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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.   

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.”

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.

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.  

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?”

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 4^th 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.

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.

I thought about not returning to Beirut this year. Apart from traveling in the middle of a global pandemic I’d be going to a country whose hospital system had been crippled by the port blast. Seeing my friends was going to be tough as the Lebanese government has always taken the pandemic seriously and is implementing strict lockdown measures.  Any Arabic instruction that I take these days will be over the internet, but in Lebanon the internet is wobbly at best.  Not to mention the electrical grid, which is near collapse and is only providing three hours of electricity a day from the government.  But my main personal concern about being in Lebanon these days is personal security.  With nearly half the population living in poverty now it’s only expected that crime is on the rise.  My Lebanese friends are worried about crime, too. 

But then I thought of how I’d miss people if I didn’t come back.  And how it felt like a betrayal not to come back during this season of despair.  And how, when I asked them what they needed I saw I could at least make their lives a little easier by bringing the requested toothpaste, deodorant, over the counter medications, vitamins, foodstuffs, and clothing. I filled an entire suitcase with these items.  Because things are really that bad in Lebanon.   The collapse of the currency to 12% of its former value has made the import of everyday items very difficult.   My one proviso for coming back was that a friend scurry about Beirut and gather up a supply of my medications so my own health wouldn’t suffer.

Implementing my return was no easy matter.  The Lebanese Consulate closed for three weeks around Christmas due to a Covid outbreak there after which they would only accept documents by mail.  Not Fedex.  Not courier service.  Only USPS mail. The very service that the Former Guy did his very best to destroy and which was still delivering packages mailed in early December a month later.  No way was I going to submit my passport to the vagaries of a sabotaged mail service, not to mention a consulate where the mail wasn’t even getting collected regularly. I was going to have to get a one-month visa at the airport and deal with an extension later.

And then there was the flight.  I had read enough about air circulation on airplanes (I can’t believe I wrote a sentence like that) to know that one sits by the window or one doesn’t board the airplane.  Qatar Airlines wouldn’t let me choose my seat in advance of booking as I was delaying my scheduled return.  I just took a chance that a mid-week flight would be okay and it was.  I was prepared to throw the ticket away otherwise.

All set, thought I.  I just needed to notify the apartment hotel of my date of return.  Alas, they informed me, they had just closed.  All those good people thrown out of work with no government safety net to catch them. They now have to rely on a patchwork of help from family, friends, U.N. agencies, NGOs, and, of course, the sectarian political parties looking to buy their votes.  I was going to miss them and my rundown apartment with the lovely view of the sea. I had anticipated this possibility last spring so I had looked around then.  I settled on one in an adjacent neighborhood near the sea which had a view.  I do love watching the sun set and the planes come in to land.  So, I notified my Plan B apartment hotel and it was all set.

As the day of my departure approached, I had to submit to the caprices of PCR testing.  The Lebanese government requires a negative result within 96 hours of the flight.  In Beirut one gets one’s PCR test back within 24 hours but in New York last August it took almost two weeks for me to get a result.  So, I spread the risk around and did two tests in New Hampshire – one came back too early to be useful – and a test in NYC.  The NYC test came back with 48 hours to spare.  

And finally, on the day of my departure there was the form to submit to the Ministry of Public Health showing one’s negative Covid result and indicating compliance with the public health measures they were taking.  Proof of acceptance was necessary for a boarding pass. Wouldn’t you know, there was a glitch in the computer program and the form kept bouncing back.  I called a friend in Beirut to see if I might be expressing my Lebanese phone number incorrectly but in spite of various iterations, the form wasn’t moving forward.  Computer glitches do to me what stalled traffic does to some others – I just go berserk.  As I was frothing at the mouth, my husband told me we’d sort it out at the airport so off we went.

