Humans of Davos — Episode 6
This is the sixth and last episode of the Humans of Davos diary. Check out https://medium.com/humans-of-davos for more.
We all sat in a circle, inside what felt like the Situation Room. Julia raised her hand to get the microphone. Like the four Global Shapers before her, she choked, in tears, on the words she wanted to share with the group.
Emmanuel, an edTech startupper, was still visibly embarrassed by Jaideep’s touching words to him a few minutes earlier. “Morocco should get back on the map of Africa,” he had told me the day before — and I was still chewing on that — but what I couldn’t forget was how he made Wyclef Jean crawl between his legs on the dancefloor of a Wall Street Journal party.
It was the first time I saw him bent on his chair, head down, staring at his feet — he who, to me, embodied African pride at the Forum. He stood up taller than anyone, in his tailor-made dark blue suit, wooden African pin on the heart, raising his hand towards the microphone. “Thank you.” He said looking at the floor, avoiding eye-contact.
What I expected to be a wrap-up meeting turned into a group therapy session. At once, and for more than an hour, the pressure from a long and gruesome sleepless week came out, sweeping away the last bit of composure we had.
I looked at the WEF catering staff standing in a corner of the room, wondering how this all looked to them. “It’s refreshing.” Patrick, an events professional from Paris, told me after the session. “We’re used to being in sessions with white old men talking about business — but this was different. It gave me hope.”
The meaningless names I read on the participant list a week earlier had morphed into heroic characters assigned with the daunting task of making a dent. Whether it was the Kurtas, Nehru jackets, pins or Kemises they wore, the water, food, books or power they distributed, or the income-inequality, gender-gap, digital-divide our convictions challenged, every character in the room was something of a superhero.
Mayuri had left a consulting job behind to teach Indian girls about menstruation, starting the Sikun Relief Foundation. She roamed the Indian countryside, from school to school, with a team of volunteers armed with pads, books and a plastic uterus. Dressed in bright and colorful dresses, wearing a touch of makeup, she used her appearance to make a statement — as another pacifist weapon aimed at misogyny. She was running her organisation on just $3,000 per year…
On the chair next to her, Ying too was roaming the countryside. She grew up in a boarding school in rural China and had broken her mum’s heart by starting Ticket Youth Foundation, an organisation sending Hong-Kong volunteer teachers to schools. “My parents hate this program,” she told me during lunch. “It prevents me from helping my sister at school, I don’t make a lot of money and I don’t even have time to see my parents during our missions in my hometown”.
At some point in our conversation, losing track of her life’s timeline, I asked her how old she was. “I don’t know,” she said thinking, “I was born in 1994. How old does that make me?” I thought she was joking. “In China, you’re a year older than your real age!”
As the session ended, and with it the official program of the World Economic Forum, one Shaper was on everyone’s mind: Mohammed. He had lived 20 years in the Kukama refugee camp in Kenya and come to Davos to shed a light on the refugee crisis. His story was incredible, and for most of the week, I didn’t dare talk to him about it. “I wish people stopped asking me about the camp,” he told me at the end of a long day of interviews. “I know it’s an illusion but in the bubble of Davos, I catch myself dreaming of a normal life, where we would talk about literature, election strategies and family.”
“What is the most memorable part of this trip for you?” I asked clumsily. “The abundance.” he answered without hesitation, next to a Shaper who’d complained to me about carrying his own luggage.
“My dream would be to go to university,” he had told us repeatedly. “We have an online program that would be great for you,” the Dean of a US University told him. That answer made me sick. “Thank you very much sir. Although it can be challenging without reliable access to electricity,” Mohammed replied with more diplomatic tact than I could have had.
“My dream is to go to university,” we kept repeating to ourselves. And by the end of the week, we were starting to wonder “How many Shapers would it take to fix that?”
I sat on a bench of the Zurich Airport Terminal 1 building, waiting to board my flight to Madrid. I had spent the last hours queuing with Leticia, a shaper from Buenos Aires who had co-founded Fuck-up Nights, wrote a book about failure and was a fantastic sparring partner on how to run non-profits and become a writer. I had barely spoken to her before then. Like me, it was her last year as a Shaper.
“Up until the last moment, I keep discovering people in this group. Who else have I missed?” I asked myself before swallowing my last anti-FOMO pill.
The Global Shapers had landed in Davos like flamingos on the moon, but within the span of a week, had formed a group that chased world leaders, donors and the media to bring attention to more global issues than denial could contain.
But we were still humans, and had also danced with Anders Rasmussen at BollywoodNight, talked about AI with will.i.am and made Wyclef Jean rap about Morocco.
Outside, the world was split between indifference and disgust for this event, which gathered the most powerful people of the world to talk about its problems. But to me, Varun, a Shaper from Goa, India, who built art healing spaces for kids in conflict zones, put it best : “If you point your fist at someone, they won’t greet you with open arms. You have to bring the angst with positivity.”
“This should be the new tagline of the World Economic Forum.” I thought to myself, picking up my bag and boarding my flight.
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