BLBG meeting 25th November – “State of the Nation”

Her Majesty’s Ambassador’s annual address to the British Lebanese Business Group (BLBG) is eagerly awaited and usually results in the best turnout of the year. Last night, over seventy braved heavy rain in the dark to get to “the residence” in the hills above Beirut, and they were not disappointed.

Rather than stick to the tried and trusted formula of describing the regional political situation, HMA Tom Fletcher first described the successes of flourishing trade between the two countries. Annual exports from the UK are now running at well over the half billion pound mark, with Scotch salmon, Scotch whiskey, high end yachts, British Airways and Perkins engines getting special mention. There has also been a dramatic increase in UK brands on the Lebanese High street, Lush cosmestics have just opened their third branch here for example. An historical parallel was drawn between the Phoenicians, (the old name for the Lebanese), and the British as maritime trading nations.

 

He went on to talk about increasing links in many other spheres before drawing inspiration from a recent Lebanese invention for measuring the human body’s vital signs. Worn on the wrist, the “Up”, as it is called, measures heart rate, number of steps taken, breathing rate etc. before regularly uploading them to a handy iPad. The rhetorical question posed was what would such an instrument show if put on Lebanon’s hypothetical wrist. Still alive and functioning but in need of external support was the net of HMA’s view.

The whole event was fueled with excellent canapés, some using one of Scotland’s exports mentioned above and lubricated, if one wished, with the other one, or, of course, with Lebanese wines.

An excellent evening, lively, informative and fun.

So, you had a bad day!

Yesterday the bad decisions started early. The first one was to get up at all. No, it wasn’t Friday the thirteenth, I hadn’t walked under a ladder or strayed across the path of a black cat or cut my nails the day before (Thursday for losses).  Given the myriad superstitions that my mother and grandmother had, I must have transgressed at least one and probably more.

The first discovery was that a document had gone missing. Desk turned upside down, draws and cupboards inside out for a half hour or so – nothing. OK, back track through when last seen and the little video in my head revealed a foggy image of a colleague picking it up at a meeting the previous day. I called him and, sure enough, “oh, I just borrowed it, I’ll bring it to the pub tonight and give it you back”. Great.

Later I set out for what I hoped and expected would be an enjoyable session of cards. The bad decision?  To take a quick power nap before leaving. Tournaments start at five, but at that time, I was still sitting fuming and fretting in an almost endless traffic jam. Late and stressed is not the way to succeed at anything and so it turned out, enjoyable as it was. Oh, and a “power nap”? It’s shorter than a “pensioner’s nap”.

And now to the pub. Warning! Bad decision coming, I took the car (no, that wasn’t it) to my usual parking lot in Hamra and let the car jockey do his stuff for me (that was it!).  Convivial Friday night atmosphere, lots of friends and acquaintances and the list retrieved. Happy hour slipped by. “let’s move on to another place down the road, cheap drinks, plenty of atmosphere and loads of history, it was open before and during the war”. “OK, let’s go”. A snap decision, and a bad one. If I’d left then, disaster might have been averted. Great atmosphere and time ticked past. Walked back to car park and waited for the car jockey to find my car key.

I became aware of pockets being turned out, tins emptied and cupboards searched. There followed a hurried conference between the car jockeys. Cars were then searched one by one and after half an hour they admitted that the key had been lost.

Now what use is a car without a key? I had no choice but to leave the car and get a taxi home. Now we’ll see if not going back until morning was another bad decision.

And when I got home, I realised that the retrieved document had gone again too, left somewhere while the key was being searched for.

Better to have stayed in bed.

PS today is better, car retrieved with spare key and document found in car.

40 Things I wish I’d know when I arrived in Lebanon

Introduction

It started as twenty and then grew as everyone I spoke to had a different view. With the resources for finding answers, it’s a bit more than forty, but never mind. It’s split into four lists. The first three are issues and differences that have affected people enough to justify their inclusion here. The final list is a set of resources to help you find answers to questions posed and so to cope successfully with an experience we all hope will be both rewarding and fun.

Many thanks to all who contributed and commented; this could not have been done without you. Special mention is due to Anthony, Francois, Harriet, Mark, Paul, Richard and Simon. Any gaffs or errors of omission are mine.

