For the past several years, each time I leave Beirut in the spring, I worry that the security situation will prevent me from coming back. One year, I was so convinced that it would that I gave my friends little keepsakes with forget-me-nots on them when I left.
Lebanon is level four (“do not travel”) on the State Department travel advisory list, same as Yemen. But it is not Yemen. True, there is shelling at the southern border, but that is only an intensification of what has been going on, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee style, for years. Yes, there was an assassination of a Hamas official in a Shi’a neighborhood in the south of Beirut, but the technology of assassination has sharpened and only those in a particular apartment were killed. There is the occasional kidnapping but unless I’ve missed something, these are extortion attempts within families. There are clashes between rival militias within the Palestinian camps but I don’t live anywhere near one and have no need to visit one.
In September, when I was visiting the State Department in DC with a Presbyterian group, the Syria Lebanon Partnership Network, I told officials there that their travel advisories for Lebanon did not reflect reality. The hysterics writing these things need to get out of the American compound more.
And where is Israel on the travel advisory list? It’s at level three (“reconsider travel”). The State Department further refines its wisdom by designating Gaza a “do not travel” area but advises that families traveling there should bring baby wipes.
Time to put on one’s own thinking cap.
In terms of Lebanon, there is no question that this place is falling apart. Last week Global Positioning Specialists, a tracking service, published a study saying that Lebanon was the #1 worst place in the world to be a driver based on road deaths and car thefts. The roads are in terrible shape, so drivers weave in and out of lanes to avoid potholes; the economic collapse has resulted in an explosion of motor cycles whose drivers evince powerful death wishes on the highways and murderous instincts on the city streets, even driving along sidewalks; cars lack functioning headlights, taillights, and safety belts; traffic lights have all but disappeared so intersections are a terrifying game of chicken; street and tunnel lights have gone dark so those cars without headlights are driving blind; drainage systems are so clogged with trash that roads and streets become flooded and impassible.
Scenes of flooding between Beirut and surrounding areas
I was relieved to read this study. I was afraid that my terror of the roads here was exaggerated. But this week even men here have told me that the roads terrify them and that they only take less traveled routes or forgo car ownership in favor of car services and the back seat. Women have told me that they have insisted that their families get larger, more crash-resistant cars. Everyone seems to have a theory about the safest times of day and week to travel and all agree that the afternoons of Ramadan are no-go times as the Muslims are fasting and are driving insanely with low blood sugar.
In the end, it all boils down to reasonable risk assessment. I feel safe enough coming here but I avoid particular risks. I take car services but only on weekends during daylight and only in the Beirut environs. I don’t take street taxis because they are not supervised by dispatchers and once I took a cab from the airport only to end up in an unfamiliar neighborhood while the driver passed me on to another, probably unlicensed, driver. I used to visit friends in south Lebanon but hostilities there have made that unwise and I won’t take long trips anyway unless I am in a large vehicle like a bus although I would prefer a Sherman tank. I am more cautious on the street at night as 150,000 displaced persons leaving the south can’t have improved security on the streets here. I know I can’t pass for Lebanese but I also know that I am around the corner from a police pill box guarding an embassy. I reckon the Syrian militia down the street would come to my aid if I screamed if only to relieve the tedium of sitting at their post.
But just in case, I have packed an emergency bag. It contains clothes, money, my passport, and a book. I must remember to get some playing cards. If the balloon goes up, I’ll dash down the street to collect an elderly friend and take her to her nephew’s in the mountains. I’m sure we could find a fourth for bridge.
For about ten days asking the time around here was to utter fighting words. That is because the prime minister, Najib Mikati, with the connivance of the speaker, Nabih Berri, decided to postpone daylight savings for a month. The stated reason was so that Muslims could break their Ramadan fast at 6:00 p.m. and not 7:00 p.m.
Mikati, a Sunni who looks like he’s never missed a meal in his life, should know that it is not the clock that establishes the end of the day for those fasting but the setting of the sun. Moreover, Ramadan is a period where Muslims detach from regular business hours and routines. Their fast is broken by long, convivial meals followed by a few hours sleep. An hour or two before dawn they often wake up and eat something to carry them through the daylight hours, and then go back to sleep. In olden days, Muslim neighborhoods would be roused in time for this predawn meal by a man called — guess what! — a mikati. Mornings are very quiet during Ramadan as Muslims often sleep late. The roads are empty and many stores don’t open until noon. There is a feeling of lassitude throughout the day. Of course, getting through until sunset is tough but changing the clocks doesn’t lighten the burden.
A joke that made the rounds
So what was really going on? There are two main theories. The first is that this was a sectarian gesture to show that the government is now solidly in the hands of Muslims. Mikati is viewed with deep suspicion by the Christians as he announced a study showing that Christians are only 19% of the population. No census was taken but presumably some demographer has come up with this figure. I understand that the Shi’a are now referring to the Christians as “the nineteen percent”. Christians account for over a third of the registered voters.
The second theory is that the decision was a diversionary tactic to avert public attention from a contract awarded to renovate and expand the airport. If that was the case, it failed, as there was a hue and cry and the contract was cancelled.
Chaos abounded while the time issue got sorted out. Christians didn’t know when their church services were – at my suggestion, my church sent out an hourly countdown on Sunday morning because we didn’t even know what to call our regular 10 a.m. service. Private schools sent out notices to parents about which time they were adopting, leaving some parents to cope with dropping off children at different times and managing to get to work at whatever time was chosen there. Any appointment had to be confirmed by asking which time had been selected. Hospitals, the airport, and some newspapers chose to proceed with daylight savings time because their computers were updating to that time. It came to be called “international time” in official announcements but it was also called “Christian time”. The other time was called “government time”, “Muslim time”, and “Berri-Mikati time”. We were living in a weird, slightly menacing time warp.
My tablet and phone showed different times
Mikati had to have known that the last minute time announcement delaying daylight savings would throw computers, phones, and the like into chaos as he made his billions in telecommunications. L’Orient Today reported that it could take months to develop the software to re-synchronize everything. Indeed, at one point last week my phone was confusing New York City time with Beirut time. A clock at the airport was shown to have one time on one side and the other time on the other side.
In the end, the delay in daylight savings was cancelled. Ask nearly any Lebanese and you’ll get told that it is time for the political class to go.
