The gospel according to Mark Dybul, the man working to end three plagues
www.devex.com - "For most of the two-hour flight from Geneva to Dublin — as soon as the seatbelt light blinks out — Mark Dybul does not sit. He stands in the aisle, flush against his own armrest, thumbing at his smartphone, while flight attendants and passengers squeeze past. He’s wearing a crisp grey suit, white shirt, and white pocket square. His side swept blonde bangs are thinning, but cut across a youthful face. A multicolored United Nations pin clings to his lapel.
(...) “I have a bad back,” he says — and then, smiling at the irony, “Flying too much.” (...)
To operate a global fund, it turns out, requires a global person. For four years Dybul has shuttled between the world’s richest and poorest capitals, rarely spending more than 24 hours in any one place. The repetitive stress of honing his message to donors, matching tight resources to program data in implementing countries — he hates the word “beneficiaries” — and then returning to Switzerland has not beaten him down into his seat, but out of it. It is as though Dybul, like a modern-day Greek hero, has taken on a quest so elemental — ending three global plagues — that the gods demanded a sacrifice: his basic human enjoyment of comfortably sitting down." (Photo: Mark Dybul, former Exec. Dir. of The Global Fund/Global Partnership for Education - GPE/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)