When one imagines a summer in Lebanon, what is usually expected is an image of pure joy. You could imagine kids playing on the beach while their parents sink their feet in the sand to enjoy a sunny afternoon after a rich lunch consisting of a traditional “Tabouleh” to accompany meat known as “Mashewe” fresh off a coal grill. You could picture teens delighted to spend their first few months with a driving license going on car cruises around Beirut with their friends blasting music to match their mood. You would expect to see the streets of Downtown Beirut filled to the brim with shoppers and tourists, and the streetlights illuminating a night that never ends. This incredible scenario simply adds fuel to the fire of the never-ending nightmare that is the life of a Lebanese citizen in 2021.
As part of the class of 2023, I always expected to spend my university years (also known as my peak years within the wider international community) surrounded by my friends, family, and community. I imagined obtaining my bachelor’s degree in Biology, followed by a 4-year journey through Medicine at the most prestigious Medical School in the MENA region until I grew wise enough to officially pursue a foreign venture. However, it seems that the impending doom of the political and economic situation in Lebanon has forced a gruesome awakening upon its naïve citizens. How is it fathomable that teenagers must bear the burden of planning their departure from the country that was supposed to nurture their hopes and dreams?
The past 22 months have been some of the most testing in Lebanese history. Admittedly enough, it has almost been a perfect storm of disastrous events that has left citizens wondering when the universe will have mercy on them. In truth, the crises that have hit the country have always been in the making given the vast history of corruption that the political class has maintained over the past 30 years. Built on an intricate fabric of false promises and catastrophic mismanagement, the sectarian system has simply proven to be the catalyst of the nation’s post-revolution demise. It has become highly evident that the country needs systemic change when the simple act of forming a government has stalled for over a year over feuds regarding sects controlling certain ministries rather than the qualifications of those in power. Moreover, it seems that the decades of irresponsibility have practically destroyed the futures of most of the next generation where almost no options remain to escape from this sinking ship.
The main constituent of our aspiring youth’s future is obviously education, which is a field that has suffered incredibly over the past two years. The Lebanese educational system had already experienced major setbacks even before the COVID-19 pandemic almost completely halted in-person learning for the best part of two scholastic years. During October 2019, a nationwide revolution broke out where millions of citizens protested for any change that could topple the endless cycle of similar faces assuming power. In fact, the country would go on to experience the period with the most change in the nation’s history, yet the actual changes that occurred could not have been foreseen even by the greatest of cynics. The Ministry of Education still planned to culminate the 2019-20 scholastic year on time despite the weeks lost to road closures that restricted students’ academic workload to take-home assignments.
Soon enough, regular learning resumed after the protests eventually subsided around the beginning of November 2019; however, one stark warning for what was to come was the valuation of the Lebanese Lira slightly faltering when compared to the US Dollar. Although it was not a problem of severe concern to the public when compared to the immediate threat of civil unrest breaking out daily, the Lira depreciation was the hallmark of what was to come. While the educational system struggled to get back on track with its curriculums during late 2019, reports from China began to address a “pneumonia-like outbreak” which had caused a mysteriously high number of deaths. This mysterious virus would become known as COVID-19, a pandemic that would boast 211 million infections worldwide in the span of 18 months along with 4.42 million deaths.
As the pandemic progressed through every nation worldwide, Lebanon was forced to undergo a supposed two-week lockdown starting February 28th, 2020, due to the country registering around a dozen COVID-19 cases in a week. The goal of this early lockdown, compared to the rest of the world following suit in mid-March, was to halt the spread of the disease before it could cause irrevocable damage to millions of Lebanese citizens, yet those efforts were to no avail. Even though the daily cases barely exceeded a dozen while they increased in the tens of thousands elsewhere and the Ministry of Public Health supposedly conquered COVID-19, the decision to start lifting lockdown measures and opening back the Rafic Hariri International Airport during late spring 2020 ultimately undid the quarantine efforts and led to a sharp rise in cases which almost reached a plateau at around 100-200 daily cases in July 2020. However, the 4th of August 2020 introduced another major tragedy into the lives of the Lebanese people that would forever shake the very core of 6 million souls.
At 6:07 P.M. local time, 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate caused the third largest non-nuclear explosion ever recorded, killing 218 citizens and leaving around 300,000 people homeless. More than a year after the blast, the people still have no answers as to the actual cause of the explosion and the reason why so many tons of highly explosive materials were simply left unmoved at the Beirut port for approximately seven years. Given the state of the Coronavirus pandemic back then along with the already sharp decrease of the valuation of the Lira, the explosion truly happened at the worst possible time. The Beirut port was the focal point of all shipped imports into the country, and this sudden hurdle would accelerate the major economic crisis the country would experience in the following year when accompanied with the major third wave of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The pandemic caused severe damage to many aspects of citizens’ daily lives whether it be economically, socially, emotionally, or even psychologically. The very act of social distancing goes against the human nature that feeds upon social interactions as a sense of unity and support. In addition, one must not forget that we were faced with a period during late January 2021 when the daily global death toll from COVID-19 exceeded around 14,000 lives lost for 2 weeks. In Lebanon particularly, that peak of the pandemic had left hospitals barely able to welcome any patients at all; Emergency Departments across the country were left with most patients lying on their floors due to the lack of beds. Even at AUBMC, commonly known as one of the most prestigious healthcare centers in the MENA region, Emergency Rooms were forced to host 3 COVID-19 patients at once during January-February 2021 while beds at the main hospital were vacated, a process which took days at best.
