The young people determined to rebuild Beirut

With a government slow-walking economic reforms, many young Lebanese people want to leave – but not before fixing the capital. Vivian Yee reports

Rescue workers prepare to vacuum debris from a badly damaged building (AFP/Getty)

The scooter engines snort out, and Sara el-Sayed swings herself down to the pavement outside the third damaged building she has visited this afternoon, two carpenters in tow.

Upstairs, a woman’s blown-apart doors need fixing. Cigarettes and mobile phone in one hand, pen and paper in the other, el-Sayed jots down dimensions as the carpenters measure empty door frames and shattered windows.

She has taken this up as her job now: volunteering to hammer together as much of the splintered city as she can before leaving it – hopefully for good.

Six days after the explosion that crushed much of Beirut, a Spanish master’s degree programme in interior design notified el-Sayed that she had been accepted, a long-held dream come true.

When she leaves, she will be done with all of this, she hopes: a government whose incompetence appears to have led to the blast; a corrupt political system young Lebanese people blame for aborting their futures; a country where the middle class is sinking into poverty as the politicians slow-walk economic reforms, and where the only way to survive seems to be a second passport, a job or a graduate programme somewhere else.

Many Lebanese people were already looking for such escape hatches before the 4 August explosion. An exodus now seems inevitable.

But el-Sayed cannot think about leaving quite yet.

“I’m not running away,” says el-Sayed, 30, a Palestinian-Lebanese architect with a small custom furniture business who used to live in Gemmayzeh, one of the worst-hit neighbourhoods. “I want to at least have Beirut on its feet before I go.”

As Beirut reckons with the destruction, thousands of Lebanese people in their teens, twenties and thirties – rather than government personnel – have shown up to put the most damaged neighbourhoods back in order, shovelling, sweeping, feeding, fixing.

Many of the volunteers have been protesting against the political system since last autumn; if anyone believes Lebanon can change, it is them. Yet few say they want to stay to see whether it will. Since the explosion, countries like Canada have been hit by a wave of applications from young Lebanese people seeking to emigrate, officials say.

“I used to call people sissies for leaving the country, because you’re afraid of doing the change and everything,” says Mohammed Serhan, 30, a political organiser and clean-up volunteer who protested for months.

But the explosion has altered his calculus. “Yesterday I woke up thinking, ‘I can go to the airport immediately, tell them I’m not coming to work. Go to the airport, fly to Turkey, see what happens.’”

He sighed. “It’s a little emotional. I still want to win this fight.”

El-Sayed, who has just assessed Serhan’s damaged doors and windows, jumps in. “Really, we’re fighting,” she says.

They will both keep protesting, they agree. “But I don’t have hope,” el-Sayed says. “I’ve always wanted just to leave.”

Like young people across the Arab world, their generation is well educated yet underemployed. While some of their friends and cousins left for master’s degrees and jobs in Dubai and the west, volunteers like el-Sayed and Serhan stayed because they wanted to or had to, hoping to change their country even as it skidded towards economic ruin.

“People who are outside love the country but don’t want to come back in, and people who are inside hate the country but they don’t want to leave,” says Zein Freiha, 21, a college student who went door to door after the explosion with a plastic broom. “We hope that we have a country to come back to. But the more we discuss it, we’re all just looking at each other like, ‘OK, there really is no more hope.’”

For them, the clean-up is personal. Many of the volunteers used to live, work or socialise in the half-demolished neighbourhoods of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael, drawn to their cocktails, clubs, cafes, galleries and studios.

Their Beirut is now in ruins.

El-Sayed’s former apartment was destroyed in the blast, along with friends’ homes, workplaces and cars. Doors around east Beirut were ripped from their frames. When looters slipped into the neighbourhood, she began sealing off apartments. Nearly three weeks after the explosion, she had raised enough money via GoFundMe to replace about 90 doors.

One elderly couple slept in their foyer with a heavy sewing machine pushed up against their splintered front door, fearing thieves. Others who called her have been quoted hundreds of dollars to replace their doors at a time when banks are rationing access to dollars and the Lebanese currency has lost 80 per cent of its value.

Beyond fixing apartments and clearing broken glass and debris, the volunteers have assessed damaged buildings, searched for missing pets, delivered hot meals and nappies and even compiled what amounts to the incident’s only centraliced database of missing people. (The government has not released any official data on the missing.)

While civilian volunteers go to work, soldiers sit on street corners, rifles dangling from their shoulders and cigarettes from their lips. Only about two weeks after the explosion did government personnel begin distributing food boxes and assessing damages, residents say.

A day after the blast, Hussein Kazoun, 28, an organic farmer, took over an abandoned gas station in Geitawi and started handing out vegetables. A week later, the station, which he christened Nation Station, buzzed with about 200 young volunteers.

“It’s not my job to do this,” says Josephine Abou Abdo, 29, an architect and designer-turned-volunteer who has been coordinating food donations. “But if I don’t get up, people won’t get fed.”

Using the data volunteers collected from residents, Kazoun’s younger sister is mapping out the most underserved areas. Nearby sits 20 donated rolls of plastic, used to seal broken windows.

As he and the volunteers have expanded Nation Station’s scope, Kazoun has also tried to persuade people to stay.

“‘We need you in this country,’” he says he was telling friends. “If it’s left to the old generation, things will stay the same.”

Abou Abdo listens with conflicting impulses. “Sometimes I think, ‘Enough,’” she says. “I just want to live in a Scandinavian country and pay taxes and live my life, you know?”

On the question of whether reform is even possible, she, like other volunteers, is caught between idealism and despair. Neither months of mass anti-government protests nor the explosion appears to have greatly weakened the ruling class, whom many Lebanese still turn to for protection and patronage despite growing consensus that they bear responsibility for the country’s problems.

At one apartment that volunteers are sweeping up, Hala Youssef, 49, who lives there, says she waited 11 days after the explosion for government aid before giving up and accepting volunteer help.

“Nobody even came to say, ‘Thank God for your safety,’” she says of the government, using the phrase Beirutis greeted each other within the days after the blast.

At the Nation Station, Joe Youssef, 39, drops off his daily donation, a truckload of vegetables and fruits that several young women are sorting into plastic bags. Youssef says he prefers donating to Nation Station over an aid group, because like many Lebanese people, he is suspicious of anything that might be tainted by the country’s favour-bartering class of sectarian political leaders.

“We don’t trust anyone in this country,” he says. “They could be tied to some gang.”

Disgusted with Lebanon’s corruption and seeing no future at home, he moved years ago to Dubai, where he worked in sales before returning on holiday last month.

But, he says, “When I saw the people, the crowd – not the government, not the police or anything – I’m proud to be Lebanese now, to be honest.”

New improvements materialise at the gas station over the course of the day. Someone welds together a metal rack to dispense the plastic rolls. Two tons of fresh vegetables are distributed.

Sarah Barakat, 21, an architecture student overseeing the vegetables, says that she, too, plans to leave Lebanon for graduate studies.

“But I’m coming back as soon as I finish my master’s,” she says. “Who else is going to rebuild this city?”

© The New York Times