A Day in the Life of a Middle Class Resident of Lebanon - Explaining Lebanon’s political and economic crisis

Opinion analysis by Yara Zebian, Featured Writer

September 8th, 2021

We’re not just tired of Lebanon’s crisis, we’re also tired of trying to explain this crisis to people who have not lived it. We could flood you with excruciatingly painful details that explain what life is like in the failed state of Lebanon, but you will still not really get it. “You’re exaggerating”, I was once told by a foreigner who has not stepped foot in this country. It’s a crisis beyond the understanding of a privileged individual’s mind. However, we need you to get it. We need you to understand just what we mean when we say that Lebanon has no rock bottom: it consistently plunges further into abyss. We need you to understand how terrifyingly this large-scale crisis impacts every single citizen of Lebanon. Although I do not have the capabilities to speak for many residents of this country (migrant domestic workers, residents below the poverty line, Palestinian and Syrian refugees, etc…), I use this space to walk you through a day in the life of a middle-class resident of Lebanon. As you read this, imagine yourself as the main character. Allow me to take you through a day in your life as an average resident of Lebanon in the year 2021. 

Day in the Life

You wake up, it’s a new day. You were hardly able to sleep tonight and every other night due to the scorching heat; the temperature has reached a whopping 32°C (90°F) on most days, yet you have no means of combating the heat; that would require an air conditioning system, and you cannot turn your air conditioner or fan on due to a lack of electricity. Anyway, we’ll get to that later. Where were we? Ah, yes, you wake up after a harsh night of uncomfortable sleep, all sweaty.

Your first order of business: freshening up. You go use the washroom, but there is still no electricity, so you take your phone with you and use your phone’s weak flashlight. You’re all sweaty, so you hop in for a quick shower. But wait: there is no hot water. Securing hot water for showers requires prior planning: you need to know when electricity will be available to turn the water heater on for at least an hour before you shower. But here’s one of the many catches: your place is currently not receiving more than an hour of governmental electricity per day, if at all. If you can still afford it, you probably have a private generator to solely rely on as your home’s power provider, but this is no longer the band-aid fix it once was because the current fuel and gas shortage has rendered it practically impossible for private generator providers to secure the fuel needed to provide you with electric power. As such, these providers have begun rationing, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll be given daily schedules informing you of today’s private generator hours, which reach 6-8 hours daily (the unlucky ones don’t even get a schedule).

You need to shower anyway, you stink; you take a quick cold-water shower, then hop to the kitchen for some well-earned breakfast. You think through breakfast meals you could have with a power outage. Toast? That’s out. Coffee? Kettle needs power. Eggs? Oatmeal? But do you have enough gas to light up your stove and cook? Assuming you do have some gas left, you heat the water for your coffee the old-fashioned way on a stovetop and cook your eggs. Now that you’ve pushed through your meal all while wiping the sweat off your forehead, you gather the energy to head to work, but there’s one “quick” stop you must make before that.

You’re heading to work now. You start your car, dreading the “low fuel” sign. You drive to the nearest open fuel station, the average station nowadays has no less than a 2 to 3 hours waiting line. Cars have formed queues starting at the station and spanning an average distance of five kilometers (three miles). You take your place at the end of the line where you spend the next 2 to 3 hours advancing one car at a time. You’re sweaty again, turning the car’s air conditioning system will waste even more fuel, and you’re in no position to waste such a precious luxury on keeping cool, so you suffer the heat. Are you exhausted yet? You still have a whole day ahead of you, so suck it up.

You’re finally at the gas station, but I hope you didn’t expect to completely fill up your car after this long wait; they’re rationing fuel, so they won’t give you more than a fixed amount of money’s worth of gas, enough to last you a day or two before you are tossed back into the dreadful line to inhumanely wait for another small ration of fuel. You’re finally done from the gas station; you now head to work. One hour has passed. You’re still stuck in traffic. One more hour. Still stuck in traffic. Remember the line you waited in to fill fuel? Well, every fuel station on your way to work has one of these, creating unbearable traffic that even those who don’t wish to fill their car have to endure. This isn’t your typical rush-hour traffic.

