Sinking Deeper

by

Aray of sunlight shines through the window as 7-year-old

Antonia plays a guitar chord she has just learned for Sister Gladys Sassine. Antonia lives at Blessed Sacrament School in Beit Habbak, a remote village in northern Lebanon. Sister Gladys, the school’s director, smiles with pride, but her eyes reveal a hint of concern.

Sister Gladys’s congregation, the Maronite Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Most Blessed Sacrament, as with many other religious communities and organizations throughout Lebanon, is navigating one of the worst economic crises since the 1850s, and the school’s future is uncertain.

Since 2019, Lebanon has been caught in an economic spiral with no end in sight. Three decades of mismanagement by the country’s political and banking elite, a climate of corruption and structural inequality — exacerbated by the

COVID-19 pandemic and the Beirut port blast in 2020 — have pushed Lebanon into nearly $103 billion of public debt.

A United Nations official has described Lebanon as a “failing state,” unable to pay its bills across the board, including its hospitals and schools, leaving civil society and its people struggling to stay afloat. In January, Lebanon lost its right to vote at the U.N. General Assembly because it had failed to pay its dues. The looming question in the mind of many Lebanese is: How much longer can we cope?

At Blessed Sacrament School, the 1,400 students seem oblivious to the precarious situation. When the school bell rings, they pour into the corridors, filling them with laughter, as they have since 1969, when the school opened to serve families in the area.

The school pays most of its bills in U.S. dollars, even though its income is primarily in Lebanese pounds — an unsustainable situation since the Lebanese pound has lost 90 percent of its market value since 2019.

In January, Lebanon’s currency was trading on the market at 67,000 pounds to the dollar, far from the official bank rate of 1,500 pounds to the dollar, which Lebanon’s central bank had maintained for 25 years.

On 1 February, Riad Salameh, the central bank governor, who is being investigated for money laundering and embezzlement, changed the official bank rate to 15,000 pounds to the dollar in an attempt to unify exchange rates. However, in midFebruary, the exchange rate on the market, which impacts most Lebanese on a daily basis, was trading at an all-time low of 80,000 pounds.

With this devaluation, the survival for many is at stake.

At Blessed Sacrament School, a teacher’s monthly salary is between 2 million and 4 million pounds. Prior to 2019, 2 million pounds equaled $1,333; these days, it is between $25 and $35.

“Their salary is the same as the cost of two tanks of fuel,” says Sister Gladys. “How can teachers even afford transportation to the school?”

CNEWA is assisting the school by covering gas stipends and a portion of teacher salaries in dollars.

Electricity is the school’s main expense at $5,000 per week. The state rations electricity, supplying only two hours per day; the school must use its own fuel-powered generators the rest of the time. Covering fuel costs has become more difficult since the central bank fully phased out the national fuel subsidy last September. The Ministry of Education has not provided the education subsidies it owes the school for the past five years.

To cut costs, Blessed Sacrament School has reduced class time to four days a week, shrunk its boarding program from 60 to 19 students, and suspended professional training courses. The school is living off of donations, says Sister Gladys.

Mother Arze Gemayel, director of Al Saydeh Hospital for the Chronically Ill in Antelias, about 7 miles east of Beirut, is faced with major challenges in providing proper care to patients since the government stopped health care subsidies to the hospital. Her congregation, the Franciscan Sisters of the Cross, has been running the long-term care center since 1946. Currently, they care for 450 elderly patients and 100 patients with special needs. Of these, 75 percent come from families with limited means and costs for their care are supposed to be covered by the state at a rate of 50,000 pounds per patient per day.

“That’s [now less than] $1 per patient per day, far from enough. But in any case, the state hasn’t paid in a year,” says Mother Arze.

The other 25 percent of patients, who once had resources to pay their own way, now struggle to cover their monthly bills, she adds.

On a sunny winter morning, Gariné Pambukian sits with her 87-year-old mother in the center’s cafeteria, surrounded by banana, lemon and avocado trees, enjoying a view of the Mediterranean Sea.

Gariné’s mother has Alzheimer’s disease and has lived at the center for two years. With a monthly income of 3 million pounds, Gariné and her husband, who already care for his parents in their home, struggle to pay the 1.5-million-pound hospital fee.

The meager revenue from patient care does not cover the hospital’s rising costs, including salaries for the 200-member staff and the

$6,000 weekly fuel expense, says Mother Arze. An average monthly salary for hospital staff is 12 million pounds, plus an additional $200. It is common in Lebanon these days for salaries to be paid in both Lebanese pounds and U.S. dollars, to help employees stave off devaluation.

Still, in the past two years, 50 hospital staff resigned either to work at private hospital centers that pay fully in dollars or to work abroad. The economic turmoil has led to a massive wave of emigration, making Lebanon the most remittance-dependent country worldwide in 2022.

Lebanon’s economy — largely dependent on the inflow of foreign currency to support an artificial and dangerously low fixed rate to the dollar — imploded in summer 2019, after a shortage of dollars in the Lebanese market.

A few months later, in October, sparked by the government’s announcement of new taxes, protests broke out across the country against the political elite, blamed for the fragile state infrastructure and poor economy. But the energy on the streets did not translate into a unified political movement and could not stem the devaluation of the pound that had begun.

In March 2020, Lebanon defaulted on its foreign debt. Things got increasingly worse, with the devastating economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Beirut port blast on 4 August that killed more than 200 people and caused as much as $4.6 billion in material damage.

The port blast has become a symbol of the disdain and impunity of the Lebanese ruling class, from the criminal carelessness of storing tons of explosive material at the port to the attempts to sidetrack the judicial probe into the explosion.

The government’s political deadlock, which includes the failure to elect a president, has prevented the implementation of reforms that