A demonstration in my neighborhood: banging on the doors of the banks with sticks and tire burning.
There is constant business outside of currency exchanges as people shed lira for dollars.
I flew back to Beirut with my usual luggage overages fulfilling wish lists from friends. These included a washing machine belt, Crest toothpaste, compression hose, and vitamins, all of which can be difficult to find now. American products are too expensive for most Lebanese now and shelves are now stocked with mostly inferior goods from Turkey, Bangladesh, India, and Ukraine. Replacement parts for appliances are at a premium because so many firms have pulled out of Lebanon.
The lira breached 60,000 LL to the U.S. dollar last week, a precipitous decline from 1,500 LL of four years ago. I asked people what bad news had preceded this latest 20% drop in three weeks and most people mentioned Parliament’s gridlock in selecting a president but some opined that the banks were playing currency games. I discounted this second opinion until I read in L’Orient Le Jour that in December the banks had encouraged deposits of lira by offering a very favorable withdrawal rate of these deposits in dollars. Of course there was a stampede to make deposits and a few weeks later the rules changed and people have to content themselves with getting their now devalued lira back. This is the only country in the world where people hold up banks to get their own money – and have a depositors union helping them.
These days the Lebanese are buying only what they absolutely need if they can afford it at all. Their cars, shoes, cellphones, and appliances are falling apart. A friend who is a doctor told me his shoe had become detached from its sole as he was walking to the hospital and he had to duct tape it to get through the afternoon. He said he can’t afford a new pair of shoes and will be wearing his sneakers to work now. His sister, married to a doctor, can’t afford to replace her defunct cellphone.
The price differential of American versus Indian peanut butter.Those were last week’sprices. On Friday the prices rose to 403,999LL and 69,999LL (as if there were coin money anymore.)
This family is fortunate as they have skills to barter. The doctor bartered his skills with a colleague to have his sister’s fractured arm set and put into a cast. The sister barters her teaching skills for dinner at the end of the day.
I ask everyone how they and others are managing to survive. The answer I invariably get is “with outside help”. The Lebanese diaspora in the West and the Gulf is sending money home not just to their extended families but also to friends. The U.S. government recognizes the dangers of desperation for recruitment to ISIS and other groups and is sending monthly bonuses to members of the securities services as their monthly salary has fallen to about $80/month. Shi’a friends tell me that Hezbollah is under enormous pressure to focus on helping its constituency rather than fighting as their constituents are the least likely to have relatives sending them money from outside.
People’s greatest fear here is a major health emergency like the heart valve replacement required by a friend’s mother, a retired nurse. She has to go before a government panel to argue her case, as if anyone undergoes this procedure recreationally. The family will have to sell their home if her petition is denied. Civil servants can no longer expect their health insurance plan to cover anything but a fraction of their health care needs.
Everyone is angry at the political class. They are seen not only to have robbed the country of its wealth and sent it abroad but now can’t even function enough to elect a new president so the nation can sign loan agreements. Of course, those loan agreements would contain anti-corruption measures, so one appreciates the impasse.
Ukrainian cornflakes strangely taste of wheat, or is it cardboard?
Next Wednesday the country will be shut down by strikes. Many public employees are no longer showing up to their jobs anyway. The public schools are shut, pending labor negotiations. Lebanese University, which didn’t have light or heat last year, this year didn’t even open in the fall as the teachers can’t afford the gas to get to their jobs. The post office is threatening to go on strike and the transport sector, such as it is, is going on strike along with public hospital employees.
It will just be venting. The political class isn’t budging. People speak longingly of army coups, revolution, and even invasion. One friend wants some Western billionaire to buy the country for its debts and set it on the straight path. Another friend, a Christian, says she wishes Hezbollah were in charge of the government because they know how to take care of people. In a normal country, a revolution or a coup would be conceivable but in Lebanon it would just set off another civil war. The fault lines here are so deep that even the families of the 2020 port explosion are divided and the judge and prosecutor are canceling each other out.
But everyone knows that things could be worse. They know what civil war looks like. They have friends and relatives in Syria where the ravages of war and Western economic sanctions have eviscerated the country. People there are not just hungry but becoming malnourished. A Syrian friend told me a high school classmate is losing teeth to malnutrition. A Shi’a family who had lived as refugees for years in Beirut returned to Syria two years ago to take care of aging relatives have told us they now wish to return to Lebanon as there is no work, electricity, medicine, or education for their children where they are in Kurdish controlled Syria. (I know them from a local church where they allow their children to attend Sunday School but that’s another story).
No one can predict the future, good or bad. And so the Lebanese endure. Living day by day. Anxious, angry, and trying to be grateful for getting through another day. Dreaming of dictators.
Tomorrow is when Lebanese in Lebanon go to the polls, or, at least, that’s the theory. I’ve only found one person who is actually going to cast a ballot and it will be a spoiled or “white ballot” at that. He won’t actually vote for any “list” or fixed combination of candidates. He just wants to show that he was there, furious at the system, and take his ballot away from anyone wanting to use an unused ballot for their preferred list.
This man has some shops in Hamra. Today he closed them early so he could go to his ancestral village before the roadblocks and other impediments crop up to make travel to the polls difficult. Decades of residence in Beirut is not enough to qualify to vote in Beirut. Men and single women go to their ancestral village and married women to their husbands’. The system insists on keeping people parochial rather than forming the kind of progressive political force that cities tend to produce. Church-going Christians find it especially onerous to go back to the village on Sundays and several have voiced their view to me that Sunday was especially chosen to dampen Christian voting participation.
I’ve pressed people on why they aren’t bothering to vote and the answer is a firm belief that the elections are corrupt and a foregone conclusion. I certainly remember hearing that the cost of selling one’s ballot in 2018 was about $500. This year, people tell me the price is much cheaper as so many Lebanese are desperate. “They can be bought for a bag of bread”, an elderly woman told me. The dead who vote don’t expect anything at all.
Still, the phones ring constantly urging people to vote for a particular party and its list. Friends tell me it is driving them crazy. There is a lot of money sloshing around political campaigns in Lebanon. No one questions that there is a lot at stake: the banking system, the economy, the Iran versus Saudi alignment, Hezbollah and its continued use of arms, to name a few of the issues.