At the airport there were unfortunate souls who had gotten the wrong Covid test and were not allowed to board.  I was given another Lebanese government website to which I could submit my negative PCR test so I was allowed to proceed to the airline counter.  I felt sorry for the airline personnel who were trying to enforce the restrictions of overseas governments.

When I finally landed in Beirut I was given another PCR test at the airport and a few days later was told it was negative.  I looked up my flight on-line and saw that all of us on that flight were equally fortunate.  Only one or two passengers on flights from Turkey were found positive at the airport that day.  Ten days later I got my final Covid test as required by the government and I was finally allowed out of quarantine and given the same freedoms as everyone else here, which were nearly none. I had arrived in the middle of a strict lockdown.  A friend arranged  grocery deliveries for me as that was the only way to get food.  I had arrived in Beirut six months after the port blast, a disaster I had missed by a week. As the taxi took me from my quarantine hotel to the neighborhood where I was going to stay, I passed familiar streets, now desolate of people and commerce. I found myself saying “good-bye” rather than “hello”. The Beirut I love is gone and I doubt it will return.

I was in New York City finishing up my quarantine when the cataclysmic blast shook Beirut. It took me a day to track down friends there, all of whom are alive but two are part of the 300,000 who have lost their homes.  The Lebanese have just learned that their insurance isn’t going to cover the damage as exclusions include not just war and acts of God but also damage resulting from chemicals. One friend told me his insurance company insists it was an act of war. Insurance companies are the same everywhere.

The Lebanese were already angry at what passes for their government but now it’s white hot fury.  What is remarkable to me is that they are not pointing their fingers at Israel with whom they are on low level terms of aggression and technically at war. The negligence of the Lebanese government in permitting ammonium nitrate to sit in their port for six years is the focus of their wrath.  The government has arrested port officials and frozen their bank accounts but it is doubtful that scapegoating will do much to appease the anger of the citizens. The opposition’s accusation, via a brother of the former PM Saad Hariri, that Hezbollah controls the port begs the question of why the government of Saad Hariri did not do more when it was in power.  In fact, friends tell me that the top management of the port was Christian.

Not that going up against any of these armed political parties is easy. Last night I read an article on the website The961.com about Hezbollah ambulances breaching the security line around the disaster zone suggesting that there was something questionable afoot.  Today the website is unavailable.  Hezbollah had influence over the port and reportedly used it to receive weapons as well as other goods.  About a month ago it was said that they had received a container of cell phones and did not pay duty on them.  The phones would have been used as emollients for their supporters or sold to retail outlets for mutual profit.

The port itself has always been notorious for its corruption. A 2012 article from The Daily Star gave details of how it was den of thieves, requiring a small conspiracy of owner, supplier, port security, goods inspectors, and tariff officers to misrepresent the bill of lading or its value in order to evade proper import duties, a practice that costs Lebanon one billion dollars a year.  

The courts, too, are also notoriously corrupt and this story involves the lack of response from the court to letters from a senior customs official seeking permission to sell or donate the chemicals.  One wonders if requests from the purchaser of these chemicals in Mozambique also went into the black hole.  Surely they noticed a million dollars worth of chemicals had not arrived.

While there has been an outpouring of grassroots help for the neighborhoods most afflicted by the blast from street sweeping to food deliveries, the anger at the political class is seething. “Where’s the state?” is the refrain, echoing years of protests. Neither the president nor the prime minister has visited the blast site. Today two members of the cabinet did try to make appearances in the residential areas surrounding ground zero but they were driven away by hostile crowds.  Tomorrow, Saturday, there is a demonstration. 

At this point, even some politically well-connected are disassociating from the system.  The Foreign Minister quit earlier this week, citing the impasse on negotiations with the IMF which is requiring some transparency and accountability before loaning more money to Lebanon.  The chief negotiator quit in June.  After the blast Lebanon’s ambassador to Jordan quit, citing disgust with the corruption and incompetence: “We must not show any of them mercy and they all must go”, she is quoted as saying.  An MP associated with the opposition resigned calling the government “a monster”.  A daughter of a prominent Sunni family, Sara El-Yafi, wrote that “justice can only be found in the destruction of this wretched political system”. Her website is also not accessible today.   A prominent protestant church official called on the one protestant representative in Parliament to resign so as not to have his name tarnished by association with the government. 

