Bar La Vision wasn’t on any map, but every humanitarian in town knew it. They always came back here after a reform died or a strategy expired — and tonight, Ald had called the gathering himself. The Strategic Alignment Fatigue™ had worn him thin, and this reunion felt like quiet repair. Dim lights, wobbly chairs, and bottles donated in-kind by forgotten missions. The whisky and rum came in three tones — brown, browner, and questionable. Ald, as ever, ordered rum — always questionable.

Tonight, the tables were filled with old comrades — the kind who’d built bridges in wars, carried sacks of rice, and written strategies only to see them dismantled by the next Shepherd. Real humanitarians. Their faces lined, their livers punished, their optimism battered — but still they gathered, still they laughed.

There was WatSan Sam, who could build a latrine from three planks, using the swiss army knife and a stubborn look; Spreadsheet Sam, who’d survived more audits than malaria outbreaks; Logframe Lucille, whose knees remembered South Sudan and whose perfect logframe once got her project cancelled; Three‑Deployment Tony, who’d left parts of himself on three continents and still raised a pint to procurement; Procurement Priya, perpetually out of breath from chasing bids across time zones; M&E Mina, who once ran a workshop on indicators that made a flipchart smoke; and Security Serge, who negotiated access by teaching a warlord the difference between SOP, soap and soup.

From the rafters came a soft rustle; Hedwig shifted her feathers and settled again among the shredded minutes of meetings that had produced nothing but sound.

They spoke of deployments as if recalling lovers. Liberia, Kosovo, Darfur. Somalia and Somaliland. Kandahar. A cholera camp in Goma. Logistics base in Peshawar, another one in Lokichogio. A nearly forgotten training in Kathmandu. Each tale began with disappointment, ended with absurdity, and was punctuated by laughter that rattled the dusty bottles behind the bar.

“What happened to accountability?” someone asked.
“It was mainstreamed,” came the reply.

The table roared.

They toasted with the solemnity of a wake and the mischief of a school trip.

“To strategies and plans — the surest ways to make God and us laugh.”
“To the only handover note that made sense — the one that read ‘good luck’.”
“To the blood, shit, and whiskey — the only three truths every log ever agreed on.”
“To the donor who wanted a ten‑year sustainability plan for a six‑month grant.”

Someone quoted an old field proverb: “Leadership isn’t complicated; you just need a good conscience — and for that, all you need is a bad memory.”
The table roared again, louder this time, as if they’d all remembered something best forgotten.

Ald laughed and scribbled notes on a napkin. Here was the real organisation, he thought — not in the dashboards or rituals, but in these scarred veterans who still showed up, still kicked against idiocracy. They weren’t nostalgic. They had no illusions left. But they hadn’t surrendered.

From the corner, a pair of junior programme officers watched in awe. “Are they always like this?” one whispered. “They laugh so they don’t rust,” the other replied.

Ald kept writing, checking his napkin like a compass he didn’t trust but couldn’t abandon.

The banter rolled on:

“Programmes, damned be thy KPIs,” said M&E Mina. “Our audit found we reached more people than actually live there — we call them aspirational beneficiaries.”

Priya waved a printout. “The Staff Satisfaction Survey™ says 102% of us are happy. We asked how. They said believe in the process.”

Serge sighed. “Policy bans night movement, so I held a midnight drill at noon to stay compliant. HQ called it innovation.”

Laughter swelled again. Each story passed like a torch — flickering, irreverent, alive.

Then Spreadsheet Sam leaned forward. “Remember that rumour about Lionbum?” he grinned. “Cooking through a directors’ call — apron on, spoon in hand, sautéing while preaching strategic agility.”

“Too perfectly Lionbum to be false,” said WatSan Sam. The table howled, drinks spilled, and for a moment the absurdity of leadership itself felt conquered.

When the laughter faded, someone muttered that nothing ever changed. Ald cleared his throat. He never lectured — he was allergic to podiums — but sometimes his words lined up anyway.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “we built bridges. Real ones — steel, stone, and a bit of prayer. Then we built spreadsheets to count the bridges. Then metaphors to describe the spreadsheets. Now we build rituals to sanctify the metaphors.”

Lucille murmured, “That’s one way to put it.”

Tony nodded. “We’re still building — just with worse materials.”

Ald smiled and went on. “The tents still need pitching. The vaccine still needs cold. The convoy still needs a road that isn’t imaginary. And the people — the ones never invited to workshops — still need us to turn up.”

He looked around the table — scarred hands, careful eyes, the stubborn tenderness of people who hadn’t given up on usefulness.

“That’s the fellowship,” he said. “Not a banner, not a dashboard. Just a promise to keep being useful, even when usefulness isn’t fashionable.”

Silence. Then WatSan Sam clinked his glass. “To utility,” he said. “And to kettles that boil without a theory of change.”

He raised his rum again. “And to all the colleagues who vanished into Extended Reflective Recovery™ — may their silence be restful.”

After a pause, one of the juniors asked, “How do you keep going?”

“Short memories,” said Tony.

“Long friendships,” said Lucille.

“Sturdy shoes,” said Serge.

“Better jokes,” said Sam.

“And,” Ald added, “by remembering the organisation isn’t the leadership. It’s whoever turns up tomorrow with a spanner, a form, a first‑aid kit, a kettle, or a decent sentence.”

The juniors smiled, as if handed a map drawn in pencil — smudged but truer than the glossy one.

The Shepherds might come and go, each more eloquently empty than the last, but Bar La Vision remained — the unofficial archive of humanitarians, where disappointments were drunk down and defiance poured another round.

Closing time

Last orders came with a squeak of the chalkboard. The barmaid — quiet archivist of their disorder — wiped rings from the wood as if erasing minutes that had somehow healed more than they harmed.

From the rafters, Hedwig stirred and dislodged a scrap of paper that drifted onto Ald’s shoulder: fragment of an old policy — “All change must be evidence‑based.”
He laughed. “We’ve got evidence,” he said. “We just call it experience.”

They stood — the fellowship creaking to its feet like old rigging catching wind. Outside, the city’s bright strategies glittered behind glass. Inside, the bar hummed with the plain courage of people who’d be back tomorrow, and the day after, until the work — the real work — was done or they were done in.

Ald folded his napkin and slipped it into his pocket. On side A, it read:

• Alignment: a geometry lesson taught on a moving truck.
• Participation: the art of retrofitting consent to a pre‑agreed decision.
• Values: adjectives you laminate when the verbs revolt.

On side B:

• We keep turning up. That’s the trick.
• Resilience is tired; endurance still works.

“We were never aligned,” he thought. “We were adjacent — stubbornly — and somehow that was enough to move what mattered.”
He smiled, recalling the line someone had muttered hours ago: Leadership isn’t complicated; you just need a good conscience — and for that, all you need is a bad memory.

He paused at the door, turned back to the room, and raised two fingers in salute. “GO TEAM,” he said, with just enough sarcasm to sting and just enough love to mean it.