Personal March 5, 2024 Selim Maalouf 11 min read
It has been around 4 days since the blast. It has taken me this long to be able to put my thoughts and my feelings together. The first 2 days in the aftermath, I was able to hold it together. I was filled with anger instead of fear and determination towards an exit instead of crippling anxiety and trauma.
4 days ago, my lovely fiancee and I almost died. There is no other way to put it.
We were just leaving our downtown office and going home to deal with the remnants of our wedding plans. Because even before the blast, every single Lebanese resident, including us, was already bleeding.
The world is busy with COVID-19, and rightly so. Recessions have hit some of the most powerful economies in the world, businesses are struggling to keep their doors open and employees are being let go in the millions.
So naturally, messages of support are being thrown around. "We're all in this together" has become a phrase that I came to revile.
No, we are not in this together. Long before COVID-19, the Lebanese people are being bled dry. Ever since the end of the civil war, Lebanon has been a pie being cut into pieces. What these warlords could not achieve in War, have despicably reached during times of peace.
With nobody batting an eye, each militia and armed party in the war became the pillars of our political landscape that we still see to this day.
Warlords positioned themselves as the protectors of their sects, in a country ravaged by sectarian war. And slowly but surely, political rulers grew to become gods among men.
30 years of corrupt rule and rampant theft went unpunished. Why? Because these thieves have developed an army of religious fanatics ready to die in their name every time the ghost of the civil war is looming.
Ironic, isn't it?
Putting yourself in danger to avoid a dangerous fictitious war that is nothing but a scarecrow levied upon our people.
Sentences such as "He stole, but he built" became unironic staples every time you questioned the integrity of a political leader. Because those were the same protectors of the sect, that made sure to take care of their own.
But the biggest heist of all was the peg of the Lebanese pound to the US dollar.
Our currency was pegged to 1507 LBP/USD. And thus began the age of debt and living beyond our means.
For years the country accrued foreign currency debt to defend the peg and the lavish lifestyle the peg afforded the elite. In the background, any productive investments were killed. Any business investor that refuses to share their new venture with the incumbent warlord, was denied. Slowly but surely, our agriculture and industrial sectors were disappearing to make way for lavish tourism and a predatory banking sector.
But what do you do when the music stops, and you are faced with the reality that the influx of foreign currency on which you based your whole economy is going to cease?
You go all in. You start spending money you don't have, but you assure everyone that you do.
Back in 2016, the central bank of Lebanon started offering up to 30% APY on USD deposits. In hindsight, anyone with a modicum of literacy in banking offered this deal would be running the other way screaming. Our central bank was creating fake digital USD to fulfill these agreements.
While you might call it fraud, our lovely political thieves called it "Financial Engineering".
In a world of fractional reserve banking, this was on a totally new level. But the craziness did not end there. Every Lebanese bank found an opportunity to make money out of the deposits of the people.
These banks bought government-issued Eurobonds and deposited large sums in BDL, who has in turn been funding our governments.
In October of 2019, the country started boiling. Gas station owners started strikes, citing failure to turn profits due to a lack of the expected subsidies from the government. At the same time, USD had become harder to get ahold of in the market and the exchange rate in the market had nudged slightly upwards as a result.
Without a moment's notice, banks started restricting USD withdrawals. Knowing what we know now, that was the announcement that every single Lebanese bank had been insolvent.
Everything spiraled from that point forward: the currency crashed, the country revolted and we thought nothing could get worse.
But it did. With businesses already struggling to survive, the COVID-19 lockdowns were the nail in the coffin.
The daily fight to ensure the safety and the health of the Lebanese people was met with a desperate push to save whatever was left of an already dying economy.
As for me, this economy was doing its best to ensure I could not operate. To amass the largest amount of USD currency, all inbound and outbound digital payments had been blocked. All outbound bank transfers had been stopped, and any inbound USD payments had to be done through a bank transfer to a "fresh money" account.
I never thought I would see the day when money would be described as fresh as if it were a vegetable of sorts. But that name hides an insidious meaning. Fresh Dollars are dollars that have not been introduced into the insolvent banking system in Lebanon. Those Dollars are worth almost 250% more than any dollar held hostage inside a Lebanese bank account.
That was when I gave up on this country. I made a video describing the situation and urging people to help me network in the US to find the right opportunity to leave.