You finally make it to work, you’re an employee at a retail store. It’s payday today, favorite day of the month! Your monthly salary is 1,500,000 L.L., sounds like a lot? With Lebanon’s looming political and economic crisis, this amount translates to 78 U.S. dollars, as opposed to its pre-crisis value of $1,000, not so much now, is it? You get paid and complete all your transactions in Lebanese liras, not in dollars, as that’s only for the rich. Your monthly income is somehow supposed to last you a whole month, so let’s go into budgeting mode. First, generator subscriptions: a ten-ampere generator subscription now costs you about 2,000,000 liras monthly. Second, groceries: eating out costs a fortune now (with a restaurant meal costing 80k-90k liras vs. the pre-crisis 20k), so you need to cook your own meals. That’s fine -- it’s healthy, actually -- if only groceries did not cost a fortune too and poultry and dairy were not rich people food now. Third, rent: if you’re lucky enough, you already have bought/built a house/apartment, but if not, your rent costs no less than 5,000,000 L.L. now. I’m not the best at math, but even I notice things don’t add up. Securing 6-8 hours of electricity per day (typically a 24/7 necessity) requires more than what you earn in a month. This is the case without accounting for groceries, rent, and other essentials.

Work’s over, but the day’s not. You have plans to say goodbye to a friend leaving the country soon. This is the fifth friend you’ve had to say goodbye to this month. You’re happy for them; they deserve so much better, but you’re in pain: you’re not ready for this – you need your friends by your side – and you’re not privileged enough to be able to immigrate. Mind you, they’re not happy either; they’re not happy about being forced to leave their life, friends, and family only to get a chance at a future. No one’s happy. You spend the night with friends – you all pretend it’s a normal hangout – no one dares bring it up; no one’s ready for this. It’s the end of the night, you’ve never hugged one another so tightly before; you try not to cry, but to no avail. “Take care and go easy on yourself” your friend says, “Let me know if you need anything at all, and don’t stop applying abroad, it’ll be your turn eventually”. This is most Lebanese youths’ greatest wish: to immigrate; it’s our 11:11 wish, our birthday wish, and our journal wish. At this point, you’re overwhelmed with two specific emotions. First, there’s sadness; that’s inevitable, they’re taking away your friends, one by one, a clever method of torture. Second, there’s anger, fury, hatred, and it’s common for your sadness to quickly turn into anger. You know very well who’s to blame for all of this, and as you see them successfully drive your friends away, you’re all the more enraged. You’re fuming, infuriated, aggrieved. Profanity is now your only source of communication. You dream of doing to the ruling class what they continue to do to you. That’s probably your second all-time greatest wish. [MG(1] 

It’s 9 PM. You leave your friend’s home for the last time ever and get to your car. Step one, check for closed roads. Yours is the state of most of the Lebanese population, and with so much despair comes so much fury, thus, protests. Civilians block roads every other day, to no avail, of course, none other than catharsis. 9 PM is peak road-block time, and you really would rather not get stuck. You ask friends, survey news, and figure out the best road for you to take. It’s been another exhausting day, all these emotions gave you a headache, so you stop by a pharmacy, in search of some ibuprofen to subdue the headache. Surprisingly, no ibuprofen is available, not in this or any other pharmacy in the country. It’s okay, you think, it’s a headache, you can survive without; you’re still one of the lucky ones. You’re not a cancer patient whose livelihood is being threatened due to lack of chemotherapy drugs, or a chronic disease patient who cannot find their medications. 

You’re finally home. Ah, home: a place where you are supposed to be safe and sound. You crash on your living room couch. You somehow survived another day. Hooray? You turn the TV on to watch the news: roads blocked, politicians bickering, civilians crying, protests erupting, warzone gas stations, israeli warplanes, explosions, fires… news hasn’t been so comforting these months. “Aren’t news reporters tired of delivering all this bad news to civilians?”, you think to yourself. As you drift off to sleep on your couch, your neighbor drops something heavy, you wake up startled and your heart starts racing as you wonder: Was it another explosion? Gunshots? Israeli warplanes? What now? Oh, never mind, it was just your neighbor... You realize how panicked you got: you’re traumatized by the August 4th explosion, you don’t even feel safe at home anymore. Oh well, at least you still have a roof over your head, you try to comfort yourself. It’s midnight, the electric generator has cut. There’s no more electricity at home, complete darkness, an unofficial nationwide curfew if you will. There’s nothing to do but sleep. You change, slip into bed, and struggle to sleep in the scorching heat once again, as this treacherous cycle goes on another day.

