An evening with a revolutionary

“To destroy abuses is not enough; habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there."
Victor Hugo

I shall be honest. Geneva as a city has yielded few of the secrets I had hoped for as I made my way here. Not because I haven’t looked, but because I don’t think it really has any. Everyone here moves on – after a few months, like me and the thousands of other interns who make their way through the system each year, or after a couple of years. No one really stays too long; there is then little investment in the life and soul of the place.

Neither has the United Nations proved too inspiring. An unwieldy, cumbersome megalith tethered to bureaucratic nonsense by paperwork and economics. To paraphrase a world-weary friend, ‘Gaza burns, Goma falls, but the UN stamps all its documents in triplicate’.

The life and soul for me, then, has been the people I have met here. The extraordinary, challenging, infuriating and loveable friends I have come across are the lifeblood of this place. And perhaps nothing represents both these people and their vitality and passion than the evening a lucky few of us spent listening to a story told by a revolutionary.

As I prepare to move on to pastures new, it would be hard to find something more inspiring than the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. A thirty-year dictatorship was overthrown in just eighteen days by peaceful protest. And while there is much still to be achieved, Lamiaa, a young Egyptian doctor who tended to the wounded of Tahrir Square, painted a picture of a country on the ascendant, given time and space to re-build.

Lamiaa was living in Cairo when the revolution began. The Egyptians watched Tunisia overthrow their own unwanted governors – and the death of Khaled Saed, beaten to death by police, was a rallying call for the young, the disaffected and the marginalised. Tens of thousands poured into Tahrir Square in spite of the desert cold of the Egyptian winter, lack of food and sanitation, and violent responses by police – and after a few false starts (Mubarak promising first reforms, then a hamstringing of his own power within office), the revolutionaries won.

She described the men of the neighbourhoods banding together to protect homes from looters (by prisoners released by the government to spread chaos – watch the Dark Knight Rises and you’ll get the picture); old men in their jilabayas, young men in their jeans, the doormen, the doctors, the dry cleaners, stood in the cold and defended their homes. She described the sheer togetherness as volunteer doctors fixed bones and handed out medicines; as she saw sick men take only what they needed even when in dire pain, aware that someone else might later need those painkillers more.

It’s a powerful image. I watched the news roll in as Mubarak finally stepped down, and saw the joyful images of celebration in Egyptian streets. I saw the names and images of those who died on my screen.

Now, I am admittedly still caught up in a misty-eyed post-Les Misérables fever. I am aware that revolutionaries who fall do not get up again when the camera stops rolling. And I am wary of rose-tinting life or death choices that I am grateful with every breath I have never had to make.

But the narrative of change is essential, and so wholly refreshing. It’s something I felt I had lost sight of a little during my time here – the UN is so vast, and its reach simultaneously so wide and so flawed, that transition seems impossible. I am not (officially) suggesting a violent revolution overthrowing the UN, nor indeed the UK for that matter. But I think that the spirit of these words, written by Upton Sinclair in the Preface to Hugo’s Les Misérables, is as necessary now as it always has been:

‘So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilisation of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny…so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.’

The spirit of fighting injustice is alive and well – and I can think of no greater lesson to take with me as I move on from the turgidity of the United Nations in the hope of being part of something truly exciting. So it is why I am so grateful for this final inspiration to be gleaned from my time here - the opportunity to meet a person capable of flooding you with hope is to be grasped with both hands.