I was done. I needed to get out.
Fast forward to August 3rd, 2020. Lebanon is coming out of an impromptu lockdown, waiting to go into another. The country was in a frenzy trying to make up for the time lost in lockdown, to catch up on their errands.
My fiancee and I had come back to the office, setting up our workspaces after a short stint of work from home. Worn down by everything, we were trying to find our happy place by busying ourselves with our wedding preparations. We had already postponed our wedding once due to COVID. And with the economic crash happening around us, we found ourselves grabbing our wedding checklist and slowly trimming away every excess cost or activity that felt superfluous or tone-deaf.
We were slowly but surely being robbed of our special day, and we were looking forward to spending some time together as husband and wife before I left for the US to blaze a trail for us there.
We thought the nightmare would soon be over. Little did we know, it was only starting.
August 4th, 2020
This day will be imprinted in my memory, but it will not be imprinted on my gravestone.
At the end of the workday, we were getting ready to leave our shiny downtown office. A privileged position for a Digital Marketing professional that needs a symmetrical fiber internet connection to work effectively.
The day I had moved into this office, was a happy day indeed. My window-side desk felt like a fresh start away from the struggles of my home office and the oppressive in-house job that I had left less than 2 months ago.
After my fiancee clocked out of the office, we made our way out of the city. Due to some road closure around downtown, the traffic to us toward the seaside road.
Around 6:00 PM, we were right next to one of the entrances of the Beirut port. A familiar sight, the usual den of thieves that we've always known.
Our drives always feature some type of music playing as a background to our conversations, from our daily struggles to our pop culture hobbies. But I never thought that this music would be the reason for our physical safety.
Stuck in heavy traffic, I saw something strange.
A big flock of birds was freaking out.
At the same time, my fiancee felt like she had heard a plane. She turned down the music, cracked open the window, and we listened.
We heard a whoosh, similar to something we've gotten accustomed to. Foreign Fighter jets flying over Lebanon have sadly become a common occurrence.
All the pedestrians around us honed in on the noise and had their noses stuck to the sky.
I looked at the glass of one of the overlooking restaurants. It was wobbling as if it were liquid.
6:07 PM
Everything went silent, the air was sucked out from around us.
I felt the world freeze. I could not breathe.
The silence was deafening...
What happened next, could not be described better than how my fiancee put it when we were talking through the events today:
"It felt like we were facing a Dragon. It started with a terrifying growl, then the Dragon took a deep breath sucking all the air out. It unleashed its fiery breath upon us for what felt like an eternity. It felt like the end of the world." -Yara Iwaz
My ears were ringing.
Destruction all around us. The world turned grey, the sky was falling.
First an attack plane, then a huge blast. My only thought was the war had begun, and the next strike is coming.
My fiancee had lived through the 2006 war, the memories were still fresh.
She turned to me, held my face, and told me that no matter what happened, she wanted me to know that she loved me.
She felt the need to tell me her last words...At that moment, we both thought that this is how we die.
I held my breath, looked forward, and decided that our time wasn't up.
I knew that I needed to have the resolve to drive through the falling missiles.
Everything was a blur, but some details were crystal clear: People were covered in blood, Glass, and debris raining from the sky, and finding shelter was a matter of life or death.
We drove through the destruction, but we survived.
But Beirut didn't.
What we thought was a strike, was the climax of years of corruption and downright evil.
2750 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate, a highly explosive chemical, stored in a metropolitan port.
If we had left the office late, we would have never left.
This is how I found my office the next day. Giant shards of glass flew across where I normally sit.
We survived, but 158 victims didn't.
We came out physically unscathed, but over 6,000 people didn't.
We went back to our home, but 300,000 people didn't.
We quickly informed our loved ones about our safety, but 21 people still haven't been found to this day.
We are privileged to have an opportunity to leave the husk that is called Lebanon.
But others are stuck trying to salvage what is left of their existence.
I will never forget this day.
I will never forget that every time I doze off, I freak out because I am reliving the blast.
I will never forget that every time a door slams or a glass breaks, I drop down to the floor and I have an emotional meltdown.
I will never forget that my fiancee keeps spontaneously bursting into tears, and I need to be by her side consoling her and reminding her that we are safe.
I will never forget the day you attempted to murder me and my fiancee.
But I would be a fool...
If I give you another chance...
To finish the job.
