2024 was a year with its own brand of unrelentlessness. It was a year of disorienting limbo, of endless scenario planning, and of an eeriness of watching as an escalating situation comes to the edge of explosion. This year we were not only operating next door to – and with our hearts engulfed in – the genocide on Gaza, but we were working in the midst of what eventually turned into a full-scale war on Lebanon, and advocating within an international rights framework whose legitimacy is taking one blow after another. We were also doing so with ever dwindling resources.

We continue to grapple with questions that are not so new, but ones that are increasingly challenging. In the face of receiving calls from migrants who are abandoned in the south of Lebanon by their employers amidst bombing, stranded in various places because they have been turned away from shelters for not being Lebanese, evicted from their homes to make space for others more “worthy”: what is the balance between attempting to fill a drop in the ocean of basic necessities and of working towards a world where we would not have to be in this situation in the first place? How do we build on the bonds we have with the communities we organize alongside, and how do we make space to think collectively as we create makeshift response plans to make up for the national ones that regard migrants as invisible? To add to it, we practice now more than ever constant reflection that can help us stay true to the ethos of our work, as shifts in the funding sector threaten to change the face of civil society.

We enter this new year with questions that we know have no straightforward answer, that should always be a work in progress, and that we should never stop questioning ourselves on. We also enter with immense pride of being part of a movement that has been through so much, and that never stops adapting and finding ways to maneuver an impossibly difficult landscape.