The advice I got was “don’t touch Arab (sic) pride and don’t touch Arab women”, but I’d already married one and my coach knew that! Hopefully this is a little more helpful.

One last thought before the "beef" - Lebanon has been my adopted country for over fourteen years, and I enjoy Lebanon, largely due to the fact that there are lot of Lebanese in it. Publishing lists like this risks offending or worse, so rather than take offence at anything, perhaps you'd write back to me with your views on foreigners instead. I promise to consolidate them all into another little piece.

Political and Cultural

1. The political make-up of Lebanon is very complex, try to get some feel for it before coming here. Many seasoned MENA veterans find Lebanon so totally different from what they have been used to in the GCC or other Levant countries.
2. Lebanon is unpredictable.  Trying to plan everything in advance - as one does /is accustomed to doing in the UK - won't work here.
3. Bureaucracy Rules.  When dealing with any official entities, expect delays, bureaucracy and the need for "wasta" – it really is who you know and not what.
4. You won't learn Arabic living here.  Most Lebanese speak English and/or French and, when learning that you are a foreigner, will practice their own language skills on you.
5. The postal system just doesn't supply a reliable delivery/mail service. More, no financial nor business transaction can be sent in the mail, e.g. bank statements must be picked up in person
6. Time management – Many Lebanese seem to have little idea of time which can give the impression of a lack of respect for your time especially if you come from a culture where time is sacrosanct. A consequence is that you are seldom expected to be on time.  An invitation to dinner at 8.00pm may well mean 9.30 or 10.00 pm, except during Ramadan, when you are expected to turn up as the sun sets and not a moment after.
7. Most Lebanese operate on short time horizons. This makes them appear spontaneous and can be appealing but in a business context tends to lead to short sighted decision making
8. Many Lebanese attempt to multitask in way that appears (and often is) chaotic and unproductive. They find it hard to give you or anything their undivided focused attention for any length of time.  This is not intentionally disrespectful though it can appear to be at first sight. For example, if their phone rings or an SMS arrives during a meeting with you, they will usually break off and take the call.  Equally, they will not be concerned if you do the same.
9. Because of trying to do several things at once, they will often appear rushed and harried, they will rush through work (repairs and the like), any finished or repaired product should be closely inspected before accepting it.
10. Useful tip – NEVER change your plans in reliance that a Lebanese will do something when they say they will e.g. arrive to fix your plumbing (this is especially true of handyman types - plumbers, electricians etc).  It will be far less irritating to continue to do whatever you were going to do and agree a time when lateness or non-appearance will not matter to you
11. Lebanon is a Mediterranean country with a typically relaxed lifestyle – this manifests itself in ways that can be charming or infuriating depending on context and occasion
12. Law enforcement starts with good intentions but quickly becomes lax. Traffic lights are more for illumination than anything else and a recent smoking ban in restaurants and pubs was steadily relaxed for various groups, which now seem embrace diners and drinkers! 
13. You will need a "Plan B" for everything, from sourcing electricity (there is not enough electricity, so all locations undergo daily power cuts to “power share”, so you need access to another source, either your own generator on a balcony, or, for example purchasing extra power from a bakery!) to telecoms to access from and to the country.
14. Bribery and the expectation of it exist. Get your coping strategy ready.
15. Warning to all British males! There is a surfeit of ladies, so acquiring a Lebanese wife has proved a much more common hazard than many realize and has afflicted all professions. Diplomats, bankers & engineers have all fallen.

