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From Our Own Correspondent: Key insights into 2020 from our correspondents

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Globe 2020

02/01/2021 GMT

Key insights into 2020 from our correspondents

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Key insights into 2020 from our correspondents

How did life change in 2020? Plenty in the USA, Africa, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Belgium

Insight, wit and analysis of a difficult year, from BBC correspondents and journalists around the world - about Afghanistan, the USA and Africa, Lebanon and Belgium

Pascale Harter reflects on key moments of 2020 with some of the most thought-provoking dispatches from our correspondents.

Afghanistan is a country where it’s not easy to define the term outrage. Violence there has not abated despite peace talks between the government and the Tailiban. But an attack on Kabul University on November 2nd sent shock waves across the country and beyond. At least 35 people were left dead and 50 seriously wounded. Photographs of the murdered students and their blood-stained classrooms spread widely through Afghan social media. Lyse Doucet spoke to one university lecturer about the students he lost and the damage done to Afghanistan’s hopes for the future.

Andrew Harding, who covers Africa and is based in Johannesburg, spends a lot of his time travelling around the continent to witness events at first hand. The Coronavirus pandemic put a stop to much of that, but he still had a dramatic story to tell in the autumn. He reflected on the somewhat ironic parallels he was seeing-  as he applied some of the cliches often used to describe Africa to somewhere else in the world which was facing a significant election.

In Lebanon it was another year of slow bleed of talent and energy from the country, as many of its best-qualified and hardest-working people just couldn’t deal with the endless struggle of life there anymore. Corruption, an economic crisis and then a catastrophic explosion in Beirut’s port led many to feel they had no further future there, as Leila Molana Allen reported.

2020 will be remembered by many as a time of lockdowns and restrictions as countries around the world battled to contain the coronavirus pandemic. It was a way of life that most had never experienced before - and there was an intense longing for a return to normality. Our correspondent in Brussels, Kevin Connolly, had been confined at home for weeks when Belgium briefly relaxed its rules in the summer. Even he was surprised by the strength of his urge to indulge in shopping again.


(Image: The date 2020 with the world as one digit. Credit: Selensergen, iStock / Getty Images Plus)

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