Global Dialogues

This essay was selected as one of three winners of the 2025 Georgetown Global Dialogues Student Essay Contest.

It was around 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, September 9, when I settled into my Air Quality and Climate Change class, which I am now getting used to. We were discussing how war zones pollute the air long after battles end: burning oil fields, collapsing infrastructure, and smoke that remains like a second enemy. Just as our professor connected conflict to the atmosphere we all breathe, news broke that bombs had exploded only a few miles away in Doha.

My phone lit up with messages from family checking if I was alive, from staff urging calm, and from friends asking where to meet. We shuffled out of classrooms into common spaces, our hearts pounding louder than the lectures we had just left. No one from our community was physically harmed, but the invisible shock rippled through us. Outside our walls, people near the site of the explosions were not so fortunate. They fled for safety, carrying nothing but fear, their lives shaken by political decisions made far above their reach.

That day, I felt the full weight of powerlessness. I am studying foreign service, trained to imagine service without borders. Yet in that moment, borders between states, ideologies, and generations seemed to define everything. I could not stop the explosions. I could not comfort the children losing parents in distant wars. I could not resolve the contradictions of a world where some die of hunger while others wrestle with obesity.

And yet, even in that helplessness, a different truth emerged. We were urged to check on each other. Students, professors, and staff from every corner of the world gathered in the atrium, sharing pizza, news, and prayers. On a small scale, that was the community we long for: international, intergenerational, and inclusive.

How do we sustain that beyond moments of crisis? First, by refusing isolation. Powerlessness multiplies in silence, but solidarity multiplies in connection. Young people across borders must create spaces such as forums, classrooms, and digital networks where stories are exchanged and empathy is practiced. Second, by acting locally while thinking globally. Climate justice, refugee rights, and access to healthcare are vast issues, but they take root in community projects, student organizations, volunteer clinics, and local research that ripple outward. Finally, by learning to accompany rather than merely to advise. Too often, power is exercised at a distance. But service that walks beside people—listening to farmers facing drought, migrants crossing borders, and families displaced by war—sustains the dignity that politics often erases.

When the bombs fell in Doha, I realized that powerlessness is not the absence of power; it is the refusal to imagine how small acts bind us into larger possibilities. To move forward in a divided world, we need not wait for perfect peace or perfect leaders. We need to practice, every day, the fragile but radical work of building communities that insist on hope when the air grows thick with despair.

Honore Mugiraneza (SFS'29) is a freshman in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University Qatar.