Playing the game: What it takes to survive in Lebanon, part two

Some medicines are now simply unavailable in Lebanon.

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 two of her story. You can read part one here.

Claudette is proud of her thrifty skills, ‘save a white coin for a black day’ she tells me. Her flat looks like a hermitage, decorated only with a fading picture of the Sacred Heart, a red shrine candle, and a small photo of her father, whom she loved. She has no mobile phone, just a landline. She never buys meat or fish or takes a taxi. She’ll walk half an hour from one fruit and veg shop to another to save a few cents, and will rejoice in the saving.

‘Don’t think I don’t know anything because I can’t read or speak foreign’, Claudette likes to say, pointing at her head, ‘there’s a brain in there.’

‘Well, a small one’, I always respond.

‘I know everything’ she replies, unperturbed, raising her chin and smiling a broad smile with her mouth closed. When she does this she looks uncannily like a frog.

However canny Claudette might be, some medication is now simply unattainable in Lebanon. For her diabetes, she needs a particular strip for her testing kit.

‘You wouldn’t believe it brother, I tried all the pharmacies, running around like a devil. They’re all saying the same thing: no longer available. Well, no problem, I’ll stop testing myself.’

Other things are bad here but we no longer really notice them. State electricity is reduced to about three or four hours a day. This means that it’s hot at night and food rots in the fridge. But this happened last year too, and we got used to that, as we did the turned-off traffic lights like tall blind statues, the pot-deep potholes, devaluation-hyperinflation-obfuscation, COVID-19, no government... but the latest thing is a serious fuel shortage. Huge queues extend out of petrol stations, fifty cars long and a hundred horns loud.

Something else happened recently. At the turn of May forty tonnes of carp rose up and silvered the face of the Litani River and Lake Qaraoun in the Beqaa Valley. Their bloated corpses had to be scraped off the surface and incinerated before opportunists could sell them in the refugee camp markets. We know that these waters are poisoned by agricultural and industrial waste, but why all the carp died, and why just now, has not been established because both of Lebanon’s fish specialists have emigrated. Perhaps the levels of contamination just got too much, by one small notch.

Our daily sobhiyye continues, and Claudette always puts on a good show. But some evenings I come back to the flat to find her sitting on her east-facing balcony, adjoining mine, it faces the mountains that burn gold at sunset. She’s holding her rosary, but the beads aren’t moving. ‘I’ve finished praying,’ Claudette will say, ‘I said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be’ (she’s always smug about her prayer-life). Then she’ll come over to my end of the balcony and lean over the railing like a Fifties movie-star and tell me, quite disinterestedly, that today she just wants to cry and she doesn’t know why. I think she’s tired. I think she’s losing the game, just, and for the first time.

This is part two of a blog written for us by friend and writer Patrick Page. You can read part one here.