Promenade in a deliquescence beirth - L'Orient -le Jour

A young woman extends fine lingerie to make the saint charbel in plaster reduce in a corner of her balcony.In the Wisdom district, in Achrafieh, cars sneak into winding streets to the sound of hammers.Winter covers with tiger pattern dry in the sun before being stored in the cupboards until next year.Two young people come to deliver prie-Dieu at the entrance to the Archdiocese Maronite.A little further, a driver fogs when he saw a taxi in the wrong way, before blocking the road to bring it back from where it comes.This could be a bucket like the others in the streets of Beirut.Except that the city no longer has the same face.It stands, shaggy, humiliated, with, sometimes, the appearance of an open -air squat.Tagged walls, vestiges of the October Revolution, barely supported buildings by the port's double explosion, which occurred on August 4, 2020.An atmosphere of anxiety floats in the affected areas.Beirut has never remained completely a facelift since the end of the war but only people around the corner quite easily distinguish the reliquates of new damage.

A few tens of meters from Saint-Georges hospital still under construction, Hussein Kazoun, 29, shoots his cigarette.Since he put his flag on a disused geitaoui assisted sessance to create a center for aid to the victims of the neighborhood, this farmer, who had swapped city life for the Bekaa plain, did not.At "Nation-Station", small hands are busy every day to prepare more than 300 meals, in the old Auto-Lavage space converted to the kitchen.On the large whiteboard hanging on a wall, the names of the beneficiaries are registered in the felt.There is no longer any shame to say that we are in need.The crisis is so deep that it has changed the middle class towards precariousness."Old people, above all, ask for help," said Hussein."We especially do not want to create an addiction, but in the absence of a state, we must fill a void," he adds.In the street of the Orthodox Hospital, traders have dropped their iron curtain.Their brand was torn off during the explosion.Plastic canvases from UNICEF serve as curtains for certain balconies.

In working -class neighborhoods on a hillside and eclectic architecture, we are witnessing the slow death of small trades.Salim Harb bent in front of his small wooden table to redo the hem of pants.He works and sleeps in his tiny workshop located in the Geitaoui district, where "everyone helps each other" and where "no one pays any more taxes".

There, not a week goes by without learning the departure of a neighbor for abroad because of the crisis."Is my dress ready?"As a timidly asked him a young Syrian in Abaya."Do you think I can take him more than 5,000LLL, to her?"Sometimes I have been ashamed to increase my prices because some regulars have raised the tone.Suddenly, I work from morning to night for clopinettes.»Salim would almost disappear in his slim jeans.He no longer eats a lot, but compensates by smoking Cedars, the cheapest cigarette brand on the market.His only way to "let off steam", he says, and "suicide slowly".In a few minutes, anger takes hold of the character."I am 70 years old, I did not know one day normal in this country, but today it is the worst", enrages this veteran Kataëb Repenti.His sister, Laudy, goes to collect her car parked in the street.Licensed by her company after 30 years of good and loyal service, this single fifties is at the damage."Geitaoui no longer looks like what we have known, because people feel humiliated, deceived.Nobody cares about us, ”she says."The Lebanese does not die of hunger and always falls on his paws," added the brother, suddenly won by the optimism that a neighbor comes to break a few seconds later."Before, rich as poor, we lived happy in Geitaoui.I had lunch in Jbeil at Pépé Abed and I was dining in Tripoli.Now I count the shares of the laughing cow, and I do not sleep without sleeping pills, "says Antoine Fahd, a pensioner of electricity from Lebanon."I have never been afraid of my life.But there, I'm afraid, I am hungry, "said this elegant man who hangs out in the neighborhood.A few weeks ago, a gentleman he knew was dead.As he presented his condolences, the son of the deceased dropped one: "Thank God, he left."" Do you see in what state the city, the whole country are immersed? ""Mistogs the former civil servant.He, like many others, were not prepared to experience the worst economic crisis in modern history of the country.The devaluation of the book and the considerable increase in prices have pushed millions of people in precariousness.More than half of the population lives below the poverty line and the middle class has disappeared.

A man walking in an alley of Gemmayzé.Photo João Sousa

Coma

In the filthy alleys that lead to the stairs that punctuate the Qobeyyate district, two masked men greet their fists."Have you seen the new exchange rate?""Has become the new" Hi, Kifak, how are you?»».Port cranes are running a troubled sky.This gravity breaks through the laughter of young sores smoking rolled cigarettes.Sarah* commands coffee and starts working on her computer."Since the explosion, one has the impression of gravitating in a comatose beirut," summarizes the young woman, surrounded by disfigured buildings in the district of Mar Mikhaël, an industrial area that has become hipster.

