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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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?

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.

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.  

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.