Before "Tripoli We Can Find" (طرابلس نلقاوها) became a Facebook group of more than 100,000 members, it was a single post about a baby car seat (EP 21).
Nessrin Gaddah was working as an assistant and translator for an EU delegation in Tripoli. The foreign staff she supported were housed at the Palm City compound and, for security reasons, rarely left it. They asked her constantly where to buy ordinary things — kitchenware, school supplies, medication, replacement parts — and she became an unpaid concierge for an entire expat population.
To offload the repeat questions, she created a small Facebook group. The first post that defined the group's identity was a practical one: a request for help finding a baby car seat that was not a Chicco. The answers arrived quickly. More questions followed. Within weeks the group had outgrown its original audience.
As membership grew, the composition shifted. What had begun as a service tool for foreigners inside Palm City became a piece of diaspora infrastructure: Libyans abroad used it to source medication for family members, spare parts for cars, school textbooks, even missing persons information during periods of conflict. Tripoli residents used it as a crowdsourced directory that the formal economy had never produced.
The group is one of the clearest examples of civic infrastructure built on free platforms by a single person in Libya. It demonstrates:
Gaddah's deliberate self-presentation as an "ordinary Libyan girl" (see Nessrin Gaddah) allowed the group to be trusted by conservative users who might have rejected a more assertive founder.