19 - yr-old human rights activist who helped clean up Beirut after blast

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19 - yr-old human rights activist who helped clean up Beirut after blast

Aya-Maria Rouhana is a 19-year-old human rights activist and one of eight Next Generation Fellows nominated by major youth-led organizations around the world. She works to give civil society the finances and tools needed to respond to her country's emergency and build resilience to Covid - 19. Still in shock, I was one of the young Lebanese who took to the streets on the day following the blast to clean up the capital city. Block by block, we pushed the rubble aside with our bare hands.

There were two Lego blocks that are still in the dust, which I keep on my desk in part because they remind me of our stolen childhoods but also because a Lego is famously hard to destroy The resilience of this small toy has become a symbol for me of the determination of Lebanon's next generation.

I was 11 years old when the MV Rhosus, the ship that brought explosive cargo to Beirut, arrived at our port in 2013 behind a network of shell corporations with its ownership hidden behind our operations. Over the next seven years, the ship slowly rotted while I grew up in a society still traumatized by memories of its own civil war and battered by wave regional crises.