Starting to live here, you and your family

1. How to find and rent an apartment, what to expect to pay and whether it’s worth buying
2. How to buy/rent a car
3. How to get a work permit 
4. How to get a residence permit, how long it takes and that you won’t have your passport during that time
5. How to get a driving licence.
6. How to register a car in your name and do the annual MOT and road tax
7. How to do temporary importation of cars, and maximum allowed age of imported cars
8. How to clear personal effects through Customs and how much it should cost.
9. How to or get an appointment with a doctor and how the medical system works
10. How to cope with motor bikes, who can go and do whatever they like, as the traffic laws and rules don't apply, indeed in any accident, a motor cyclist cannot, by law, be blamed
11. Security and armed people are everywhere in Beirut along with visible military vehicles and cordons – do not be alarmed, this is normal, best to ignore it
12. Driving techniques are very aggressive and can be alarming but do not be too concerned, most drivers are highly skilled and in any case, because of the poor road system and numbers of vehicles, speeds are slow. The last thing most drivers want is to have an accident, they will do all they can to avoid one.
13. If you get lost in Beirut, the mountains will be to the East of you – the mountain ranges in Lebanon run broadly North to South, and the sea to the West
14. The 300 metre rule – you can buy almost anything or service you can dream of within 300 metres of where you currently are – your challenge is to locate the shop.
15. Where to send the kids to school
16. Where to shop for food/clothes
17. Where to go out at night/for the day
18. How much to pay for a taxi as there are no meters. As in many countries, taxi drivers exploit foreigners. At the Hariri Airport arrival floor, take the escalator up to the departure terminal and there, taxi drivers will happily greet you and accept LL20,000 for a ride to central Beirut because they've just dropped off a ride
19. Internet speeds are lower than in the UK so, for example, Skype interviews are very difficult to conduct.

 In business

1. Types of company and corporate structure that exist (SAL, SARL, JV etc.
2. How to form a company and what percentage of shares can be foreign owned
3. Positions foreign nationals are allowed/not allowed to take up in a company
4. How much is a reasonable retainer for a lawyer and auditor
5. You, your staff and company will spend at least 20 days of the year not working due to the huge number of public holidays, many of which are announced at the very last minute.
6. Compared to Western operating practice, decisions have to be referred to a higher level, and everybody is afraid to make a one, whether in a private organisation or government, and a corollary to this is …
7. Management Style – most Lebanese rely on Prestige and Face, their management approach (especially but not limited to older people) appears dictatorial and “control freakish” to people more attuned to western management styles. They greatly value age and experience (sometimes to a fault), they also have a respect and admiration for anything foreign (such as you).
8. The Lebanese are extremely family oriented. Many businesses are still family owned, so criticism of family members, even if richly deserved, is not wise in virtually all cases. As a new employee, even in a senior capacity, expect to be excluded from all important decisions  
9.  … and if you are working with the government, Lebanon spends long periods (up to a year) without one, during which time, no new law can be passed. Only Belgium has spent longer without a government this century
10. The consequence of the previous fact means that those working in ministries spend long periods unable to do anything much for the future, affecting motivation and level of interest in what you are trying to achieve.
11. Employment law is a minefield; get a brief before hiring anyone.
12. There are no green paper consultative documents produced, salaries increases have been imposed twice in the last five years with little warning, for example. This makes cash flow and P&L planning both tricky and essential!

Top resources

Books and Publications

1.  “At Home in Beirut” published by Turning Point, stocked by Libraire Antione chain, this is an excellent reference which can be the first point of call for almost all the business and living questions
2. HSBC Bank, British friendly with simple to/from UK transfer facilities
3. Country Risk Review and Lebanon This Week published weekly by Byblos Bank, both are publications packed with regional wide numbers that actually mean something. You can access the latest on their web-site’s media section.
4. British Embassy UKTI, the current head is Paul Khawaja and he knows everybody
5. Local staff and colleagues if you’re lucky enough to already have them
6. “The Daily Star” an English language newspaper
7. Libancall – an approximately English language breaking news SMS service
8. The British Lebanese Business Group, for contacts and networking
9. Naharnet website, a news service covering the region in general and Lebanon in particular
10. Five Index for finding suppliers of just about anything
11. The Duke of Wellington pub’s Friday night “Happy Hour” and “The Greedy Goose” pub for meeting other ex-pats
12. Henry Heald for shipping/customs/etc. They’ve been doing it since 1837 (!) and again are British friendly.

Video clips:

1. Middle East Airlines are the national carrier; their in-flight entertainment has quite a good advertisement for Lebanon, showing shopping, restaurants, hotels, clubs, cosmetic surgery, beaches and ski resorts. This is a shortened version.
2. And if you want to get a touristic look, here’s a quick tour of some of Beirut’s landmarks.

 

How Isis makes me feel

Drop a frog in hot water and it will immediately leap out. Put the same frog in cool water and slowly heat it and it is likely to remain until cooked (and dead!).  We humans have a similar characteristic; we have no difficulty spotting emergencies and responding; storms, earthquakes and heart attacks spring to mind, but a slow steady yet inexorable build up we may well fail to notice until too late – history is littered with examples, the consequences of underestimating the Nazi threat springs to mind.

