Jéhane Sedky

As Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica at the end of October, headlines praised the country’s resilience. Images of flooded streets and uprooted homes were paired with the familiar refrain: Jamaicans are strong; they will rebuild. But resilience to what — and for how long? How many times must the same communities be expected to “bounce back” from storms made deadlier by climate change, and from structural inequities that keep them poor?

As the US foreign assistance architecture faces unprecedented dismantling, lessons from past crises take on urgent significance. Our new analysis of COVID-19 donor funding1 reveals a profound disconnect between the rhetoric of global solidarity and the reality: most official development assistance was issued as loans, and direct support to partner governments was minimal. When WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, it triggered a wave of aid commitments.

At the age of 5, I begged my parents for a dog. They eventually acquiesced, but there was a catch. When my father came home with a pup called Lucky, he told my brother and me that Lucky spoke only English. To communicate with him, we would have to learn to speak English, too. Thus began my long journey to becoming an American. That conversation with my Egyptian father took place in a small apartment in Maadi, a suburb of Cairo where we lived with my Egyptian grandmother.