But the system is set up for stasis. A person votes first for a set list of candidates and then may indicate the preferred candidate. Each candidate’s religious affiliation is listed along with the party. Each electoral district has an assigned number of Muslim and Christian seats. It boils down to a contest between preferred candidates of winning lists getting slotted into these sectarian seats. These people go on to determine who the President will be (Maronite), Prime Minister (Sunni), Speaker (Shi’a). The ministries are similarly horse traded. The system is designed to perpetuate sectarian politics, not transcend it.
It doesn’t help that those wishing to institute real reform in Lebanon have not organized into one party and list for each district. About a third of the candidates running tomorrow are opposition candidates — over twice as many as in the 2018 election. The revolution or “thawra” was always internally divided between the incrementalists and the revolutionaries. In some districts, the opposition groups are running against each other.
The one significant change in the make-up of the lists and candidates is that the party of former prime ministers Hariri, father and son, is not participating in this election. The Future Party consolidated Sunni votes and now these votes are up for grabs. It is expected that Hezbollah will end up the winner here but it is nonetheless an opportunity for the opposition.
For the last several years the Lebanese government has made efforts to get expatriate Lebanese to participate in the elections. In fact, it has encouraged people of Lebanese ancestry through the male line to claim Lebanese citizenship and vote. This was part of an effort to get expats to invest in Lebanon, to be the country’s white knights. A total of 244,442 Lebanese abroad registered to vote this year, over twice the number for the 2018 election. This increase may reflect the estimated 300,000 Lebanese who emigrated in the past two years. Expat voting occurs a week before the Lebanese elections so it is now known that only 60% of those registered expats actually cast a ballot. Here again, the pessimism of the Lebanese about their system comes through: expat ballot boxes come through the airport, Hezbollah territory.
A campaign banner in Beirut
People seem to be holding their breath until the elections are past. There is concern about violence like that which occurred in the south a few weeks ago when a rally for Shi’a candidates running in opposition to Hezbollah was disrupted by gunfire. Some of my now expat friends abroad do not want to return to Lebanon until the election is over and things appear safe. There is concern that entrenched parties may destabilize the country by delaying the formation of the parliament or resorting to violence.
Maybe the gloominess about the election is justified and voting really just ratifies a corrupt and broken system. I don’t know. But I do know that this general distrust of the electoral system is closing off an avenue for change in Lebanon just as surely as the myth of “The Big Steal” is doing so in America. If citizens see their elections as dirty, what is Plan B?
Six weeks weeks ago, on Mothers Day in Lebanon, my friend Imad and I were walking on a side street in Hamra, the neighborhood where I live, when he took a bad fall. We had been heading to the only bakery left in the neighborhood to look at a strawberry cake I had spotted for Imad’s wife. If it suited, Imad would have been spared going to a neighborhood which had been experiencing thick traffic jams that day due to car owners trying to prepay their car registrations before the fees went up.
The street was dark, as all streets are dark now in Lebanon. What Imad tripped on was the base of a parking meter which had been stollen, presumably sold for scrap. As a doctor, Imad immediately knew he had broken his femur and feared he had also broken his hip. He was in excruciating pain. We called the Red Cross, trying desperately to tell them where we were, a difficult task as there is no address system in Beirut. We had to mention landmarks like country folk describing their location. By-standers on the street rushed to his aid, one man holding his head up off the sidewalk with the help of his hands and my knitting bag. They were immensely kind.
Parking meter base whose rods caused the accident
The Red Cross came quickly and worked with great professionalism in getting Imad onto a stretcher despite his pain and immobility. He asked to be taken to the American University Hospital. Their question? “Do you have insurance?” Yes, he does. He gets his medical insurance through the doctors’ syndicate here but had recently downgraded his policy to second class because of the costs. When he was mulling this decision a few weeks earlier, he explained to me that the difference between first and second class insurance was that first class patients get priority if the hospital is overcrowded plus they get better rooms. The healthcare is supposed to be the same.
At the hospital, Imad was placed on a stretcher pending the arrival of his wife and daughter with $1,000 cash in spite of the fact that he has health insurance. The insurance arm of the medical syndicate hasn’t been paying the hospital bills promptly so up front cash is demanded. That was two hours of neglect while he was in excruciating pain. Between the wife, daughter, and son the family managed to assemble most of the cash. The hospital also demanded the donation of 2 units of blood. But no one could donate blood, for health reasons, so they called a good friend who came down to donate on their behalf. A nurse told me subsequently that no hospital should take two units of blood from anyone as that represents 20% of the body’s blood and puts the donor at risk.
The next day Imad had an operation that lasted five hours. A stainless steel rod was implanted into Imad’s thigh bone extending all the way down to just above the knee. It is not at all clear that this was the appropriate length of rod as the actual break is near the hip. Imad fears the same thing happened to him as happened to his father whose surgery during the civil war left him with an uneven gait. Supplies were short then as indeed they are now.
Eventually Imad was moved to a bed on a hospital floor to begin his convalescence. As in all hospitals, this is a balancing act between monitoring and caring for a patient while preventing the risk of secondary infection. The family learned that next door was a Covid patient. Usually hospitals have separate floors for separate health issues, partly to prevent the spread of infections to patients recovering from surgery and childbirth. But we learned that AUH has lost so many doctors and nurses to emigration that it has closed floors. And maybe their patient base is shrinking, too: how many families are left in Lebanon who can cough up $1,000 in cash these days now that their savings are frozen?
Padlocked window at the American University Hospital
Sharing an air circulation system with a Covid patient made getting Imad home a matter of urgency. It turns out there isn’t even an option to open the window at the hospital. No one has been able to open a window there for years. They are padlocked. This is reportedly to prevent suicides and smoking.
But to leave, the family needed a 25-day supply of anticoagulants. The chance of a dangerous post-operative blood clot is about 10%. Despite us running around a number of neighborhoods asking pharmacies for the required medication, none could be had. The pharmacists told us they hadn’t any for months.
What to do?
The doctors’ syndicate couldn’t help and Imad didn’t know anyone high up enough in the health ministry. It was time to resort to desperate measures. For the last several months Lebanese have been flying to Istanbul for the day to pick up medications. Or asking friends from the Gulf to bring them in on their next trip home. It is illegal but even the government knows better than to challenge these travelers. Of course, a trip to Istanbul would add $500 to the cost of Imad’s care.
