I Live In Beirut. Our City Is On Its Knees, But We Will Not Buckle
We were convinced it was an earthquake.
Suddenly, as I was having my evening coffee at home with my wife and our four-year-old daughter, it was as though someone had grabbed our building and was shaking it with their hands.
A split second later, shockwaves from the blast that had started at the port just two kilometres away hit us. The glass window to our balcony shattered – that we survived felt a miracle, our curtain protecting us from shards of flying shrapnel.
My initial reaction was total confusion. I needed to see if my daughter was okay, and I needed to pick up my wife from the floor – she had been thrown three metres across the room by the blast.She was in pain, but thankfully not too badly hurt. We both knew it could have been much worse.
Everything was shattered: smashed balcony doors and windows left broken glass everywhere.
We immediately went to a safe spot inside the flat, away from the windows. My daughter couldn’t stop crying, traumatised and unable to understand what had happened, but we composed ourselves and after a few minutes, when it seemed like things may have calmed down, I ventured back out to assess the damage. Everything was shattered: smashed balcony doors and windows left broken glass everywhere. I got my daughter some water, got my wife to wash her face and then started clearing some of the glass shrapnels from the floor.
The port explosion has been breaking news across the world, but to us Lebanese people, it is just one more tragedy in what has been an unbearable few years.
Our country has been plunging deeper into an economic crisis that is now the worst it has seen since independence in 1943. Last October, thousands took to the streets to protest the economic situation. At Islamic Relief, where I work as Lebanon country director, we were forced to change our strategy from working on longer-term programmes to focus more on people’s immediate needs – mostly emergency food parcels. And when the coronavirus pandemic brought...
