strategic plan into a working organization within the organization, with a real budget and real programs. I spent those years as the financial gatekeeper while trust was slowly rebuilt. Comebacks are not theory to me. I have carried boxes through one.

Twenty years into civil society later, I am still at it: holding an institution together in a collapsed state, watching every day how organisations age, how they numb themselves, and occasionally how they wake.

So this is what I will do here, every Wednesday.

I will write about institutions: how they rot, and how they come back. Some weeks the lens will be a nation; some weeks, an organization small enough to fit in a basement. I make no claim to a polished expertise that has reached its peak. I am still learning, still fixing things, still sometimes breaking them. What I have is lived experience, and it is substantial enough that keeping it to myself began to feel like a kind of waste.

Three promises. I will put my experience on the table without holding back: the scars and the errors alongside the lessons. I will write about patterns, never personalities. No names dragged out, no accounts settled, nothing here is aimed at any person or any board. And I will not sell you despair. Institutions are not machines to be debugged; they are living things that hold values and gather the people who share them. Living things decline. Living things also heal.

I have watched institutions decline, and I have watched them heal, both from very close. Think of this space as the shelter of my childhood: a small, lit room beneath whatever is failing above us. Starting today, every Wednesday, I will walk you down the stairs and show you what I saw.