Episode: 21 — "Facebook Changed My Life" · Full Episode #21
Date: 12 May 2020 (Season 3)
Language: Libyan Arabic
Recorded in: Remote (Tunis / London)
Nessrin Gaddah (نسرين قدح) is a Libyan communications specialist and the founder of "Tripoli We Can Find" (طرابلس نلقاوها), a Facebook group with more than 100,000 members that functions as a service-information infrastructure for residents of the Libyan capital and its diaspora. She was raised in Hay Al-Andalus, a western Tripoli neighbourhood, and at the time of recording was splitting her time between Tripoli and Tunis, working with Expertise France, the French public international cooperation agency.
Before founding the group, Gaddah worked as an assistant and translator for an EU delegation in Tripoli. The foreign staff she supported were housed at the Palm City compound and rarely allowed outside it. They asked her constantly where to buy ordinary things. The first real post she made — the one that triggered the group's identity — was a request for help finding a baby car seat that was not a Chicco. Within days the group was handling hundreds of similar questions, and it expanded from an expat-facing utility into a diaspora service tool used by Libyans abroad to find anything from medication to spare parts back home.
See: Tripoli We Can Find
Expertise France found her through a Libyan contact based in Geneva, who reached out to her on Facebook. She ignored the message, assuming it was spam. A Libyan friend then phoned her to explain that the message was a legitimate job offer. She describes the episode as the moment she stopped underestimating where opportunities come from.
Gaddah slept normally in Tripoli during open conflict. She stopped sleeping after she moved to Tunis — once she was safe. She describes the delayed onset of her anxiety as a body catching up with what the mind had postponed.
See: The Insomnia of Safety, PTSD and Collective Trauma
Gaddah described a deliberate self-presentation strategy: to look like an ordinary Libyan girl so that progressive ideas, once shared, land without triggering defensive reflexes in conservative audiences. She framed it as a form of civic design — not compromise, but delivery.
Episode: 143 — "Facebook Changed My Life" (Part 2) · Full Episode #143
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
EP 143 functioned partly as a re-air and partly as a sequel to EP 21 — a return conversation with Nessrin three years after the original episode, set against the now-mature scale of the network she built.
By the time of recording, Tripoli We Can Find had crossed 101,000 members, with four associated Facebook pages and five subsidiary groups operating in parallel. The architecture has, in effect, become a small civic platform — moderated, segmented, and persistent. Gaddah described the moderation labour as the under-recognised part of the operation: the network functions because someone keeps it from collapsing under spam, abuse, and commercial misuse.
Gaddah described her first paid job, at nineteen or twenty, at Nurol — a Turkish construction company operating on the Naser University campus in Tripoli. The work produced 900 Libyan dinars in two months. With the first earnings, she bought a Freelook watch in the Swarovski style. The story sits in the episode as the small biographical detail that the original EP 21 conversation did not have time to cover — the very first piece of self-made money, and the very first thing it was spent on.
The episode addressed how the network has evolved into a bridge between Libyans inside the country and Libyans abroad. The early requests were one-directional — expats inside Libya needing services. The later traffic moved in both directions, with Libyans abroad using the group to reach back into the country for medications, documents, family items, and information that the formal channels did not provide.
"I slept fine in Tripoli during the war. It was after I left that I stopped sleeping." (EP 21)
"The first post was just: where do I find a baby car seat that isn't a Chicco." (EP 21)
"Nine hundred dinars in two months. The first thing I bought was a Freelook watch." (EP 143)