“Playing the game”: What it takes to survive in Lebanon

The port of Beirut, Lebanon, following last August’s explosion.

Lebanon has been struggling for a long time. Last week, the Lebanese pound hit an all-time low. There are long lines at petrol stations due to fuel shortages and rationing, and unrest is stirring again. For people living in Lebanon, this is now the norm. Many have developed survival strategies out of sheer necessity. Here, Embrace friend and writer Patrick Page, who lives in Beirut, tells us of life in Lebanon through the eyes of his elderly neighbour, ‘Claudette’. This is part one of her story.

This is one perspective of life in Lebanon. Not mine, but that of my neighbour. I’ll call her Claudette. We live in East Beirut and there are two well-trodden metres of between her door and mine. She’s 77 and makes the best coffee in Lebanon: thick and black and probably flammable (‘Well, do you want water or coffee?’)

In the morning, at 9am, she knocks on my door, or I knock on her door, and we exchange a smile and an insult: ‘What do you want? Nutter.’ Then I go in to her flat, usually forget to close her door, get shouted at again, close the door, and then we settle into our sobhiyye, our unhurried morning coffee session in the shade of her west-facing balcony. We swap more desultory insults, exchange neighbourhood gossip, and Claudette will recount her latest failures and triumphs in surviving, which she approaches like a great game. We’ve been performing this ritual every day for nearly two years now and we call each other brother and sister.

Claudette was born in 1944, in a village in the mountains in the south, a year after Lebanon became independent. When I remark that her life spans that of the nation she simply shrugs, ‘What do I know?’; the analogy too trite perhaps. She was taken out of education after finishing primary school and has spent her life caring for others, first as a kind of second mother to her two brothers and later as a nurse to her parents who both lived into a frail old age.

Getting hold of medicines has become increasingly difficult in Lebanon.

Image: Tahaddi

When Claudette’s father died he left her a chunk of money which she put in the bank and from which she has lived off the interest ever since. When I first knew her two years ago this was 900,000 LBP (Lebanese Lira) a month, $600 at the official exchange rate. This was easily sufficient for her needs, as Claudette lives frugally and is on a fixed rent scheme which means that she pays 23,000 LBP per month, about $15.

But her monthly interest is now reduced to 150,000 LBP, which, with the drastic devaluation of the lira, is worth $10 dollars. Her rent has remained the same (now $1.50), but the rest cannot cover her basic needs. When I ask her how she will live on this she gives me the classic Lebanese shrug, much like the Gallic one: ‘What can we do? I have food. Many don’t. Katter khair Allah, thanks be to God.’

Claudette’s main battle now is getting hold of the medication she needs. She suffers from a cocktail of medical issues which she lists off given the slightest of prompts: diabetes, blood pressure, brittle bones, stomach acid, ‘you name it I have it’, and then there are the mental health issues that she mentioned just once, on a dark rainy day a few months after the port explosion when her flat was still waiting to be fixed.

The problem is that all medication is brought in from abroad, purchased with dollars, and as a result is prohibitively expensive in lira. But Claudette has her ways. She has registered with several NGOs who help her sporadically. When she signs up, they will generally ask if she is getting help from another NGO. No, she tells them, because she has to play the game, because she wants to live. The other day, when she managed to find an organisation to pay for an X-ray I opened my door to find Claudette literally pirouetting and clicking her hands in an extraordinary kind of flamenco. ‘Patrick, Patrick! I did it and I didn’t have to pay a franc!’.  I don’t think she did this dance in front of the NGO. 

By Patrick Page, writer

Read part two of Claudette’s story.