The first thing you notice about Beirut is the noise; the waspish buzz of thousands of motorbikes, the calls to prayer from the minarets which pepper the skyline and the banging and drilling of construction. The city is still furiously rebuilding following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, a nasty 34-day spat that resulted in the deaths of 165 Israelis and 1,191 Lebanese and caused severe damage to the latter’s infrastructure. Water tanks are still a common sight, and the stench of sewage in some of the poorer parts of town is overpowering.
The government’s failure to provide proper public services has given birth to the wonderfully named YouStink, a multi-denominational Lebanese take on the Anti-Water Tax movement who headed to Prime Minister Tammam Salam’s house at 4am the other morning to let him know that they’re not happy about the uncollected rubbish on the streets. Look closely at the video and there’s even a protestor who looks a bit like Paul Murphy.
We’re spending our first night on Nehme Yafet, the Beirut equivalent of Dame Street with the American University down the end of the road and a shopping drag a few minutes away that has all the usual multinational suspects plus some truly spectacular schwarma ’n’ falafel joints. Eight kilometres to the south though is al-Barajneh, an area of south Beirut associated with the Hezbollah Islamist militant group where 49 people were killed and 239 left injured twelve days ago by suicide bombers linked to ISIS. Sadly, the old soubriquet of Beirut being the “Paris of the Middle East” took on a whole new dimension.
The international city that it is there’s lots of English and French language media with the Daily Star’s front-cover proclaiming: “US Special Forces Travelling Very Soon To Syria”, and L’Orient Le Jour deeply concerned about the impact Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter jet will have on the region.
Having a breakfast falafel earlier - there’s a theme developing! - I got a surprise hearing an old pirate radio buddy I was in Israel with 30-years ago, Gavin Forde, presenting the Radio One Beirut breakfast show with Olga Habre. The big tunes among the city’s hip young things at the moment are Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’, Fleur East’s ‘Sax’ and Anastasia’s ‘Take This Chance’.
One suspects that things will be a little less Anastasia-tastic when, after a three hour trip up the coast, we arrive in Halba, a mixed, majority Muslim area where Concern have their Lebanese base.
It’s the principle town in Akkar province where 110,000 people are in need of emergency winter supplies. From now until late February, the mountainous region will be blanketed in snow with temperatures routinely dropping to minus-five at night.
We’ve already been told the story of 43-year-old Alaf and her family who were forced to flee Syria in early 2013.
“We knew that people were being killed, but we didn’t want to leave our homes and our businesses - I owned a clothes shop, my brother used to sell and distribute grains and my family also owned a supermarket and a mobile phone shop,” she says. “However, it got to the point where the bombing was 24 hours a day, and we had to get out. We left together and had to leave absolutely everything behind. We could take nothing with us - only the clothes we were left wearing. Once we left, the looters arrived and stole and destroyed our belongings.
“We thought we could seek refuge nearby. It never crossed our minds that we’d actually have to leave the country. When we came to the border with Lebanon, the men in our family were extremely terrified because men were being detained at the checkpoints. One of my brothers and two of my nephews were detained trying to cross the border. This was over a year ago and no one has heard from them since. I’m very worried about that.”
Afar goes on to describe her rudimentary living conditions.
“I’m with my brother, Mohammed, his wife and their eight children, my sister, Zahra, and my mother, Malakeh, who is 94. The youngest child, Hanan, is only five,” she says. “We’re living in an abandoned building site. There’s no furniture, no belongings. We just have these tents and mattresses to sleep on, on the floor. It’s a freezing, open, grey space but it’s safe. Since January, refugees have not been allowed to work in Lebanon. We had to sign a contract agreeing not to seek employment. That means everything we need - food, fuel soap, clothes - has to be provided by aid agencies like Concern.”
Because they’ve received only half of the funding they need from donor governments, the World Food Programme has slashed the value of the food vouchers they give to refugees from $28 to $14 a month per person. With the rents on even modest dwellings around $240 a month, you can see why the vast majority of them are living below the poverty line.
Many of those who are relying on Concern are from Homs, the destroyed Syrian city that lies just 10kms over the border and which we’ll be gazing down on over the next couple of days from one of Concern’s mountainside projects. It’s a sobering thought…

Read Stuart Clark’s first Lebanese blog at
[link]www.hotpress.com/Lebanon/news/Hot-Press-to-visit-Syrian-refugees-in-the-Lebanon/15835479.html[/link]