Before implementing this plan, Imad called a fellow doctor whom he had known since medical school in Russia forty-odd years ago. Mohammed is a Shi’a. He took himself to Dahieh, the Shi’a neighborhood to the south of the city often described as a Hezbollah stronghold. There he located the medication at the first pharmacy he entered. Hezbollah makes a point of provisioning its people when the government can’t. So Imad was able to get his medications thanks to Hezbollah.
We have since learned that there is a service at the Beirut airport where one can order pharmaceuticals from Istanbul and pick them up a few hours later. No one at the hospital mentioned this, perhaps because it is illegal or the staff is too overworked to handle discharges properly.
Meanwhile, Imad had sent his Russian-born wife down to medical records for a CD of his leg, pre- and post-operation, and to get a refund for the cash deposit and the PCR and blood test he had had to pay for upon arrival at the emergency room.
She came back empty-handed. So Imad decided to put the frighteners on the AUH administration.
He sent me. “They’re afraid of Americans here”, he told me. I got the job done.
Now to get an ambulance to send Imad home. He needed a stretcher as he can’t put weight on his leg. It was five in the afternoon when Imad began calling the Red Cross, the only free option. Three hours later they still hadn’t arrived. They were having a busy evening. Time was running out as the electricity in the family’s apartment building would be cut at midnight and they would lose the use of the elevator. Staying at the hospital through another night wasn’t an option – the insurance wouldn’t pay for it and another patient needed the room.
So, Imad called the ambulance service that charges a fee. They quoted the equivalent of $75. I thought that sounded reasonable but still the family hesitated. Imad’s disability represents a significant loss of family income. I suggested they set a time at which they would resort to the ambulance company and not look back. They decided that would be 9:00.
A few minutes past the deadline, Imad picked up the phone to call the ambulance company when his wife shouted “No! Don’t call them!”. She was balking at the $75. This is the equivalent of her monthly pension as a part-time doctor at a clinic, such is the collapse of the currency. We talked her around and the company came within 20 minutes to take the family home.
Did we take the elevator directly down to where the ambulance was waiting? No, we did not. AUH has put up barriers to patients leaving for fear, as the ambulance workers told us, that patients would “escape” without paying. So, a nurse had to use his security pass to get us through a labyrinthian route down to the ground floor. This can’t be a good use of a nurse’s time.
The one issue I couldn’t help them navigate was the question of tipping the hospital staff. Imad felt it was his obligation and his wife felt vehemently otherwise. Only later did I learn that it is expected that orderlies get tipped and, increasingly, nurses. No one’s salary is sufficient these days.
Like all Lebanese, this family has seen its savings from decades of work disappear into the maw of the banking system, probably never to return. The wife said a friend of theirs, another doctor, had died of Covid, having been refused admission to the hospital for lack of $1,000 cash in hand.
I asked Imad how the family had even had $1,000 in cash on hand the night of the accident. “In case we need to flee”, he answered. He was thinking of a sudden attack like Israeli’s bombardment of 2006. There is no doubt that there is hostility at the border but more and more now, the Lebanese are forced to confront the devastation wrought by enemy within, its spectacularly corrupt political class whose depredations have caused the collapse of the country’s infrastructure.
A parking meter still intact. We heard that the parking meter company is no longer operating in Lebanon and these meters are just detritus.
So many people have left Lebanon in the past two years that it hardly feels like the same place.
The person I miss most is a widow named Elizabeth. She married a pastor nearly sixty years ago here and they committed themselves to their church even during the war. Both of them had foreign passports and could have gone to the UK on hers or to Australia on his but even the war could not budge them from this place. She has described to me life during the war when her husband posed a kidnapping risk and he had to stay in their apartment full time except on Sundays when a posse of parishioners came to escort him to the church. It was left to Elizabeth to lug the water bottles up three flights of stairs, stand in the bread lines, and take their children to school when it was open and teach and entertain them when it was not. Not to mention functioning in her own job as a teacher. At one point, one of the militias took over some apartments in her building and only later did she learn that the building was also an arms dump for them, successfully concealed when the Israelis came looking. One night a car bomb exploded in the street outside her apartment and she and her husband spent hours picking glass shards off of their children and the bedding. Their car was stollen off the street, twice; the second time it was not returned. The family regularly joined their neighbors in spending nights on end in the building corridors and basement during shelling attacks.
I asked Elizabeth once how she managed to deal with the stress of the war and she said she was just too busy getting through each day to think about it. On top of everything else, she also had parishioners staying in the apartment when traveling back and forth across the Green Line became too dangerous. It was crowded at the church, too, as the church allowed a family of Palestinians to camp out there for the duration. There was very little privacy for this devoted couple.
Yet for all the fear and hardships endured during the war, like many Lebanese, Elizabeth remembers the comforts she and her neighbors could extend to one another whether by keeping their children amused together when schools were closed or inviting one another for coffee and a chat. Corona and the economic collapse have put paid to that. Elizabeth has watched her grandchildren live in isolation from their friends when the schools close and she can no longer have coffee with her neighbors for fear of the virus. Once the pandemic started, Elizabeth and I developed a very companionable habit of walking through the neighborhood once a week, picking wildflowers in the various empty lots. She invited me into her family pod and I helped her through knitting projects as we watched t.v. with the grandkids.
Bouquet from a flower walk with Elizabeth last year
Despite blandishments from her children living in the U.S. and Australia, Elizabeth has never had any interest in leaving Lebanon. As with so many of her peers, she has watched her children leave, get married, and raise families abroad, still hoping that someday they would come back. She is more fortunate than many in having a remnant of the family here and she is still indispensably active in her church.
Now this valiant generation who stayed put during the war is leaving. Elizabeth herself is taking steps to claim her late husband’s Australian citizenship. It is the scarcity of medications and the flight of so many doctors and nurses that has finally tipped the balance. Beirut, once a world class medical center, is now bereft of medical supplies and personnel. Last summer, cancer patients demonstrated in the streets against the scarcity of lifesaving medicines. There are workarounds at the individual levels — day trips to Turkey or the Gulf to pick up supplies — but these don’t help clinics and hospitals do their jobs. Unless this changes, Elizabeth will have to leave and Beirut will lose a steadfast community anchor.