A step in the place and the post-explosion images do not leave you.The crazy charm of this town, which the youth and the arts have seized 15 years ago, disappeared.There, between the bruised stone, some continue to believe it.Workshops, shops or bars saved from the rubble refuse to be buried by the crisis.In a small Estaminet, friends toast in Spritz.In the street of Armenia, "The place to be" tourists, the time is no longer in the nights of bamboche.While the whole city is immersed in quasi-occurrence due to electricity shortages, decibels arise bars nestled in old buildings.We are witnessing a scene of the most dystopian.Young people chain the "Doudou Shots", but what are they celebrating?"Can we really party between ruins," says Elijah, a resident of the neighborhood.In Gemmayzé, a few hundred meters further, the scaffolding cuddles the colorful facades and glass debris, vestiges of the explosion, crack under the soles.We could almost hear the back and forth of the NGO teams that crisscrossed the alleys for several months after the tragedy.

A little further, the ACCAOUI climb leads to the beautiful districts of Achrafieh where luxury buildings seem uninhabited.From Place Sassine to the Sodeco district, traffic lights are on strike and green lianas hang on electric posts.The budget of the municipality of Beirut, the most important in the country, is almost worth nothing because of the fall of the book and the entrepreneurs no longer come to calling for tenders.The roadways are not all maintained, and the trash litter some ways."Under these conditions, all that can be done, we do it.We are currently forceing cleanliness, on the collection of garbage cans before the summer season, so that tourists say to themselves that Lebanon is dirty, "said the vice-president of the municipal council, Élie Andréa.

At the end of the rue de l'Indendance, a teenager covered in soot sends a second in rags who came to search in his trash cans.The beggars have never been so numerous.Under a tree, a sack of moldy bread and a telephone directory of 1973 decaying.Workers cross Street Abdel Wahab al-Inglizi empty, invaded with scaffolding.She no longer looks great with her 1930s with broken windows, her electric wires hanging and her signs half torn off.On this Sunday, the city looks, deceived, sleeping sleeping.Mingeletters that petraduate are the kings of boulevards."Mkamlin" (we continue) is taggedly tagged on a green bench.Meanwhile, a young boy recites the fable of the fountain "the frog who wants to be as big as the beef" to his grandparents seated on their balcony.Does he guess in their eyes, who have seen others, concern?Does he understand that this multimillenary city, his city, that the whole Middle East envied us, is nothing more than the shadow of itself?

A service station destroyed in front of the port of Beirut.Photo João Sousa

Beyond the ring

In the deserted city center, a man in Mercedes rolls with an open tomb.The district has cooked after cooking.This witness of successive beiruts, a symbol par excellence of the stealthy economic boom in the post-war country, now looks like an old theater decor in plywood.The painted faces of the victims of August 4 are displayed on wooden panels like soldiers who fell into martyrs.In the eponymous square, the nerve center of the revolution, skaters and beggars look at each other in earthenware dog.In just a few days and for months, all the Lebanon had gathered under one flag to denounce the political class.Today, the city center is no longer married.In front of the Al-Mari mosque, dozens of men line up with plastic bags to recover a bag of rice or bread.In no way embarrassed by this show, two women wonder aloud if "Chanel is open".Luxury stores sellers turn their thumbs near large empty escalators."There is no longer a soul that lives.More businessmen or chic ladies.Some days we do not even enter a thousand pounds into the cash register ", loose manale, which works in a cosmetics shop, braving the omerta imposed by the management of the souks of Beirut.Here, we don't even do shoplifting anymore.Brands withdraw one after the other."We do not deserve to finish like that", "Revolution" or "Eat the Rich" adorn the facades of yellow buildings of the very chic Saifi Village.Asphalt melted under the tires burned by demonstrators.On this scene called the ring and which will have crystallized for months all the hopes and the reverse of the Thaoura, the fracture between the ghostly districts of (very) rich and those of the poor is manifest.Beyond the old line of demarcation which separated the east and west districts of Beirut, chaotic constructions make a nose to town planning.

