The Conversion of Cross-Border Networks 177 In turn, dissidents at home were often eager to team up with members of the anti-regime diaspora to amplify their long-repressed voices and play a role in resistance. Rahma, who worked with Enough Gaddafi! to speak with foreign media from Tripoli, attested, “I kept changing my SIM card. I was kind of scared. But I wanted to try and do something.” Network ties to persons at home also made the sending of remittances possible. Based in London, Assad, of the organization World Medical Camp for Libya, recalled, Using our own connections in the country, we started to make contact with people – the hospitals and doctors in the hospitals that we know in areas that were either liberated or where they were fighting for it to be liberated. We distributed through smuggling some satellite phones to each of these hospitals so they can call us with their needs. They also confirmed deliveries. We carried on doing that the whole time. For some, these contacts solidified into direct, sustained communications with persons on the front lines. Dr. Shalabi of London attested, Through Skype, a friend got me the details of a doctor in Canada. This doctor got me the details of a friend of his who ran the Misrata port and had satellite internet. I was able to speak to him, but it was very hard to gain people’s trust. When I called him, he was like, “who are you?” I was like, “I got your contact details from this chap in Canada. I’m Ahmed Shalabi, a Libyan doctor working from the UK. I want to help, but I need to know what you guys need. Get me a doctor.” He said, “Okay, give me one hour, I’ll get you a doctor from the hospital where all the injured are being taken and he’ll tell you what they need.” So I got him, an hour later, and this doctor now is a friend for life. It was an honor working with him. He told me, “I need this, this, this.” Diaspora members also relied on their contacts at home to smuggle and deliver the aid they had acquired to hard-to-reach areas. Salam recalled that getting supplies to these areas was dependent on the extraordinary resourcefulness and bravery of smugglers and fighters. At one point, the World Food Program wanted to go deliver food, but they couldn’t because of protocols. Because we’d been going and coming from Zintan back and forth and we had a great relationship with the fighters there, we decided we would create a post in Zintan and deliver all the food there. Once we got there, we were still worried about how are we going to get this [aid from Zintan] to Yefren. We decided to seek out the Boy Scouts – not the children, the Boy Scouts organization [in Libya].2 We purchased, I think it was like seventeen, mules. They carried it to Yefren on mules, because there was no other way to get it in there, the roads were occupied by Gaddafi’s troops. Taregh of Oxford also reported that his contacts made the movement of volunteers possible, both Libyan and foreign, from Cairo into Benghazi. 2 Colonel Gaddafi was a Boy Scout in his youth and allowed the organization to operate in Libya. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press