It’s not just Elizabeth I’m missing. I’m missing Ramzi, a commercial film maker, who normally comes back to Beirut from London every chance he gets. But now work has dried up here and even if it hadn’t, editing would take a long time due to the scarce and capricious electrical supply. He and I used to like to hang out in a local bar at the end of the afternoon, waiting for friends to finish work before joining them at a restaurant. Ramzi loves to talk to me about his family’s history as his forbearers were early adherents of Presbyterianism and worked alongside American missionaries as they established schools in Lebanon. His father was a noted folklorist whose photograph greets the traveler in a montage of Lebanese cultural icons at the airport. That family also stayed in Lebanon during the war, moving to Beirut once the south was under the control of the horrifically violent South Lebanon Army, a Christian militia backed by Israeli. Ramzi himself was a journalist at the time and spent two days in a foxhole with the corpses of his colleagues before being captured by the Israelis. Fortunately, his capture was filmed by Western media and he was allowed to survive. Ramzi will be coming back for a final visit next month to close down his apartment and settle his affairs.
I miss Fadi, a banker from a well known Shi’a family who converted to Christianity years ago. He’s now in Cyprus with his wife and son. I miss Samira, a Syrian refugee whom Elizabeth took underwing with her six children and taught them English when the schools were closed for Covid. Samira and her husband allowed their children to attend Elizabeth’s Sunday School as a form of cultural enrichment although Samira herself is Shi’a who wears a headscarf and her husband a Communist who didn’t want his children inculcated with Islam. They fled the Syrian government years before the uprising started but are now back, living in a Kurdish controlled area so they can take care of his aging parents. But there is little work for her husband and no nearby school for their children and Samira misses Lebanon. I miss Lily, an NGO administrator whose last job was with the World Food Programme. These personnel mostly cycle through a region so it was inevitable that Lily would leave but I miss discovering parts of Lebanon with her in the days when there were still traffic lights.
And I miss my church here, not that it isn’t still here in the physical sense but its membership has been decimated and its culture is changing to reflect the views of those who remain. We have lost professional class members who have returned home to the West, having lost their jobs or having found life here too difficult. We have lost women migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Ethiopia whose employers can no longer afford the pittance they had been paying. In these losses we have lost institutional memory since most of the handful of people still attending haven’t been here more than two or three years. It’s mostly the African men who are still here as their mechanical expertise is still keeping buildings and boats running. Now their transactional Christianity faces little resistance. No theodicy issues here — the good prosper, period. I can’t imagine how they deal with the cognitive dissonance of working for the very rich Lebanese. Time for another sermon on The Book of Job and how the good suffer.
In fact, The Book of Job is a good place to find solace, too. For all that the steadfast Job lost, he regained in new form. Even now I find myself spending time with acquaintances who are becoming friends. Chief among them is the 93-year old Hilda, a retired nurse in my neighborhood who told me the other day she considers me a sister. She has no option but to stay although all her family have left. She regales me with stories of her idyllic childhood in Damascus as the daughter of a doctor and nurse who ran a lying-in hospital there. Sometimes, she talks about living through Lebanon’s civil war and the constant fear she had of home invasion by the militias. She asks me about the US political scene and why there is so much racism there. Her multiple medications are supplied by a businessman relative who flies in and out of Beirut. “I manage, I manage”, she tells me in her darkened apartment lit by a lantern. May her patient endurance be an example to those struggling to remain.
In the past, when I came back to Beirut, I would ask my friends what I could bring them from the States. “Nothing” was the cheerful reply, “we have everything here”. I’d just bring friends a box of maple cream cookies or salt water taffy, little treats from America, and consider the job done.
A pharmacy operating in near darkness
This time it was different. Along with the maple creams and taffy went their requests, among which were: Tylenol, aspirin, Salonpas, vitamins, make-up, brown sugar, Crest toothpaste, walking shoes, flea collars, fleece blankets, flashlights, prunes, and vegetable seeds. One friend likes to make her mother chocolate chip cookies so I brought six bags of those; another friend misses a licorice candy so that went into the bag. The children of another were missing Kraft macaroni so those, too, made it in. I also packed large jars of Nescafe which is very popular here for some reason and is now a luxury item and special treat. Land’s End had a sale on down vests so I ordered one for each friend and for myself, knowing how cold it gets with stone floors during the winter rains.
I did not neglect my own needs. Friends told me to bring all my own toiletries, so I did but I drew the line at shampoo. It’s too heavy and could spill. I didn’t even buy a plane ticket until I had three months of my medications in hand. I packed a three pound bag of vegetable wash and batteries for my flashlight and reading light. I also packed a canister of pepper spray for myself and the daughter of a friend whose 14th floor apartment with the spectacular view now requires hiking up and down stairs where anyone could be lurking. The lack of electricity means that building security gates are often open for hours at a time. This is true in the building I am staying in as well.
In packing clothes, I thought about how difficult it might be to find a functioning dry cleaner and even reliable electricity for an iron. I packed all knitwear. I thought about walking up seven flights of stairs to my AirBnB apartment, and walking down, and left my long raincoat at home lest I trip on its hem. I packed thermal underwear, a duvet, and a wool throw because the apartment doesn’t have heat except during business hours as the building is mostly office space. The landlord offered me a space heater with a gas canister but it looked like something that would blow up in my face and I asked him to take it away. As I write this I am keeping myself warm with three layers of clothing and a woolen wrap.
I am staying in a new apartment this year. The landlord of last year’s apartment doubled the rent in dollars. This reflects the increasingly two-tiered reality of Lebanon these days. Those who have the means to insulate themselves from the higher prices pay dearly for the three sources of utility power these days: government supplied electricity (if any), back-up generator electricity (about 10 hours a day) and battery supplied electricity to a few wall outlets. The most deluxe buildings have two generator contracts but even they don’t have 24/7 coverage. In my apartment, I can’t use the oven or microwave after 7 p.m. or on weekends. I don’t need to be reminded that this is a high class problem. Most of Lebanon is sitting in the cold and darkness. This is the coldest winter in forty years. It snowed in Beirut a few days before my arrival. A dentist friend had to close his clinic those days as it was too cold for his hands to work.