For part of my working life I was responsible for developing strategies for business. I discovered this was not about sitting in a darkened room with a wet towel round my head trying to think clever thoughts, but was about identifying important trends as early as possible, that is, finding those things whose rate of increase was interesting while the absolute volume of activity was still small. The explosive growth of personal devices and the internet were apparent over thirty years ago, you just had to know where to look to find the ancestors of Google, Skype and mobile phones already up and running. I missed texting though.

This type of analysis is applicable at any level, and there are three international trends that are really worrying to me. Global warming: we aren't going to spend any time on it other than to point out that we haven’t really got past the awareness stage, in other words, there is still no concerted effort at world level to cope with a world problem. The second is the steady erosion of the effectiveness of antibiotics, those miracles of modern medicine that we abused in such cavalier fashion that there are an increasing number of resistant bugs: again there is little evidence of any kind of concerted world action to ensure they are used correctly. Finally there is the increasing growth of tribalism and its sinister brother sectarianism. Far from there being any worldwide action against this trend, there seems to be a concerted effort to reinforce it.

Let me try to justify such a sweeping statement. The Basques have been making noises about separation for years, the Catalans have managed to get there language revived, the Scots have campaigned for “independence” for years and are actually being given the opportunity to secede from the three centuries old Act of Union and the Irish are, well, the Irish.

This is not personal, most of my genes are from the Celtic fringe (Scots, Welsh and Irish) and my grand-children are half Catalan. More, I’ve been on a lifetime journey of personally "celebrating difference". This was partly by chance and partly because I passionately believe that the search for truth and knowledge are facilitated by variations in culture and experience. I also believe that two of the mainstays of human success as a species are our power of co-operation and our capacity to challenge established ideas; for evidence, just look at the number of multi-cultural, joint Nobel Prize winners. And, of course, for that to work to the optimum, tolerance is essential.

It is against that back-drop that I find the growth of ISIS and its atrocities against people and cultural and historical icons, the events in Nigeria, particularly the school kidnap and more recently the mass killings of civilians in Gaza to be abhorrent and personally, psychologically disturbing. They all have a common element, complete intolerance for any point of view other the narrow, entrenched and didactic one of the perpetrators. It’s as if the worst of the Spanish Inquisition had been re-incarnated and deposited in the Middle East with 21^st century weapons put at their disposal.

From here we can only go in one of two directions. Like a pond freezing over, which starts in a corner and finishes with the whole surface becoming ice, we can all retreat to our tribes and expel those different from ourselves, as was done in Nazi Germany and is happening now in Northern Iraq and Syria and Nigeria and Sudan and will inevitably spread. Or, we can take world action to counter the threat.

While the wonderful advertising campaign for unity being waged by the Lebanese army on local television is a positive example, I can’t say that that the responses to global warming and antibiotic misuse give me much hope. So, let's speak up and speak out.

Med Poets Plunder Party

“Shiver me timbers!”

“Have him walk the plank!”

“No, keel haul him!”

“Where’s the rum?”

“Ooooh arrrrrr!’’

What’s all this then? Extracts from a resurrected “Pirates of the Caribbean”? A celebration of the so-called generous vowels, not to mention generous Rs (pronounce with care) of the West Country?

No, these are extracts from entertainment at the Med-Poets’ Society’s annual offbeat get together, an event that somehow combines elements of a varsity comedy club “smoker”, a masquerade ball of the type favoured by long gone European Aristocracy and a good-old fashioned East End “knees up”. More succinctly, it’s an opportunity to dress up and perform a party piece with identity hidden by costume and alcohol, with community singing and dancing to follow.

Many thanks to all those involved in this years’ gathering, billed as a Pirate Plunder Party. All proceeds go to charity, so sponsors were signed up (were they threatened with those traditional Pirate Punishments, I wonder?), Alt City in Hamra, Beirut was found as the new venue which was an improvement on the now defunct Hard Rock café, a DJ employed, a source of really good British fish ‘n’ chips found and tickets sold. There’s no committee, just a wonderfully energetic and enthusiastic organiser by the name of Vicky. Some of us get dragooned into doing silly things under the watchful eye and humorous introductions of Anthony, the master of ceremonies to jolly us all along on the night. At this point, word plays on the “Jolly Roger” (the famous skull and crossed bones pirate flag) spring to mind, but I’ll leave you to work those out for yourselves.

