as someone who is lebanese and who lost a family member in the explosion last august, i wanna explain the gravity of the situation from an outside standpoint (thread) https://twitter.com/riverevesny_/status/1390021593334648834

so first off: my grandmother has lived in lebanon all her life. she’s lived in the same apartment for fifty years. she’s lived through wars and disasters, and basically whatever else has happened in lebanon over the past 95 years.

and considering lebanon is a tiny, non-wealthy country in the middle east, y’know, a lot has happened. when the explosion happened on august 4th, and i was alerted that she had been injured, i didn’t worry. she’d lived through stuff like this, she had a steel bone ffs!! right?

she got hurt while visiting her brother who had just undergone a surgery at the hospital. while the hospital was evacuated, she, and my aunt, stayed trapped. my aunt made it out alive. my great-uncle made it out alive. my grandmother did not. so already, this was a shock to me.

but on top of that, i wasn’t allowed to attend her funeral, because lebanon was “too dangerous a place for a girl my age.” my brothers were also barred from going to her funeral, but soon after, they spent the rest of their summers helping out in lebanon for a nonprofit.

while they were there, another building was burned down, not fifty meters from where they were. it’s believed that it was burned to hide evidence on who had caused the first explosion.

the explosion knocked out windows from buildings that were miles away. it was big.

hospitals were already overrun with previous covid patients, and with so many people getting injured, no healthcare system was able to keep up. the quantity of covid cases in lebanon increased exponentially. masks were not available, neither were respirators.

about half of my lebanese relatives caught covid within the last month of summer, including my own brother and father.

the explosion and covid were not the only problems in lebanon either. for years now, the lebanese government has been extremely corrupt.

the entire country has been rebelling for years against it. garbage collection services were unavailable, the justice system was far from effective. streets were trash-ridden and dangerous. which, considering the fact that people in lebanon drive with no control, was not good.

on top of this, a huge inflation of money occurred, throughout everything. the lebanese currency, livres, started losing value, and quickly at that. prices doubled, then quadrupled, and they never stopped growing. people had no money. and banks were backlogged

because so many people were trying to convert their livres into US dollars before the livres became valueless. so basically, not a large amount of people were able to save themselves from literal bankruptcy. and what with covid, the government, the crisis at hand,

most people did not have sustainable jobs.

for at least a month afterward, whenever i went with my dad to go shopping, we would buy excess food and industrial items to ship to lebanon. such as vitamins, dry and canned foods, several vacuum cleaners

solely for the purpose of cleaning up the glass shards off the floor.

my dad, who travels quite a bit for his job, stayed stuck at home due to covid for months. but after what happened in lebanon, he went there, and stayed for about a month, just trying to help out his family.

cleaning out my grandmothers old apartment. taking care of family matters. as a matter of fact, i still have no idea what will happen of the apartment. or of my great-uncle. or of the Sri Lankan refugee who had been taking care of my family for decades in exchange for a home.

the last words i said to my grandmother were “i promise, you’ll be there to see me graduate. and as soon as we know what university my brother goes to, we’ll let you know.” she was gone four days later. she never found out my brother goes to imperial college.

she wasn’t even there to see me start high school, let alone graduate.

but despite everything my family, and every other lebanese family has been through, people still made fun of the situation.

and i’m not saying that lebanese issues are worse than everywhere else right now.

because really, there are a lot of places who have it just as bad, if not worse than lebanon. i just wish people would actually pay attention to the gravity of the situation, like they would for any other country, rather than making jokes.

thank you for reading. end of thread.