Will we ever know exactly what happened? Was it a warehouse accident set off by a welder’s spark? Or was this part of the chain of by sabotage such as has been occurring in Iran of late? Is Trump’s use of the word “attack” based on real intelligence or is it disinformation aimed at discrediting Iran?  Many Lebanese and NGOs are calling for an international investigation, a call taken up by Emmanuel Macron on his visit to the people of Lebanon yesterday.  But president Michel Aoun, former warlord, has rejected this, claiming that it would obscure the truth.  

Here we come upon what is called “the judicialization of international relations” which is supposed to extend the enjoyment of human rights.  Unfortunately, in the Middle East it became associated with George W. Bush and Western machinations for regime change.  Today was supposed to bring the announcement of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon on what persons they were holding responsible for the bomb blast that killed ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri along with 21 others in 2005.  This crime occurred during Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. There were serious irregularities in the collection of evidence at the scene of the blast and much of what the tribunal has relied on is telecommunications evidence, quite a bit of which came from Israel.  The Lebanese had been bracing for the pronouncement of the tribunal’s judgment with every expectation of mass demonstrations and possibly riots. Some believe it was Syria disposing of an opponent of the occupation; others believe it was Israel sewing discord between Lebanese factions while setting up its enemy Syria to take the fall.  And there are other theories.

What is clear is the political consequence of the Hariri assassination: mass demonstrations and the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon in what has become known as the Cedar Revolution.   This week’s catastrophe will surely add oxygen to the October 17 Revolution and its call for a new social and political contract.  The Lebanese people are tired of being a fiefdom run by political mafias. They want a state: there are warehouses to inspect, the poor to care for, infrastructure to build, and some wealthy criminals to bring to justice.

In a few short hours I will be driven to the airport by some friends.  I have an acute case of survivor guilt leaving Lebanon during this moment of collapse.  The currency has lost 80% of its value and half the people aren’t working.  Electricity is only running three hours a day in Beirut and the back-up generators can’t cover the rest of the day. Pharmacies and hospitals are running low on supplies.  Food is eating up family budgets. The airport lights cut out last week while a plane was trying to land.

Everyone has a scenario for what will happen in the next six months and none of them is positive. Quite a few people worry that Israel will take advantage of the country’s weakened state and invade “for security reasons”.  That would help create a diversion for Netanyahu and his corruption baggage and perhaps secure water sources.  Others fear a clash of militias, mainly Shi’a versus Sunni, another front in the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.  Some see the “revolution” turning violent and/or the military taking over. No one doubts the continued emiseration of the Lebanese people and a rise in crimes for survival.  On my own street, we had a two-man break-in of an apartment building in which a doctor for an international NGO got quite cut up fending off the intruders (she and her husband have since left the country).  One of the intruders was the bawwab (super) of the building next door, someone who at least had a roof over his head.  Last week, a woman was robbed of her purse on the street and got a black eye.  The robber was a Sudanese, probably a house servant whose wages hadn’t been paid.

Those who dare hope hope that Hezbollah leaves the government in a gesture of solidarity so that the IMF loans can come through.  Some place great store on the Lebanese diaspora coming through and in fact, in the last week or so, I’ve seen Lebanese expats in my hotel and in neighborhood restaurants. But there are not enough of them to turn the tide, I don’t think. It’s a seasonal appearance to visit family.   Some predict the rise of disaster capitalism with corporations buying up public assets like the coastline just as they did in Thailand after the tsunami.  Except, of course, the Lebanese political mafia has already found a way to get ahold of much of this supposedly inalienable property.  Mostly, though, people are hoping for their families – and that hope lies in leaving the country. One of my teachers told me that even unmarried Muslim women from conservative households are being pushed to leave the country, unchaperoned, to find employment.  Turkey and Cyprus are favored locations for their ease of entry.  Residency and even citizenship can be had for the price of an apartment, as I understand it.