In Khandak El-Ghamik Street, the main artery of the district of the same name, a young girl descends from her house in flowery pajamas to go and buy a box of Kleenex in the dekkéné of "Hajj" Ali.An older woman comes to make bottles recorded from Pepsi.Because of the crisis, Ali Haïdar, 70, is no longer credit."Except to my neighbors of building," he said.The former pharmacy preparer, converted into a grocer, has the nostalgia for a time when his neighborhood was likely, was cosmopolitan, where we were going to "drink coffee from Armenian neighbors".Since the end of the war, this district has been perceived by "the others" as a unsanitary and dangerous Shiite ghetto."Which is unfortunately not entirely false," he whispers.The other day, a man shot in the street to celebrate the marriage of the son of a Zaïm, and a woman rushed in his tiny shop to avoid lost bullets."Drugs, thugs, absent condition.»Nothing new in short.Except that Hajj Ali dares to put words on the evils today.Throughout the artery, green flags and, in the center, a guitoune of the Amal empty party.A full farfouille pussy between the ripped garbage bags where black hair extensions and extensions mix.A little further, a merchant posed, without worrying about his neighbors, his electric motor on the sidewalk.A travel agency specializing in the organization of Hajj put the key under the door.Abu Hussein spreads her clothes on the road by chanting Ahla W Sahla.Long before the crisis, the khandiots thought they had already touched the bottom.

A little higher, in the same street, Salman Khreis size the beard of an old man of the vintage.On the window of his show, the prices of the services displayed have increased little."To not panic the barge," he said.The young barber at the end of the street, "did not hesitate"."Today I won 12,000 pounds that I immediately spent on the market.We no longer eat meat but only potatoes and eggs.Even during the war, we did not dance in front of the buffet ", plague the man with blue eyes.The living room inherited from his father stayed in his juice.Old magazines support a dresser where stereo is placed."The movement (Amal)?He pretends to work for us but it's eye powder.Do you have the street state?"The demonstrations of today?" A joke "."It's been decades that they share the cake, it is not to let go of the song now," says Salman, Lucid.In a coast that adjoins the large cemetery of Bachoura, Hiam* walks with difficulty, a bag of races in hand."We are only waiting for death," she says.Before, she would have taken a service to go home to Basta, but she has nothing to pay 4,000 ll.

A pictorial fresco in front of electricity in Lebanon.Photo João Sousa

"Welcome, Welcome"

At the crossroads of the Fakhreddine and Michel Chiha streets who lead to Hamra, the lights flash in the void and motorists play GTA in front of a disillusioned traffic agent.The hubbub that emanates from this district, pillar of Beirutian life, contrasts with the calm of Zoqaq el-Blatt.In front of sessance stations, out of breath pumpingists sneak between dozens of cars that line up.A now common scene, while the fuel shortage is becoming more and more severe.A young, resigned, patient in his Volvo windows open and surfs on Instagram.On concrete walls, hundreds of tags tackling the Bank of Lebanon were covered with black paint.No one dares to approach the barbed wire protecting this symbol of the country's financial fall.Between Hamra Street and Spears Street, cross business men, trainers and beggars.At the Marly building window, a marceli bellish and a pencil line watch observes this back and forth.The changers are the new nababs on the avenue.Wish*no longer knows who to sell his keychain in the form of a cedar."There are no more tourists," he grumbles, unhappy.The "Lebanese Champs-Élysées", a shopping and cultural lung of Beirut, cited with cinemas and theaters, small cafes and shops, are no longer worthy of the name.

Small businesses display the slogan on their windows "support local businesses". "Welcome, Welcome", lance Élias Mouawad, un artisan.In its small workshop opened in 1972, customers are now rare."The Westerners have deserted and with the COVVI-19 students no longer go to college.Hamra is no longer alive as formerly.Look at this fauna now!"He said, pointing to beggars.Arab music with a full tube, he hits, size and punching pieces of copper and brass to make them earrings.What to spend time, failing to fill your cashier.The city is depressed and takes with it its inhabitants."I'm not even going to eat a song in T-Marbouta or have a drink at the Mayflower bar," he said shoulders.Students abandoned the Bliss Street which borders the American University and where the fast foods open 24 hours a day swarmed.When the courses resume, what future can they hope?In two years, tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, and many of them have gone to seek opportunities abroad.

On the cornice, since the end of confinement, onlookers and joggers come together as usual.Baraked men, spread over their towel, coat with oil.Last month, a woman broke the pelvis by falling after leaning against the promenade of the promenade.Municipal agents found that the bolts that supported the safeguard had been hosted...