Blemished lemons at Spinney’s
I am still getting my bearings in this land of scarcity. There are two supermarkets in my neighborhood, a Spinney’s and the more down-market co-op. Spinney’s didn’t have flour last week, nor butter. Its selection of goods is pared down. No more Asian products like tofu or European cheeses like Parmesan. I expect this reflects not only the high cost of imports but also the loss of the customer base — the cosmopolitan professionals who have left the country in droves. Walking down the supermarket aisles one sees that most of the manufactured goods come from Turkey these days. This has always been considered the inferior stuff. But it’s all inferior stuff in the supermarket these days: it is clear that the Lebanese agricultural sector is sending everything it can abroad, leaving the Lebanese with the bruised and misshapen remainders. There is one exception: a special refrigerated section at Spinney’s displaying exquisite baby vegetables and choice fruits. They even had lychee nuts last week from South Africa. It was almost an affront.
The price checker atSpinney’s
Watching people shop for food is truly painful. Their faces are etched with anxiety. For the first time I’ve seen couples shopping together as the purchase of food is now a major financial undertaking for the household. Before last June most basic foodstuffs were subsidized and were very cheap. Now the prices paid for food reflects the fact that Lebanon imports 80% of what it consumes and is paying for it with increasingly expensive dollars. Many shoppers use their cell phone calculators to keep within budget. They price-check before placing items in their baskets. While standing in the checkout line they lament prices together. There are always items to be re-shelved at the head of the checkout counter.
Just after I arrived, a friend came over for coffee and said it was nice to see me because mine was the one face she’d seen lately that was not taut with anxiety. Now I see why.
God knows what is going to happen to this country but story a friend told me does not bode well. An acquaintance of his, who is an army officer, told of a soldier in his unit who showed up late for muster. “You’re late!” he shouted at the soldier. The soldier replied, “You’re lucky I came at all”. Instead of disciplining the soldier for insubordination the officer responded, “You’re right”. That soldier’s pay used to have the purchasing power of $800/month in an economy with subsidized goods. Now his salary has the purchasing power of $55/month with nothing subsidized. This is the one public institution in Lebanon that most Lebanese respect and that many credit with holding the country together. What happens if it unravels?
I made it my business to try to find out how people in Lebanon are coping with the collapse of their currency and the severe reduction of their purchasing power. I asked everyone I could how they’re dealing with the new normal, for that’s what it is. I can’t claim this inquiry does more than scratch the surface but maybe it gives a hint.
Chickens in a friend’s backyard
The first thing to note is that the currency collapse has divided the country into haves and have-nots. Those who have access to dollars or euros are doing just fine. Foreign aid workers can live like kings. Anyone with a pension paid in dollars is winner, like the retired telephone operator of my acquaintance whose pittance of a pension from the American Embassy is now supporting three generations. About 150,000 families receive regular remittances from abroad via OMT, the wire transfer company, and for now, I believe, they can receive these transfers in dollars and not be forced to convert them to Lebanese lira at a fraction of the market rate.
Among the have-nots, many are simply leaving. A common greeting now is “you’re still here?” Medical professionals are in the forefront of this exodus as their specialties are desirable and their English or French is fluent as those are the languages of science instruction in Lebanon. In addition to doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, teachers of English are also leaving and at about the same 20% rate.
Those with less fungible professions are hoping for employment in the Gulf. There has been a sizable Lebanese ex-pat community there which commutes home on weekends. This is less sure a solution now than it has been in the past and not just because the Gulf states are trying to develop their own professional class out of their rich wasters. The Lebanese are reportedly being offered lower than usual salaries there as they are in no position to bargain.
Subsidized coffee at 7,999 LL
Coffee sold at market rate — nearly eight times the price of the subsidized.
Those who remain are resorting to their wits. Take the Lebanese armed forces, for example. They reduced expenses last summer by no longer serving meat to their troops. Now they are trying a new income scheme — giving rides to tourists in their helicopters. Anyone with land is cultivating it. Last year I read that the Greek Orthodox Church, a major landowner here, was offering land for allotment farming. How people will get to their allotments now in the face of a severe gasoline shortage is another matter. People with backyards are even raising chickens as beef, chicken, and fish are not just expensive but their freshness is becoming questionable, especially now with the power blackouts. Food is expensive as about three-quarters of it is imported to the land of milk and honey. Food subsidies have helped people manage basic nutritional requirements. Rice, beans, pasta, cooking oil and coffee are among the foodstuffs that have been subsidized by the government. The government covers the price differential by reimbursing the seller. The potential for abuse is a business opportunity for some. Subsidized Lebanese foodstuffs have been found in their original packaging on shelves in Sweden and Turkey. Truckloads of subsidized foodstuffs and fuel are being smuggled into Syria where people are starving, thanks to the West’s sanctions program. This annoys many Lebanese as they see their frozen bank accounts as the funding source for subsidies. Before subsidies started to end last month there was a good deal of hoarding going on amidst the general anxiety. Now food prices are rising to their real market rates and are becoming astronomical for the poor.
The scramble for cash is relentless. With an unemployment rate upwards of 50%, it is no wonder theft is increasing. The theft of cars and car parts is on the rise. One scam involves hitting a target car from behind and stealing it when the owner gets out to investigate. A friend wrote that three Kias were stollen from her village above Byblos — she is now taking the battery out of her car at night. One of the reasons I had to move from my original residence a few months ago is that friends were afraid to park their cars in that neighborhood. Another scam is to ring intercoms in apartment buildings, claiming a delivery and then robbing the apartment that opens its door.
Supermarket jars on sale at Second Hand Beirut. The dollar sign is used in place of Lebanese Lira.
Even the well-to-do are liquidating assets – the yachts in the marina are being sold to Saudis, I heard from a man at church who until recently used to work on one of the yachts there. Second-hand stores are cropping up on Facebook and even on Hamra, the main shopping street in my neighborhood where until recently global brands like American Eagle and the Body Shop could be found. The Facebook page Second Hand Beirut is a painful testament to desperation — one recent entry proffered empty supermarket jars.
The self-employed are dealing with their patients and customers differently from before when they would simply state their fee for services. My dentist now tells patients what the cost of materials is and tells them they must cover that. His services, though, are up to their discretion. Most patients pay nothing or very little but some who are working aboard pay the dollar rate of the past. The shirtmaker in my neighborhood took an order from me on the same open basis. He is using his studio as an art gallery now and collects old tires for their metal content — he can get $300 for every 300 tires he brings to the salvage yard. It turns out that the Beirut port explosion was a bonanza for metal salvagers — no wonder the clean-up was so quick! A retired teacher of my acquaintance tutors a family’s children in exchange for a meal at the end of a lesson. My hairdresser no longer bothers with the full salon treatment of washing the client’s hair and combing it out before the cut. His customers want only the most basic service so he just sprays the hair with water prior to cutting it. Even right before Easter when there should have been an especially high demand for his services due to the holiday and lifting of Covid restrictions, I found his salon empty.
