The Beirut blast: heartbreak and hope
You stood by Lebanon in a year of mourning
Last August, a deadly explosion ripped through the port area of Lebanon’s capital city, shattering a nation already at breaking point. On the anniversary of the Beirut blast, you’re standing with a heartbroken people who are still picking up the pieces.
On 4 August 2020, the Beirut blast’s engulfing power devastated Malak and Walid’s lives. Although a generation apart, they discovered the source of their healing in the same unlikely place: a new playground built with funds donated by BMS supporters to help children suffering from psychological trauma.
Walid’s struggles were those of so many Lebanese graduates. His dreams of working for a news station in Beirut had crumbled against the hard reality of unemployment, economic struggle and feelings of shame.
Walid’s trip to visit his parents in Beirut on that fateful day should have been a time of encouragement. Instead, he found himself clearing the debris of his family home off his own body so he could reach his injured mother.
“Carrying my mother to the hospital and running through the wreckage was the hardest thing I had to do in my life,” he says.
But Walid feels hopeful again thanks to his time volunteering at the children’s playground. He’s seen little ones like Malak, whose instant developmental regression so worried the adults around her, become more like their happy chatty selves again.
Walid has regained a sense peace helped by seeing children go from being silent and withdrawn to cheerful and smiling, and all through the activities put on by psychologists at the playground. “The children got me out of my state of stress. I finally found a purpose,” he says.
Like a passenger in a car with no brakes
Malak and Walid lives were altered beyond imagination on that August day. Over 200 people lost their lives and an estimated 300,000 others were left displaced and, one year on, people in Lebanon are still asking questions. Some have been immediate and practical: how should you commemorate an anniversary like this? Some run much deeper, threaded through with feelings of anger, injustice, loss of hope and despair.
“Some groups have been calling for demonstrations to take place,” says Alia Abboud, Chief Development Officer for LSESD, BMS World Mission’s partner in Lebanon. “Some people said it’s better not to hit the streets on 4th August. ‘Stay at home’. Others are saying we need to go down to the port to show solidarity with the families who lost loved ones.”
Not everyone is ready to revisit the port, though. Reminders of the damage remain graven into the cityscape after 2,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded there last year. Shockwaves ripped indiscriminately through the city, with the impact felt as far away as Cyprus.
The blast was one of the planet’s biggest ever explosions and one of its most horrific industrial accidents. The many broken silos had been full of grain that was meant to feed a nation. That grain remains rotting in mounds at ground zero, a potent symbol of a crippled country still coming to terms with the aftermath of the explosion.
The answers many feel they are still waiting for makes the process of healing harder. Alia describes it as being like a passenger in a car with no brakes, careering into rocks as it hurtles down a steep hill.
The rocks that Lebanon is navigating are huge: forest fires and Covid-19, a population where one in three is already a refugee in a foreign land, and an economic and political crisis, where the cost of basic household items like sunflower oil has risen by over 1,000 per cent. Vital medicines are out of stock, there is not enough fuel to supply the electricity sector and the country’s central bank is running out of money. Alia’s friends, family and neighbours live in expectation of the worst.
Planting seeds of hope
BMS World Mission’s partner in Lebanon is not immune to this crisis. Its staff are living through it: some experienced the blast themselves, and now all exist in its aftermath, doing what they can to get by. Last year, Alia and her team chose a theme for the year ahead: planting seeds of hope.
“We try not to keep our eyes as much as possible on the bad things that are happening around us, but on what God is doing both through us and within us,” she explains. And as a BMS supporter, you’ve enabled Alia and her team to keep their eyes on the good their Heavenly Father is doing amidst it all.
Your generous gifts to the BMS Beirut appeal last year have brought hope back to the child given an emergency meal so they don’t go hungry, to the family given shelter after the blast destroyed their home, and to the church given food vouchers so they can distribute them amongst those in need.
Thank you for standing by people like Walid, Alia and Malak during one of the hardest years of their lives. One year on from the Beirut blast, it’s still making all the difference as the seeds of hope begin to grow. “We are grateful,” says Alia of BMS supporters. “We thank God for your generosity. That enabled us to stand by our people in the hour of need and plant seeds of hope. So, thank you so much.”
Thank you for your incredible response to the 2020 Beirut relief appeal. Because you and many other Christians gave over £110,000, you’ve been part of providing:
- 40 families with emergency accommodation
- 2,200 vouchers for households in need
- 7,800 hot meals for affected families
- 200 children with a new playground
- 18,000 hygiene kits
- Pray that Christians in Lebanon would be agents of hope and transformation, and that members of the church in Beirut would be encouraged to stay despite the current brain drain as many working people leave Lebanon.
- Pray that families who have lost loved ones would feel justice is being done and that their questions are being addressed. Pray that they would finally be able to heal after the blast.
- Pray that families in Lebanon are sustained through the current crises, and that aid agencies can effectively support people in need.
Words by Hannah Watson
