June 16, 2026 | André Isidio de Melo, Country Director, ADRA France
I arrived in Lebanon on 7 April 2026, deployed as Planning Manager with ADRA’s Emergency Response Team, during one of the country’s hardest stretches. A sharp escalation of hostilities had begun at the start of March, and the strikes were ongoing. I landed the same week a ceasefire was announced for the wider region, and Lebanon was pointedly left out of it. The news was grim, and people were leaving, not coming. I was going the other way. By the time I flew in, MEA, the national carrier, was maybe the only airline with stable operations to Beirut, and even though they were running reduced flights, there were still plenty of empty seats, a quiet sign of how few people were heading to Lebanon.
Lebanon is a small country with an estimated five and a half million people. For more than a decade it has carried one of the heaviest hosting burdens on earth, sheltering more refugees per capita than any other country. And then, on top of that, came this latest war. By early April, more than one million people had been displaced inside Lebanon, close to one in five residents forced from their homes. Evacuation orders covered areas where more than a third of the population lives. Collective shelters — mostly public schools never built for it — were filling past capacity, and thousands of people had been killed or injured.
That is the backdrop to what follows and it is what makes the story I’m about to tell feel almost unbelievable.
As Planning Manager, my days were spent turning that scale of need into something concrete: shaping and writing the proposals that would fund the response, and helping ADRA Lebanon’s team plan how to deliver it. In practice that meant projects like emergency food assistance for IDPs in Beirut and Baabda, medical and psychosocial support in Mount Lebanon, and a multisectoral package — food, hygiene, winter protection — for displaced and returnee families out in Bekaa and Baalbek-El Hermel. It is careful, meticulous, deskbound work for the most part, but it is also the groundwork that decides whether help actually reaches the people who need it.
The Shop
One day I decided to go out and buy a few things to eat. I found a small shop nearby, picked up some items, and brought them to the counter to pay.
The shopkeeper greeted me in Arabic. It took him only a moment to realize I wasn’t from there – my accent gave me away instantly, and I couldn’t really answer him in his language. There was that small, familiar pause that happens when two people register that they don’t share a tongue.
And then he said it. “Welcome.”
It was a single word, but it carried something I’m still struggling to put fully into words. His whole manner – calm, warm – made it clear that this wasn’t the rehearsed politeness of a man ringing up a sale. He wasn’t welcoming me into his shop. He was welcoming me into his country.
What struck me most was that he didn’t seem to be welcoming me for a day. There was none of the silent calculation you sometimes feel from people — this one is just passing through. He greeted me as though I might stay. As though there would be room for me if I did.
The math that doesn’t add up and the kindness that does
Standing there with my groceries, I did the arithmetic almost against my will. This man lived in a country already stretched far past its limits. A huge share of the people around him were displaced or had fled. Resources were thin, the economy had been in crisis for years, and the war was close enough to feel. By every cold logic, he had every reason to look at one more foreigner and feel weariness, or suspicion, or simply nothing at all.
Instead he offered warmth. Real warmth, the kind you feel in your chest rather than just hear in someone’s words.
For a moment I caught myself thinking, I could live here. The people are like this. And almost immediately, the thought turned and pointed back at the part of the world I had come from.
The comparison I couldn’t avoid
I was a migrant in that shop. A foreigner who didn’t speak the language, who had arrived from outside. The only difference between me and so many others who cross borders is the reason printed on my paperwork, that I had come to help with an emergency response. But to the man behind the counter, I was simply someone not from there.
And he was glad I had joined his country, crowded and burdened as it already was.
So I thought about how we — France, Europe, the United States, the wealthy and stable countries — receive the people who come to us. I thought about the borders, the suspicion, the language of “crisis” and “burden” that we attach to numbers a fraction the size of what Lebanon carries. And I felt something close to shame.
Here was a man with almost every reason to turn inward, choosing instead to open his door. And there were the prosperous countries, with almost every resource to be generous, so often choosing the opposite.
What I brought home
I left that shop with my groceries and with something heavier and better than groceries. And the shopkeeper, I soon learned, was no exception. Over the weeks that followed, my Lebanese colleagues invited me into their homes and shared their food with me. You could feel how much they cared – they were kind to me, and in no time we became friends. More than once I found myself almost wrestling for the bill at a restaurant, but they would never let me pay. In a country where so many people had so little, they kept insisting on giving.
The lesson wasn’t complicated. It’s the kind a child could understand and that we somehow forget as nations: that hospitality isn’t a function of how much you have. The Lebanese people I met had every excuse to be hard, and they were soft. They had every reason to count what a stranger might cost them, and instead they counted him as welcome.
If we want to know how to receive the people who arrive at our doors — frightened, displaced, far from home — we don’t need a new policy paper. We need to learn from a shopkeeper who looked at a stranger he couldn’t understand and said, simply, “Welcome“.
A note on the figures: the displacement and population numbers above reflect humanitarian reporting from around the time of my deployment in April 2026. In early April 2026, more than one million people were reported internally displaced (close to one-fifth of the population) since the escalation began on 2 March. Lebanon has no recent official census, and figures in an active conflict change quickly.