So I will never forget this day. I got lucky and I left the offices at 4pm.

I took a coffee in the next to my house and I was going up in my apartment. I was in the elevators

and I felt the blast. To be honest, I thought at the beginning it was an earthquake.

I didn't hear the sound. I was feeling vibrations. So I thought it was an earthquake.

I lived in the seventh floor. When I arrived in the apartment, I directly went down using the stairs

because I thought it was an earthquake and the second wave was coming. I arrived down on the street.

I saw like a pink cloud and I knew it and I saw it and I learned it was a blast.

It's the 4th of August 2020. Patrick Gera is in Beirut, Lebanon.

210 people died from a chemical blast that day at the city's port, bringing chaos to a city

already in the midst of a pandemic and protests. People needed food and through an organisation he

already had contacts with. Patrick and some friends got to work.

They contacted us to lead all the operations, to distribute

hot meals on a daily basis, to the capital, so to families in need. Because those people lost

their houses, they lost their kitchens. They had nothing. We led the operations of more than

9 kitchens, distributing and serving more than 200,000 meals, to families in need,

over 50 distribution points. So we had to connect with NGOs that were working on the ground.

Most of our distribution points were over NGOs and those NGOs had to distribute the

meals to those families. One of the NGOs or non-governmental organisations also getting to work

was the World Food Program. As soon as the blast was reported, they were swinging into action.

For 60 years, the World Food Programme has been bringing food to people in the toughest places in

the world. In 2020, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work. But it's not just bomb

glass and war zones where the WFP operate. Hundreds of millions of people,

...