I truly love laughing. My wonderful, gorgeous, intuitive, high maintenance son told me just before he went to Ireland that he had missed my laugh – and I so got it. I laugh from my gut and my heart and no matter what, I laugh.

I am running a 2 day workshop in Amman, as an aside from my day job here of scaling up a massive cross border response into Syria…no, not aren’t I great, but rather the whole thing is a little surreal. One guy from Lebanon showed us a 5 minute video of the work they are doing cross border, very powerful, but then this poor man is lying on a stretcher (in the video, not the workshop) and saying ‘I am very seriously injured and I have come here for help’. So like all good medical NGO’s, we don’t provide medical aid, we film him….I was really struggling not to burst out laughing at how wildly inappropriate that was…nobody else seemed to notice.

Then after, I am with an old colleague from both Somalia and Lebanon, and we start of course talking about the ‘good old days of the famine in Somalia’…and the weird and wonderful translations we used to get. She recalled an e-mail where it was stated that; ‘we are working with intercourse and conducting multi scrotal assessments’ and the security flash update which told us that ‘the assailant was being chased by mops’…The former took some figuring out at the time – turns out spell check didn’t help them…they were working with INTERSOS and conducting multi sectoral assessments….The latter was classic for Somali’s as ‘p’ and ‘b’ are interchangeable…though I far prefer images of mops than mobs.

And it looks like my contract will be extended by 6 months – which includes health insurance. Pretty bloody amazing.