This might as well have sounded like a dystopian novel, but it’s the reality for all residents of Lebanon. If I were any successful in portraying daily life in Lebanon, you are probably feeling one of many emotions by the time you get to this section of the article. I would expect you to be frustrated, confused, despaired, and/or angry. You’re probably thinking, “this is surreal, it can’t be that bad?” The truth is, it’s much worse than this; as hard as I tried, there are so many facets of this crisis I was not able to tackle. I was not able to talk about our fear of ever needing medical care or emergency hospitalizations, as hospitals are ill-equipped and medical bills are unaffordable. I was not able to speak of the lack of availability of drinking water, in response to the gas crisis. I was not able to highlight civilians’ inability to secure bread for their families. Lastly, I was not able to portray this crisis with an intersectional lens. This article barely scratches the surface of how this crisis is impacting different populations in Lebanon, so much more can be said in that regard.

As you momentarily experience our daily stream of emotions – albeit to a lesser extent – remember the root of this crisis. This crisis was long expected to the trained minds – the ruling class has been systematically orchestrating the eventual downfall of Lebanon in their greedy agenda. Contrary to popular belief, the Lebanese are mobilizing. They may not be taking to the streets en masse, as was the case in the October 17th revolution, but they’re resisting in different ways. Alternative movements are on the rise, and despite their differences, they all aim for a secular government. These grassroot organizations are committed to political organization as they prepare for the upcoming 2022 parliamentary elections along with the university-level and syndicate-level elections happening in 2021. As it stands, these movements scored an unprecedented win, against mainstream sectarian parties, in the Order of Engineers and Architects syndicate elections back in July 2021, securing 15 out of 20 seats in four departments, and 221 out of 283 representative seats. Similar victories were achieved by the American University of Beirut Secular Club who won the largest share of seats back in 2020, with strong hope that these victories be replicated in the upcoming student elections of October 2021. Other residents of Lebanon are simply resisting by deciding to survive one more day, blocking roads, or yelling in governmental offices. The Lebanese are not stagnant, their definition of resistance has simply been adjusted as they struggle to remain alive.

You’ve reached this far, so I bet you might be wondering how you could help us. Whether you’re a Lebanese diaspora or you have just found out that this country exists, share this article with your non-Lebanese friends. Help them realize the extent of our crisis, amplify our voices, raise awareness, and always accompany all of that with donation links to non-sectarian, non-partisan NGOs that are actively helping the community. Such NGOs include the Lebanese Red Cross for medical aid, Embrace for mental health aid, Elgorithm for trauma relief and students’ mental health, Live Love Beirut for relief aid, Anti-Racism Movement for migrant domestic workers under the horrific kafala system in Lebanon, and Borderless NGO for education. You can find a much more comprehensive list of safe NGOs you may donate to in the following post, generously compiled by Elgorithm NGO. Alternatively, or simultaneously, I encourage you to donate to the alternative grassroot movements that continue to fight and organize for a secular Lebanon as the Lebanese 2022 elections approach, one such organization you can donate to is MADA network, which has brought together the 16 secular clubs that have formed across universities, regions, and syndicates in Lebanon.

In addition to monetary donations, proactively reach out to local medical NGOs listed in this post and supply them with medications from abroad. You can also employ Lebanese remotely and pay them in dollars – or fly them to your workplace. Other ways to help include directly funding Lebanese high school students’ and university students’ education, as many students have had to drop out of universities in response to the drastic increase in tuition fees. Alternatively, you can offer more scholarship opportunities abroad for Lebanese seeking further graduate education as a means of immigration.

This crisis will not miraculously disappear in the upcoming years. In fact, a recent report by the World Bank estimates that Lebanon requires a minimum of 12 years and a maximum of 19 years to recover from this crisis, which has been rated to be worse than Greece’s 2008 crisis and Argentina’s 2001 crisis. While the world has moved on to the next injustice, residents of Lebanon will continue to die a slow, merciless death at the hands of greedy and ruthless warlords.