One of the great concerns is bank failure.  Lebanese banks used to be solid, gold-backed institutions. It was a point of pride that Lebanese banks did not get involved in the casino capitalism ending in the 2008 crash. But then came “financial engineering”, the Ponzi scheme of attracting dollar deposits by offering high interest rates. Now, people can’t access their dollar savings accounts.   Many Lebanese working in the Gulf have found themselves in this position. The only thing a depositor can do is write a check to be deposited in another Lebanese bank, so this has meant the real estate sector, in a slump for years because of the overbuilding of high end apartments, is now experiencing a rush of investment.  People are trying to buy land or housing just to clear out their bank accounts.  The sellers are often in the category of people who are allowed limited access to their dollars – people with children studying abroad, for example.  Within families, people are buying up the debts of their children and other relatives so that they can clear out their accounts and become the family banker.  There is no FDIC here so when a bank fails, the money is gone for good.  Buying real estate only exacerbates the problem of non-productive uses of capital in Lebanon, of course.  How will the economy be financed if the banks are cleared out?

Institutions of every kind are now shutting their doors.  The venerable Bristol Hotel, neighborhood stores and restaurants, and private schools.  Even the American University has furloughed staff, mostly from its hospital, where low level administrative staff were let go this week in their hundreds.  Quite possibly these were mostly patronage jobs shoved onto the university by the political mafia, but these are families without an income now.

Bizarrely, the prime minister, Hassan Diab, is suing AUB for a million dollars of salary to be paid into a foreign bank account.  He was an administrator there before his political elevation. This tone deaf initiative has little legal merit as an AUB employee only receives an unpaid leave of absence under these circumstances. The suit has become a sign of how detached the political class is from the problems of subsistence gnawing at the rest of the Lebanese.

Where is the revolution?  It has split.  One part wants early elections and a change of personnel at the top of political life here.  The other part sees the problem as systemic and that elections would only benefit a new generation of politicians who would succumb to easy corruption.  And who believes that there isn’t vote buying, ballot box disappearances, and other corrupt practices in the election system?  In three months we will have the first anniversary of the revolution and its fault lines will become more apparent. Maybe it will be re-energized.

When I arrived here in January, as the lira was losing value and banks were breaking trust with their depositors, the word “miracle” was on everyone’s lips.  They saw trouble ahead and wished for a miracle to take Lebanon in a new direction.  This was before Corona and hyperinflation.

Now, though, no one talks about a miracle.  There is just an agonized litany of terrible conditions, a pervasive sense of dread.

A friend here quoted to me from MacBeth:

“Bleed, bleed, poor country!

Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,

For goodness dare not check thee.

Wear those thy wrongs;

The title is affeered.”

We can only hope that the corruption and mismanagement of Lebanon will not come to as bloody an end as Shakespeare’s play. 

The other day I left my building for a dental appointment and saw the shopkeepers of the area milling about on the street.  Accident? There were no police. Block party? Not a festive feel.  I went up to the shirt maker and inquired.  “No electricity” he said.  “The back-up generators aren’t working either.”  Sure enough, their shops were in darkness.  The shirt maker, the tailor, the falafel maker, the dry cleaner – these are the lucky ones who still have paid employment and now they can’t work.  Then the dentist called and said his building didn’t have electricity either.

The electricity sector has been a problem since the civil war started forty-five years ago.  That was when back-up generators became commonplace.  Since the war in Syria and the increased pressure on the system by the flood of refugees, there have been regularly scheduled three-hour power cuts in all neighborhoods of Beirut.  Nowadays, the power cuts last most of the day and during the hours of service they still cut regularly.  One evening I counted eight power cuts.  The traffic lights are out on the city streets so crossing an intersection is now especially terrifying in a country where road travel already was a white-knuckle experience.

