This is a Global Player Original podcast.

Well, you're in a very glamorous place, or what used to be a glamorous place.

How is Beirut?

Beirut is extremely interesting, extremely under the kosh, politically and economically.

But at the moment, in terms of my little bit of Beirut, full of exciting, interesting women

who are standing for election in the local

government elections, which are hopefully coming up in May this year, and who I am working

with to try to help them with their campaigns.

And what's the city like? Because obviously, there's that massive explosion which just obliterated so much of it and basically closed down the port.

Is it recovering from that?

Well, it is, but we drove past it yesterday and you can still see enormous amounts of wreckage.

So there has been some rebuilding of some of the areas around the worst parts of the

explosion. But, you know, let's not forget, it would have taken for even a very economically

prosperous country, a phenomenal amount of money to put right everything that happened in that

explosion back on the 4th of August in 2020. And this country certainly doesn't have the resource

to do that. So you can still very, very clearly see the economic and the sort of building damage.

And possibly even worse than that, of course,

it continues to be politically very damaging as well, because you may have, if you follow news

about Lebanon, you may have seen just this week that the judge who had been set up to

investigate how it happened that this ammonium,

I think it was ammonium nitrate that was being stored in the port, that caught on fire and

had this enormous explosion and had been there for years. And the suggestion is that people in

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