As mentioned previously, the Lebanese Lira’s valuation compared to the US Dollar was in massive decline even before the blast, with the black-market rate reaching a high of 9,000LBP to the $1 in June 2020; however, the rate post-explosion along with the second and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic would keep fluctuating to as high as 22,171 Liras to the dollar on July 17th, 2021. This was the obvious result of years of mismanagement, corruption, and lack of accountability. Nevertheless, this disastrous economic collapse only seems to be progressing further given the developments that have occurred during the summer of 2021. While the situation was thought to have been dire before, it has utterly become unbearable as of late.
It all commenced when gas stations around the country began hanging their Petroleum hoses in the faces of confused citizens when most had been operating 24/7 prior to June 2021. From that point onwards, the public discourse was focused on a possible fuel crisis in the country which led to people swarming Petrol stations from the brink of dawn to fill up tanks and gallons of fuel while the price was still stable. Eventually, this hoarding mentality would even spread to the gas station owners themselves, who refused to sell fuel at government-subsidized prices leading to the closure of gas stations early in the day with thousands of people still queuing. As such, the supposed fuel shortage in the country led many citizens to resort to the black market to purchase gasoline at a higher price to avoid the risk of wasting an entire day in the “lines of humiliation” only to be told that the station will close for the day when they were finally close to filling their vehicles. As a result, the fuel crisis affected most aspects of daily life to the point where the Lebanese General Security Department reported record high passport renewal requests during the summer. To make matters worse for citizens who were already struggling to make ends meet, prices of electricity bills and public commute soared. Moreover, the cost of a bag of rice had risen to 20 times its original worth in only 2 years, let alone the prices of bread, dairy products, and meat. Simply put, a famine had begun.
One must also mention the role of the government in the electricity crisis in the country. Political candidates have been promising the Lebanese people 24/7 electricity for decades only for their plans to be pushed aside upon their election into parliament; consequently, citizens have always depended on private generator companies to supply their homes with electricity during the government outages that lasted as long as 12 hours consecutively per day in some areas. However, due to the incredible difficulty of obtaining fuel for their generators, many of these private suppliers have been forced to ration their supply of electricity to most homes in the country. This situation has left many cheering in joy the minute their private supplier powers their homes after long hours of no electricity, Wi-Fi, and air conditioning during the scorching heat of August. The country has been dragged from the high of harmonious unity against the ruling class to the low of barely managing to light up a streetlight at night.
When the bar is set so low, what can be said about the aspirations of a new generation of Lebanese teens? At that tender age, how are they supposed to cope with one of the worst economic crises in the past two centuries whilst balancing their education which has been made even less accessible? The debate revolving around the educational sector has addressed the feasibility of students returning to on-campus learning after the COVID-19 situation slightly improved in the country and vaccinations helped flatten the curve of daily deaths over the summer. However, questions over how students would even make it to their schools/universities with the fuel shortage that has crippled the nation’s transportation services remain unanswered. Moreover, how would students manage to take their courses online when there is barely any electricity or internet connection due to the fuel situation?
This article is a last cry for the sake of the Lebanese people in general and the youth in particular; the younger generation are stuck with a crisis they are in no way responsible for. It might seem crazy, yet the situation has truly evolved into the total collapse of the socioeconomic, political, and healthcare sectors in the republic. Lebanese citizens have been waking up to the morning news tackling numerous crises for the past few decades, but now it has been more than overwhelming to hear a daily reminder of how disastrous the crises have gotten at the expense of the innocent. This collapse has even turned the people against each other; serial hoarding of essential materials has led to the heartbreaking reality of this summer while many gas station owners have chosen the black market as a way of generating an enviable profit during a time when 80% of the country’s population has fallen under the line of poverty. The Lebanese people have always prided themselves with their immense resilience in the face of disasters along with their ability to rise from the rubble, yet this defeats the nation’s own interests when the crises accumulate to finally sink this floating shipwreck.
Amid this chaos, a university student like myself would obviously consider foreign options to escape this mess while I still could; however, when it comes down to it, a large majority is stuck in the aftermath of this collapse for a generation to come. The World Bank has recently published a report saying that the country might take as long as 15 years to truly recover from the damage inflicted in the past 24 months. As for immigration in the search of a better livelihood elsewhere, one must possess a foreign passport as well as a USD source of income to stand some sort of chance abroad. It seems bizarre that people’s life savings have lost almost 90% of their original values due to the black-market USD exchange rate as well as the issues concerning hyperinflation. Lebanese students are at a crossroads in their lives. They either choose to stay due to the currently immense financial hardships of immigrating as well as the emotional aspect of leaving their loved ones behind or leave before the crisis worsens and the living conditions deteriorate even more. Those who are lucky enough to get a choice in the matter utterly resent it as there does not seem to be a correct choice; you either ignore your family, friends, and community to survive or turn your back on your own future for the ones you love the most.
Edited by Bachar Bzeih