Volunteering

Offre Joie Help Decades-Old Cases Move Forward After Salvaging Judicial Archives

These aren’t ancient scrolls from a temple somewhere, they’re your judicial files…

If any of you have had the misfortune of walking into the justice palace in Beirut, or anywhere else in Lebanon, you probably felt a mixture of sadness, nausea and utter hopelessness. The state of the buildings that house our justice system make EDL seem like a 5-star hotel.

Smoking indoors, overflowing garbage bins, coffee stains on the floor, dust and paint chips on folders and files thrown haphazardly over each other with no discernible order, alphabetic, chronological or otherwise. It’s a disaster.

Offre Joie is an NGO I absolutely adore and admire. They’re always there doing the work no one else wants or could do, from rebuilding a family’s burnt down house a couple of weeks ago, to picking up and sorting the trash that swamped our streets during the garbage crisis’ peak in 2015. They work all over Lebanon, and embody what most of us hope and wish volunteer work and charitable action could be.

Why Organizing and Cleaning the Archives Matters

When my friend Mark Torbey told me what they’re planning to do, I was skeptical. Why do the job we pay government employees to do. Also, why help them prosecute the people who don’t have wastas? That was my first instinct.

Then, after reading Legal Agenda’s piece on the matter, I felt extreme gratitude and relief at the amazing job done by the men and women of Offre Joie.




The basement’s archives were wet, rotting, full of mould and infested with rats both alive and dead. These archives contained appeals court cases going back a whopping four decades.

Anyone unlucky enough to be familiar with never-ending court battles spanning years and decades will understand how frustrating it is when the judge postpones a session for 6 or 9 months, time and time again. What you might not know, is that often this happens cause no one can find the case file in the cesspool of neglect and corruption that were the Appeals Court archives in Beirut.

Thanks to Offre Joie, 35+ years of lawsuits on hold for the absurd reason of not finding files in that pigsty of a room, can now resume. A friend of mine who’s a lawyer was so happy, he asked me who was behind Offre Joie so he could thank them for basically reviving cases most people, judges and lawyers alike, thought were forever lost in that black hole of a room.


Maintaining The Archives

There is absolutely no excuse why such an important public facility was in that unforgivable state. However, while most of us would whine and curse, Offre Joie rolled up their sleeves and actually did something to make the situation better.

I hope those responsible for maintaining this archive get inspired from these young men and women’s selflessness and virtue, and make sure that the archives don’t fall into disrepair and turn into a pile of rotting garbage again. After all, these are people’s lives and livelihoods at stake, and whatever little faith in our judiciary taxpayers still have. This must not and cannot happen again, and even though I am endlessly grateful to Offre Joie, this is the government’s job and they need to start doing it instead of waiting for good citizens to go above and beyond to do something that should be a given: organize and clean a room full of JUDICIAL RECORDS AND FILES…

Menna w Fina: How You Can Help in Tripoli


A Recap of what we do in Tripoli

For those of you who don’t know, this blog is what I do in my spare time, it’s not a job. I work at an NGO that I love called MARCH Lebanon, which was founded in 2012 with the stated purpose of fighting censorship and defending individual freedoms and rights.

Since 2015, we’ve been working in former conflict zones, helping de-escalate tensions and rebuilding the communities ravaged by war and neglect by teaming up with young men and women that were once part of the fighting, or were directly affected by it. Our longest-running and biggest project is our Tripoli one, where we went into Beb El Tebbeneh and Jabal Mohsen shortly after the Lebanese Army went in and stopped the clashes there that had been on an off since the Lebanese Civil War, and only made worse since the start of the conflict in Syria.

Since then, we’ve established the Kahwetna Cultural Hub and Community Center, as well as a massive rebuilding project Beb El Dahab which employs young men and women who were part of the violence, to help rebuild what was destroyed and lift up their communities as they learn new livelihood skills in the process (including computer skills, graphic design and language courses).

This article isn’t about that though, it’s about a grass-roots initiative young men and women that were involved in our projects in Tripoli, started themselves, and of which we are extremely proud.