Part of the lack of service is structural.  The back-up generators are now part of the economy and close to political power.  The last thing they want is a functional electrical system.  A few years ago Zahle, a city in the Bekka, managed to get 24-hour electricity going and found its transformers mysteriously shot at.  People who can afford it now are doubling up on generator companies so they can do their jobs.

Fully half the population does not pay for its electrical use.  Partly this is government subsidies, mostly to Shi’a neighborhoods.  It is also bold theft of electrical lines.  The Baptist church near me had both its telephone and electrical lines spliced by a family of squatters in the basement of their building.  They removed the telephone line. When I asked why a friend why they didn’t call the electrical company to remove the splice, she said it was the price of peace.  A small Protestant community can’t go up against Shi’as.  Maybe it would be different if they were Maronite or Greek Orthodox.

Reforming the electricity sector is one of the major demands of the IMF and other sources of foreign loans.  There have been loans and grants in the past to upgrade the system and the money has been misappropriated. Now foreign lenders are getting tough.  They want the $2 billion a year loss the government takes on the electricity sector to end and that means ending subsidies and theft, a heavy lift during this current economic collapse.  Smelling opportunity, Gebran Bassil, the Maronite president’s son-in-law and a former minister in the Parliament, is demanding that a power plant be built in a Maronite community because “Lebanon is a Christian country.”  Could he be more offensive to the Muslims and Druze? He regularly trolls members of other faiths.

There are rumors that China may buy up the national electrical company.  It already has a large presence in Africa and the Middle East may be its next step.  It has been expanding its presence in Lebanon of late by building Beirut a new music conservatory and sending medical supplies during the pandemic.  It has troops in UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) ensuring Lebanon’s sovereignty and has a field hospital near the southern town of Marjayoun. Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, is encouraging the government to look East for its partnerships and to forget the West.  The United States has not done its standing here any favors by imposing yet more sanctions on the region, this time via the so-called Caesar Act, which penalizes any person or institution doing business with Syria.  The effect on Lebanon could be catastrophic as the economies are intertwined. America’s influence here may well dwindle as a result of its punitive policies.

The economic problems here are now drawing comparisons with Venezuela.  The hyperinflation is being accompanied by scarcities in supplies.  Food prices are astronomical — I spent 72,000 LL on four cans of black beans last week — in official terms that was $47.52 but as the dollar is trading for ten times more than the official rate, it was more like $5.00 for me — still, a ridiculous price and nowadays most Lebanese don’t have access to dollars. The hospitals are two weeks away from running out of medical parts.  This means, for example, if a surgeon wants a particular size screw, he may have to adapt a screw of a different size to do the job.  Pharmacy shelves are already looking bare. I have to cut some of my pills in half to get the right dosage.  The dry cleaner asked me to bring back the plastic covering they wrap my order in —  I was already bringing back the hangers.

The other day I was walking down the street feeling so pessimistic about Lebanon. Then I realized I heard the bangs and clangs of building construction.  “Surely,” I said to an acquaintance shortly afterwards, “they wouldn’t be building unless they were confident in eventual sales and no invasion from Israel.”  The reply? “What you heard, my dear, was the sound of money laundering.”

Instead, what the Lebanese mention when the Venezuela comparison crops up is that Lebanese ex-pats will not let the country or their families collapse into poverty.  Foreign remittances are a big part of this economy.  The dollars they have built up in the banks here may be as good as gone but new dollars, or “fresh money”, will not be touched.   Or so the banks say. At least for now using “fresh money accounts” is the only way to wire dollars into the country so the recipient can receive them.

In the meantime, the sardonic humor of the Lebanese is as active as ever.

Q: Why is Lebanon the safest country for children?

A: Because they can put their fingers in the light sockets and not get hurt.