SPRING/SUMMER 2020
The Diplomat If anyone had told Kabalan Frangieh ‘94 that at the age of 27, he would be responsible for saving almost 200 people from impending death, he wouldn’t have believed it. And yet, in 2003, as the newly assigned Deputy Chief of Mission to the Ivory Coast in West Africa, urgent appeals reached him from petrified and stranded Lebanese nationals residing in Monrovia - who make up much of the merchant class of Liberia – of being trapped in their homes without food or water. Around them, the shelling was incessant. They desperately appealed for help to get out of the country as rebels besieged the capital. Humanitarian and aid agencies have already been forced to shut down operations because of the danger. Staff at the Lebanese Embassy had been evacuated. Frangieh and one other employee were on their own. Americans and Europeans were already evacuating their nationals. I can do this, thought Kabalan. I have to bring them here to the Ivory Coast, and quickly. The reports from Liberia described massacres. Don’t panic, Kabalan. Think. It was then that a sense of calm came over him as he remembered his days in India. It was his first post in the service. At only 23, he was assigned to the Lebanese Embassy in India as Deputy Chief of Mission. He was a newbie, relatively untrained, and still confused about his career choice. Just one week after his arrival, the ambassador went on holiday, leaving the young anxious Frangieh fumbling to find what his duties exactly entailed. For a few days, he allowed this incessant anxiety to engulf him. I wanted to come to India, he reminded himself. I wanted to be different. Prove that you can do it. Only two years earlier, he was an AUB student rallying his peers to take part in the student movement he co-founded with other IC alumni at the university. The ‘Commoners’ promised to change everything at the university from the administration to the campus itself. A handful at IC, (“I am what I am” he had written defiantly under his 1994 torch picture), he became a full-blown activist at AUB. He continuously felt that he had to make the world better for people around him. Upon graduation and after
giving the valedictorian speech, he sat for a diplomacy test. Not that he wanted to be a diplomat. But just because there was a test. He passed with flying colors and somehow found himself in the rather unwanted foreign service. I don’t like it, he thought, but here I am. He was given a choice of countries for his first assignment. Without hesitation, he chose India. It was beginning to dawn on him that his ego was getting rather inflated. Materialism around him was also beginning to irk him. He longed for some spiritual growth. He knew that he would find that growth in India. And so he packed a small bag and set off to the mystic orient. Now, with the ambassador on a two-month leave, Frangieh found himself running the Lebanese Embassy. The anxiety eventually gave way to a sense of efficiency. By the time the ambassador returned, Frangieh had picked up all the diplomacy nuances and duties required. Along the way, he had also picked up what he had long yearned for: a spiritual awakening. He had even acquired an Indian guru. Slowly but surely, his perceptions changed. The avid activist boy in him grew into a levelheaded adult. “I started the journey in India of really becoming a man on the spiritual plane and not on the material plane as you are taught to be,” he said. “This was my real personal growth. Me, Kabalan, and not the product of my parents, my school, or university. And this helped me a lot in my career.” And now was the biggest moment in his career – and life – so far: saving his people in Liberia.
Kabalan Frangieh in South Africa
17
