Returning to Lebanon

BEIRUT—Lebanon’s taxi system is one of my favorite things about this country. The cabs—invariably ancient green Mercedes—will pick you up on the side of the street and take you where you want to go for 1,000 liras, or about 50 cents. The driver is free to pick up other passengers along the way who are heading in the same direction and usually drops you off at the main road closest to your destination. I used to think that a system where every passing cab stopped at a standing person on the street to ask where they wanted to go and didn’t even exactly take them there was horribly, disgustingly, un-American-ly inefficient.

But I love it.

My morning commute to the other side of the city begins in the bright sun on a corner across from the Mediterranean Sea and yelling “Gemayaze?” to drivers through open windows. The jaded, tired driver will nod his head almost imperceptibly to his left if he can take me or will make the very Lebanese gesture of raising his chin and eyebrows while making a clicking sound with his tongue. In this context the gesture means, “You want me to go where? Funny. That’s a good one.” A lot of times the drivers will put up two fingers in response to my query, which means they want me to pay double the fare, or one buck. When this happens I usually roll out a toothy smile and an Arabic “Please uncle?” to try to avoid paying more. It usually works, though I hear that the drivers fleece many foreigners who don’t know the system. William M. Rasmussen ’04, a former Crimson news executive who is here working at the same newspaper that I am, once paid $10 for a trip that should have cost 50 cents. Novice.

Most of Beirut’s cab drivers are from poor areas in Lebanon’s south or Beirut’s southern suburbs. A week before I arrived in Lebanon at the beginning of June, riots broke out in those same suburbs over a new law that prohibited the less expensive diesel fuel in vehicles that carried fewer than 20 passengers. Seeing their profit margins slashed because of outrageous gas prices, drivers and their supporters protested in the streets. The protest then became about something bigger than gasoline: People protested the lack of jobs, the intermittent government services and the poor economy. The Lebanese Army opened fire on the crowd after a protester shot a soldier. Six people were killed. It is not surprising, then, that discussions about domestic politics with the drivers usually end with the often-heard Arabic phrase, “Yel’aan hal-balad,” or “Damn this country.”

What may surprise many Americans is the desire among Lebanese to leave their country for anywhere in the West. After learning that I was born in Lebanon but live in Canada, the drivers inevitably ask me what I’m doing back here. “You’re stupid,” is the blunt response when I tell them I may want to move to Lebanon after graduation.

They are probably right. I would have to be pretty dumb to come back to a country where the in-your-face disparity between the rich and the poor makes my stomach turn. The income gap here is not any wider than that of many developed countries, including the United States. But when there’s no middle class in a country of only 4 million people in an area the size of the state of Delaware, the contrast between rich and poor is appalling. Just 10 minutes outside Beirut in the Palestinian camps or the Shiite suburbs or 90 minutes outside of Beirut to either the rural north or the south, you realize why Lebanon is still a third-world country. One university researcher here estimates that 90 percent of the population lives below the government poverty line. And that figure would be much higher if it wasn’t for the fact that remittances sent from Lebanese abroad make up 24 percent of Lebanon’s GDP. In a dumb tourist move, I was complaining to a group of Lebanese friends about the measly $600 a month I get paid at the paper where I work, only to find out that that was more than what many of their fathers made.

What’s even worse, Lebanon is a society that rewards those with wasta, which literally means “connections” but encompasses everything that can be used to pull strings, including outrageous bribes, in everything from getting into college to finding a job to starting a business. It is not surprising that so many Lebanese want out.

But in Beirut, the Sri Lankan nanny riding in the back of the Mercedes or the Range Rover with the kids is an almost ubiquitous sight. And it’s not uncommon to see young upper-class women walking unashamedly in the streets here with big bandages over their noses: plastic surgery is huge in Beirut and a new nose is as much a status symbol as a new car. Expensive anything—cell phones, clothes, cars, clubs—is in. Beirut is shallow, superficial and even a little tacky in its ostentatious display of beauty and wealth.

My summer here may have been much more tranquil if I didn’t know Arabic: I wouldn’t have heard my smart, university-educated cousins complaining about needing wasta to find jobs; I wouldn’t have noticed that the young elite of this society—the kids with the connections, money and education—do not talk about improving the living standard in the country. But in the end, I am of course grateful that I speak the language. It’s the only way I can prevent Beirut’s cabbies from overcharging me. It’s also the only way I can let them know that I’d rather be stupid than complacent.

May Habib ’07 is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House. When not writing for the English-language Daily Star, she spends her time teaching William M. Rasmussen ’04 how to say, “I swear I am not a CIA or Mossad agent” in Arabic and picking up bad Lebanese habits like smoking Marlboro Lights, drinking highly caffeinated tea and sleeping in the afternoon.