Menna w Fina

Menna w Fina is a volunteer organization that young men an women that are part of MARCH’s work in Tripoli launched earlier this year. Last week, when I was there on-site, a young man I have come to know well over the past few years, which goes by “Harrouk”, told me about Menna w Fina.

First thing he showed me was the logo, which they designed themselves thanks to workshops of graphic design given by our very own rock-star designer Joan Nassif.


The second thing he showed me, was a video they had shot, edited and produced themselves, skills they had learned under the tutelage of our very own comedian and kick-ass videographer and director Wissam Kamal.

They are focusing on cleaning up, sorting and tidying up the alleyways and streets that crisscross the heavily populated areas of Beb El Tebbeneh and Jabal Mohsen, especially the sites that are located on what used to be the front line when the battles were happening.

They have an event this Friday, and if you’d like to volunteer and pitch in, you an RSVP here

https://www.facebook.com/events/2062521933966944/

I was personally extremely delighted to see all the skills and experience gained in MARCH projects is already being put to good use by the young men and women who were part of them. In a country where we cannot count on the authorities to do their job, it’s grass-roots, volunteer-led initiatives such as Menna w Fina that will help improve our circumstances and the communities we are part of. I also salute the young men and women for taking time out of their days and putting in the hours and pounding the pavement to make this a reality. Below are some before and after shots of their first event last week:







49% of Lebanese Worry About Their Food Security, So Stop Wasting Food.


In Lebanon, 27% of people are under the poverty line. With the government’s recent savage tax hike, more than 100,000 extra people are expected to drop under that line within a year. The UNDP found out that 49% of people in Lebanon worry about being able to eat regularly throughout the year, and 31% can’t eat healthy, nutritious meals year-round.

FoodBlessed is an awesome Lebanese NGO founded in 2012 with a mission to feed those who would go hungry otherwise. FoodBlessed rescues perfectly edible food that would have been thrown out, from shops, caterers and restaurants and redistributes it to those most in need of food assistance. Apart from this noble, all-volunteer humanitarian mission, FoodBlessed helps raise awareness against the danger of wasting too much food environmentally, and directs those with organic waste, to farmers to be turned into fertilizer, instead of littering haphazard dumps in Lebanon and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

#MaBadda2iste7a Campaign and What You Can Do

Recently, FoodBlessed launched the #MaBadda2iste7a campaign to encourage everyone to stop wasting food, either by over-ordering in the sometimes wastefully “generous” attitude of Lebanese hospitality (3 out of every 9 plates on Lebanese tables aren’t completely consumed), or being too “ashamed” to pack up your leftovers at a restaurant to eat them later, give them to a friend or relative, or donate it to someone searching for their next meal.

The hilarious video shows a couple ashamed to sneakily hide whatever they didn’t finish having at an expensive restaurant, in their bags and jackets. In contrast, another woman on a nearby table just asks for the rest of her meal to be packed, to which the server graciously obliges. You need to start doing this always, because more than a quarter of our garbage is just food we didn’t finish…

Here’s what you can do to help:

  • Pack and take your leftovers with you to have later / give to someone you know instead of end up in a garbage dump
  • If you are hosting an event, or work at a company, or caterer/supermarket/etc. and have perfectly edible food surplus, please don’t throw it away, and if it’s enough to feed 15 people and up, please contact FoodBlessed and arrange for them to take and redistribute it to those that need it the most.
  • Volunteer with FoodBlessed, which counts on a community-driven, volunteer-based model. Get your office to volunteer together one day. Maybe you and siblings and cousins can help cook and serve food for folks who need it the most. With over 400 volunteers, FoodBlessed’s Hunger Heroes has been able to serve more than 250,000 meals in the past 3 years.
  • Donate to the Souper Meals on Wheels (SMW) initiative, which is an ingenious idea of a food truck selling pizza to clients at night, to fund their mobile soup kitchen initiative during the day, making them able to go to where they are needed most, instead of those in need of food assistance having to come to them. It’s already at 25% of its 30,000USD funding goal, and just a few dollars from each of us can ensure they reach their funding goal in no time!