To all our friends, passengers, visitors :

2020 was the year nobody expected.

It uprooted all our plans, habits, projects.

The author of these lines caught the coronavirus, first in London in March 2020, then in Belfast, in December 2022.

Worse, his mother died from it, in October 2022 (but things are more complex than that, you don't die from one single cause).

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I was obliged to get vaccinated, to be able to go to Brighton, in January 2022. My mother had been vaccinated too.

Sadly, we realized that the vaccine (which is not one, strictly, medically speaking) was in no way preventive.

Contrarily to all the other true vaccines.

Following these three years of confusion, unprecedented chaos, our priorities shifted, on every level.

Thus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which we have been so deeply involved since October 2000, became something of a side-show.

We all discovered other emergencies, much closer to home.

The duty of solidarity still remains primordial, on all levels of human experience.

The author of these lines has participated, as a volunteer, in a Social Grocery, related to the Food Bank in his region.

In this grocery you see people queuing for low-cost products, who had no need of that before.

Among them, a mother and her daughter, who owned a café, gone bankrupt after many others, due to the pandemics.

How can we begin to evaluate the extent of all the social, human damage done ?

More than ever, we need to rehumanize ourselves, smile through masks, and beyond masks, listen to each other, encourage each other, support each other.

It's a long way to free ourselves from this long, vicious nightmare of the years 2020-2022.

The peace we have been seeking since our birth as a humanitarian organization, will be found, built, and kept, in ourselves.

("Be the Change you Wish to See in the World")

At that cost we shall survive, stronger, more resolute.

"What does not kill me makes me stronger".