And what of the foreign domestic workers? Until recently, a live-in maid was within the budget of a middle class family. Now, even the small salaries paid to these workers are too much for those whose salaries are in lira. Some families have sent their maids back to their home countries. Many have simply deposited them at the doors of their embassies, most of which do little for them. To its great credit, the Philippines has chartered planes to brings its nationals home. But poor prospects at home were the reason these people, mostly women, came to Lebanon in the first place. Many have simply melted into the slums, hoping to find day work. A friend who works at a Christian NGO trying to help foreign domestic workers said that more of these women are having children now, suggesting that these women are hooking up with men in some kind of concubinage arrangement in the hopes of support. One can only imagine their vulnerability to pimps. This NGO accompanied one foreign domestic worker to her embassy to ask for a repatriation flight and the embassy official suggested that she should earn her airfare by turning tricks.
There is no government safety net in Lebanon. The World Food Programme has been ramping up its aid in Lebanon but only serves the destitute. A Syrian refugee family I know was rejected because the mother works two days a week cleaning houses. She has six mouths to feed. Religious groups try to help, like the Maronite project of identifying and helping the needy within their dioceses or mission dollars flowing in from denominations abroad like the Presbyterian Mission Agency. I expect the Muslims have similar initiatives. Families and friends try to help one another, especially in the countryside where roots run deep and the land can be put to use. But I am told that a larger and surer source of aid are the clientelist sectarian political parties, notably Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces, a Christian party. This crisis is an opportunity for them to solidify loyalty among the rank and file by providing stipends and other resources.
Right now the resources most scarce these days are gasoline and electricity. Even the financially comfortable are finding it difficult to fill their gas tanks and recharge their computers. People are organizing their working lives around the hours of electricity provided by the public utility and the back-up generators. The gasoline lines are so long that at the end of the evening people park their cars in line, go home to sleep, and get into their cars the next morning to inch towards the gas pumps. A friend managed to get gas this way so he take his family to their mountain house to water the garden they had planted a few months earlier. When they got there they found that there was no water because there was no electricity for the village water system. The garden was dying. I asked him if he was going to be okay. He answered, “As long as there is peace here, we will be okay.”
A satirical poster in the form of a public death notice announcing the end of the Lebanese lira.
My computer crashed three months ago so I wasn’t able to update this blog while in Beirut. I could have tried to have had it repaired there but I don’t trust repair services in Lebanon these days.
There, I said it.
Too many friends have taken their cell phones, computers, and cars in for repairs and found that they have paid for used replacement parts or have had, in the case of car repairs, other parts of the car stollen. This is what a currency collapse does to otherwise good people.
I could have gone to an internet cafe to get the job done but apart from concerns over Covid, there was a great deal of pressure on one’s time during off-curfew hours. The Ministry of Public Health instituted multiple curfews and lockdowns, especially during during Ramadan, normally a period of evening socializing and conviviality for those observing the daylight fast. Between lockdowns and curfews we were all forced to spend a good deal of time at home. When allowed out, we reverted to our ancestral patterns of hunting and gathering, especially for medicines and food basics, which the currency collapse has made scarce. I joined the bands of neighborhood people going from pharmacy to pharmacy looking for prescription medicine. My own pharmacist showed me the waybill of his most recent order — he had received exactly one box of every medicine he had ordered. As pharmacies are supplied every ten days, my pharmacist can help exactly three cardiac patients a month with their Irbesartan. I told him he had first dibs on medication for stress. At least he’s still in business. Seventy percent of recent pharmacy graduates have left the country. About twenty percent of the medical professionals have left as well.
Normally, my trip to Lebanon is a very social experience. But this year it was a tough trip for me — the curfews and lockdowns kept me isolated from those I wanted to see and the lack of restaurant dining made it difficult to get together even when we could. I felt a loneliness that I hadn’t felt since my first year there and even then I had church for socializing. I quickly learned that the purpose of this trip was to bolster the spirits of my friends and to help them when I could. Foreigners like me were repeatedly told how it lifted morale to have us visit during this desperate period.
I was able to experience some pale semblance of normalcy before I left in the two weeks after Ramadan. The curfew was moved back enough that it was possible to go to restaurants with friends in the evening. It proved a wistful experience. Many establishments had closed for good. And many friends were missing as some had not come back from abroad for their work this year and others had left with their families for a new life elsewhere. But it felt wonderful to spend evenings with the friends who still remain, at least for now.
So many activities I normally do in Lebanon I couldn’t do this trip. I like to travel to see friends outside Beirut and visit new places. But travel is now a fraught experience there. Angry demonstrations regularly cut off roads and streets. For my much of my trip, travel within the country required a permit from the Ministry of Public Health. My first application to visit a friend in the seaside town of Anfeh was denied. Street lighting and even traffic lights have gone dark as economy measures so travel by car is hazardous. When I was able to go a few weeks later to Anfeh I was terrified by the ride back on the darkened autostrade where the only light was the high beams of oncoming traffic blinding our eyes. After that I made only two other trips outside of Beirut and both in daylight hours.
Nor were my excursions inside Beirut comfortable. Normally, I go on walks on wasteland near the beach to collect wildflowers, get a little exercise, and enjoy the seaside air. Usually there are people fishing off the rocks but this year they weren’t there. I expect the August 4th Blast poisoned the fish. I didn’t feel safe with just a friend to keep me company. Walking along the city streets also proved hazardous as manhole covers are now routinely stollen and sold for scrap. In the darkened streets, it is hard to see where one is stepping. The streets at night are eerily empty of cars and pedestrians.
An old tire has been affixed to a manhole whose cover has been stollen; the wasteland under Raouche where I used to pick wildflowers; a gasoline line from a few days ago.