My own silly things at past events have included writing and reading my own nonsense poems, playing a guitar and being interviewed with a gorilla;and I still had to pay for the tickets, I told you Vicky was a wonderful organiser. This year I just borrowed a disguise. And thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Plans to move on to a second event fell by the way side as a quiz, a fancy dress competition, eating, dancing and drinking carried on until after mid-night.

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last year knows that things are, well, err, sort of, like, a bit difficult here. One of the neighbours (Syria) has got rather noisy and the rowdy behaviour has spilled over into parts of Lebanon. And that has rather inhibited fun and frolics, as it seems (and would be) thoroughly insensitive to have a plethora of celebratory events going on while bombs keep going off. So we’ve been without the usual Christmas balls, while New Year and Burns’ night have just whimpered past. But this one was for charity and a little lifting of the spirits was sorely needed.

Thanks to Vicky and her volunteers, we got it.

Why did he do it? The Celtic curse?

There are days when it seems the universe was set in motion for the sole purpose of creating situations and events that make me feel angry or frustrated or miserable and on really bad days, all three at once.

Monday was one of them.

I wake up when it gets light, something my body learned to do to overcome jet lag. A wonderful trick it is, as on my first trips to New York I used to wake up ready for breakfast at two every morning and then have difficulty not falling sleeping over dinner. My longtitude sensing body clock works fine – as long as there is no early morning cloud cover. Early morning Monday’s sky was pretty well clouds and nothing else so I woke up late, which makes a bad start as something (my regular swim on this occasion) has to be cut out of the schedule for the day.  Another bomb went off, this time in Choueifat with the by now familiar, yet still gut-wrenching images on the TV. A set of trivial things I won’t bore you with continued to go awry so that, by early evening, the world had gone black and turned against me and I was completely unfit for human consumption. So I consumed instead.

Now that same day I’d read of the circumstances of the death of one of my favourite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, at the ridiculously early age of 46. Seventy bags of heroin were found stashed in his flat. His mother bore an Irish name (O’Connell) and I began to wonder about the problems of us Celts, our apparent tendency to self-destruct while trying to escape from a world that can make us revolt from even having to stay on it. William Hamilton (mathematician), Oscar Wilde (writer), Dylan Thomas (poet), Brian Jones (musician), Richard Burton (actor) and George Best (sportsman) were all Celts who paid the ultimate price for over indulgence in sex, drink or drugs (and again sometimes all three) often presumed to be attempts to escape from reality. All of them provided insights and pleasure for the rest of us without finding personal peace and now they’ve been joined by another.

What is it about the Celts then? Well I can’t be sure, but Monday provided me with yet another experience of descending into the black followed by switching the lights out. And there’s another colour that can engulf me – red. I think of myself as easy going, I like the soft furriness of cats, I’m normally gentle with others and their feelings, but, and it’s a big but, very occasionally the red mist descends.

I think it was the manager’s fault. He should have ducked when, having ripped out the SIM card and crushed it under foot, I threw the empty phone across the shop. The details of the event don’t really matter, suffice it to say that what seemed like hours of my life had been wasted by a customer dis-services screw-up by a well-known mobile telephone company in the UK. One by one, all the pet hide behinds of data protection, health and safety and “it’s our policy” had been trotted out for my mental torture. Then it happened, the red mist that I’d been holding back finally exploded all over my brain anaesthetising good-sense, reasonableness and physical caution, during which time the phone was made to fly. My wife smoothed over the threat of assault charges, but I’m still banned from ever going in one of XXX’s shops again. Just the sight of me walking past the same shop half an hour later caused the manager to duck. Too late. I think it was that that caused the feelings of remorse, guilt and self-horror to set in.

It happens every five years or so, the invasion of the red mist followed by descent into black. Black alone perhaps once every few months. I can cope with that, but if they happened regularly? I’d have been pushed or fallen off the stage ages ago.

So I’m not going to blame Messrs. Hamilton, Wilde, Thomas, Jones, Burton, Best and Hoffman for leaving too early,  for I suspect they’d had to cope not just with the black and the red but many other colours too and all too regularly for comfort. I’ll just thank them for the bodies of work they, and so many other Celts, left behind.