The system didn’t crash.
It blinked.
And in that blink, thousands of us disappeared.
One email sent.
One budget line erased.
One restructuring plan — wrapped in empathy.
And suddenly — a job title vanished.
A login expired.
An office closed its doors.
And a future once scheduled in back-to-back meetings dissolved into quiet, uncertain mornings.
Some of us cried quietly between calendar invites.
Some turned off the webcam and stared at the ceiling, hoping silence might explain what emails couldn’t.
Some refreshed their inbox, waiting for an answer that never came.
Some applied for every job we could find — roles we were overqualified for, roles we didn’t want, but had to pretend we did.
And all of us, in our own way, packed up years of devotion into a single folder named handover.
We told ourselves it was structural. Strategic. Necessary, even.
But no theory of change softened the silence. No cost-efficiency model held our grief. And no strategy document — no matter how polished — could explain what it feels like to be written out of the future you helped build.
And still — as the system blinked — the emergencies didn’t. Displacement didn’t. Hunger didn’t. The floods didn’t wait. The wars didn’t pause.
And heartbreak, as always, arrived on time.
And in the space that opened up — something unexpected began to take root.
Not panic. Not rage. But proximity.
A closeness born not of planning, but of shared uncertainty.
People reached out to people.
Not for deliverables, but for presence.
Not to report progress, but to say: I’m still here.
Not to plan, but to bear witness.
Not to fix the silence, but to ask the questions we once whispered alone.
We gathered on living room floors, walking side by side through quiet parks, in WhatsApp threads, in browser tabs and backyards, in empty field offices where the whiteboards still held plans no one erased — asking each other:
“What if we never rebuild it the same?”
“What if this is not the end, but the great unlearning?”
“What if we stop waiting for permission and start designing something worthy of our courage?”
And in those moments — unplanned, unfiltered, unrecorded — I didn’t discover something new. I remembered something that had always been there.
Something ancient beneath the architecture. Not a breakthrough — a remembering.
Of what we were always capable of — before the meetings, before the protocols, before the blink.
The quiet constellations of care.
The invisible networks of trust.
The leadership that didn’t ask for permission to emerge.
When the hierarchy dissolved, what remained weren’t gaps — but people. Still standing. Still reaching. Still enough.
I’ve seen local leaders call midnight meetings by candlelight, hotspotting across unstable networks just to join a Zoom room.
I’ve seen young people gather — behind gates and in borrowed spaces — stitching their own safety nets with nothing but each other and the will to endure.
I’ve seen women say, “We will not be silent,” even when silence was the safest choice.
And I’ve seen women lead — not in press releases, but in shadows and sandstorms, steadying teams, making decisions while history wrote them out of the footnotes.
I’ve seen a nurse in a remote clinic stay through the night, using her phone light to check pulses, whispering lullabies between treatments — because no child should recover in silence.
I’ve seen a man riding a motorcycle across hardened earth, a cooler box behind him — filled with paracetamol, anti-snake venom, and hope. No convoy. No radio check. Just the quiet knowing that someone was counting on him to arrive.
I’ve seen people who lost their contracts but not their compass.
They became rogue strategists. Grief-tempered disruptors. Storytellers with dirt under their nails and futures in their palms.
Unfunded visionaries.
Freelance protectors.
Because in every end-of-contract, there is also a contract with the future — one that doesn’t need a signature. Just a vow.
A vow that we don’t need a system to tell us where to stand.
A vow that we won’t abandon each other just because the organization did.
A vow that in the face of vacancy, we will remain — not as employees, but as humans.
They can end the job. But not the work.
They can revoke the badge. But not the belonging.
They can shut the office. But they can’t close the space we opened in each other.
Because when the system blinked — we didn’t vanish.
We found each other. We gathered — not with certainty, but with courage. And somehow, we led.
I’ve seen it in Afghanistan. When the internationals were evacuated and operations froze, local leaders didn’t wait. They drove — Kabul to Herat. Kandahar to Mazar. Their maps were memory. Their courage stitched into every step. They checked clinics, partners, roads, offices — not for a report, but to see if the work could still go on. And when they returned, they said simply: The response can begin.
In Nigeria, when helicopters stopped flying to remote zones, we panicked. Contingency plans were made — on paper. But local leaders showed up. They offered homes. Shared food. And whispered at midnight: “I won’t leave you behind.”
In Northeast Syria — no evacuation. No Plan B. The team didn’t wait for clearance. They opened a gate. Lit a stove. Made tea. And in a cracked-walled room, they made space for us. And somehow, it felt like home.
In Iraq — I stood beside a local leader at the gates of Mosul, the city still breathing dust and memory. Buildings collapsed. Nothing felt ready. Nothing felt safe. I stared at the ruins and asked, “How do we begin?” He looked ahead — not at what was broken, but at what could still hold.
Then he placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “We don’t wait for it to be ready. We make it ready.”
And that day, he made calls, rallied volunteers, reconnected with partners. And somehow — they gathered, through the ache of history and the dust of war — and we started again.
In Türkiye — they coordinated across borders into Syria while we waited for clearance that never came.
We called it red zone. They called it urgent. We saw barriers. They saw bridges.
While our emails stacked up in unread threads, they moved — through broken roads, uncertain skies, and invisible maps. And the aid reached places we hadn’t marked, because they knew the way by heart.
In South Sudan — the shelters of grace and wood collapsed after a storm. We said we’d need weeks to get supplies from Juba. They didn’t wait. They gathered. They built with mud, sticks, sweat. And by the time our trucks arrived — the homes were already standing.
We’ve seen what gathering looks like.
It’s not always loud.
It doesn’t trend.
But it moves.
It dares.
It builds — not with budgets, but with belief.
In one version, they invited us.
In another, we looked for them.
In another, they gathered before we noticed.
In another, we never arrived — but they gathered anyway.
And in this version?
It’s the local leaders. The disruptors with dusty boots and stubborn hope. The storytellers with memory as their map. The visionaries who never waited for a seat at the table — because they were already rebuilding the house.
They didn’t gather for visibility. They gathered to survive. To protect. To reimagine. To carry each other across the cracks left by a blinking system.
And maybe that’s what this moment asks of us now —
Not to rebuild what blinked, but to begin from what stayed.
To start not with systems, but with the people who held the line when the lights went out.
To begin with the local — the ones who gathered without mandates, led without titles, built without guarantees.
And if you’re still holding on, quietly, between the lines — know this: you’re part of it too.
The past might have betrayed us. The present is uncertain. But the future is still unwritten — and we will be the ink, the paper, and the steady hands that refuse to let the story end here.
Ali Al Mokdad