I like to say that the Lebanese are Italians who speak Arabic. They are fun-loving, sensual, cosmopolitan, and wry. But this year, they were morose and anxious. The word my pharmacist used to describe the mood was “desolation”. It is now a commonplace to think back to the Civil War as a better time. Part of me hears this in light of human nature, very much akin to the ancient Hebrews trudging through Sinai nostalgic for slavery in Egypt. But, as friends explained, the Civil War with all its invasions and bloodshed had periods of peace and normalcy and, mostly, the economy ticked along. There was always the concrete hope for the peace that finally came.
Now, what concrete hope exists? What roadmap shows the way out of the tsunami of crises battering the country — the collapsed currency, the catastrophic national debt, capital controls preventing withdrawals from a now fragile banking system, 50-70% unemployment, two hours a day of government electricity, political stagnation and increasing sectarianism, and corruption holding the country together like a cancer? Endless articles describe the problem but I have yet to read one that proposes a solution. The problem is deeply structural. The Lebanese tried a peaceful revolution in October 2019 and were attacked by partisans on motorcycles wielding bicycle chains. The Lebanese refer to their political parties as “mafias” with good reason.
Announcement of multiple simultaneous demonstrations for healthcare and medicine
I left Lebanon wondering if will be safe enough for me to return. I don’t see how the collapse won’t lead to general lawlessness. Tuesday’s headline in The Daily Star, the English-language newspaper was: “Lebanon seen drifting toward total chaos amid collapsing pound”. It reached 18,000 LL to 1 USD the other day. That is about 20 percent lower than it was when I left. Until a year and a half ago the pegged rate was 1,500 LL to 1 USD. Now, at this moment of immiseration, the subsidies are coming off baby formula and other foodstuffs. There are severe shortages of gasoline for cars and of diesel fuel for generators. Even people with jobs can’t work if there is no electricity.
I tell friends I’ll return if there is fighting in the southern suburbs but not if there is fighting in my neighborhood. Lebanon needs a miracle. Pope Francis is on the case — he’s summoned the leaders of the Lebanese Christian denominations for a summit at the Vatican. Yesterday’s headline in the Daily Star reads: “Lebanese look for divine intervention to rescue their country”.
In the meantime, I’ll try to catch up on this blog. And keep praying for that miracle.
“How long will this period last?” is a question I get asked all the time here. “When do you think we will return to normal?”
Subsidized foodstuffs at a local market with a sign limiting the customer to one each. Subsidies are due to run out in June.
I’ve responded reasonably with the example of Greece and its economic meltdown. Many of the same conditions apply – hyperinflation, capital controls and the lack of access to bank deposits, high unemployment, the brain drain, an entrenched political class, and corruption. But in Lebanon, all of these conditions are worse. A 25% unemployment rate would be a huge improvement here. There was no worldwide pandemic at the time of the Greek crisis. And there was never a worry about a currency collapsing because Greece was on the Euro. Yet still, twelve years on, Greece is not back to normal.
I’ve come to realize that it is not my considered opinion on economic matters that is driving this recurring question. No one would mistake me for an economist. It is not the words but the music that one should listen to in this question. What is really being asked is, “Do I have the strength to weather this crisis? Will I live long enough to see Lebanon restored?” As the Psalmist achingly wrote:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? (Psalm 13:1-2a)
Yesterday the lira dropped to 15,000 LL to the U.S. dollar. It is now at 10% of its value of 18 months ago. The middle class has been effectively wiped out, their savings gone. Even those with the prescience to save in dollars cannot access them as dollars now. Demonstrators reacted to the bitter milestone by forcing stores to close on Hamra Street, the business street near my apartment, and cutting off the roads with burning tires and trash. No one blames them. The acrid taste of anger is in everyone’s throat. Fifty-five percent of the people here now live below the global poverty line of $3.84/day.
The political class is unmovable. A friend read me the president’s schedule for last Wednesday, March 10: he was napping in the afternoon to preserve his health. When he is awake he is demanding select posts for his party in any new government. There is no roadmap in sight for this nation in distress.
There is the persistent dread of worse to come, of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Surely, the August 4th blast was a reminder of the power of the unexpected. There are fears of Israel exploiting the moment and invading; of ISIS gaining a footnote, which it attempted to do about ten days ago but the army caught them; of what Hezbollah might do to maintain its considerable power. What is coming around the corner next?
Eyes are now turning to the army, one of the few public institutions held in high regard here. Soldiers, too, are feeling the economic plain. Their purchasing power has been reduced to about $150/month. Retired soldiers are reportedly in the forefront of the demonstrations. The army commander, a distant relative of the president, went on television and reassured the Lebanese people that the army was with them. This was widely interpreted as a shot over the bow aimed at the political class. Is a coup really how this impasse is going to end? How much longer can the people here hold out? Already one sees the reddish hair of malnutrition among the poor. Food, medicine, and gas subsidies, a clumsy system that incentivizes the trafficking of subsidized goods into the disaster that is Syria, are supposed to end in June. The other day a fight broke out in a Spinney’s supermarket over a box of powered milk, an incident now famous here as the reporter on Egyptian television took it as an indication of how far the country had fallen.
The newscaster, who used to live in Lebanon, bewails what has happened to a land known for its food and cuisine.
Today protestors tried to storm the headquarters of the Economics Ministry but were repelled.
The mood here is so different from what it was little more than a year ago. In those long ago days the lira was at 2,000 to the dollar. People were nervous but were still looking for a miracle. That was the word they used, “miracle”. And they described the circumstances they were living in as “the situation”.
Nowadays there is no longer talk of miracles. The word “situation” has been replaced by “catastrophe”. It is all people talk about. The pandemic is just an irritant.
Friends advised me to move out of my apartment hotel with its view of the sea and find somewhere safe. They didn’t feel safe walking there, or even driving, as car thefts are on the rise. So, I am back in my old neighborhood in a fortress of a building and see nothing but buildings across from me. But at least I get to see my friends.
Today I stocked up on water, detergent, and basic foodstuffs. I don’t know where things are going. I heard shots fired this afternoon. Ambulances arriving at the hospital. Church bells ringing. Is there a connection? I don’t know how to interpret this environment of sounds.
A friend just called. There was a sectarian shooting in Verdun, a tony neighborhood near mine. The shops have all closed and the streets are empty.
“Never mind”, says my friend. “We are used to this”. Then he went on to talk about exchange rate of the lira.
goingfortheguttural 