The Syrians have arrived

In Lebanon I am ajnabi – a foreigner. Foreigner carries overtones of strange, unusual and in this country that loves foreigners, welcome guest.

I suppose in its favour, the word is much more empathic than the American one – Alien – as well as being more accurate post Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver. Although I’ve lived nearly a third of my adult life in Lebanon, I’m still a foreigner and that means I need to obtain permission from the powers that be to stay here from time to time. The time recently came round again.

I duly collected all the required paperwork, passport (to prove I’m me), marriage certificate (to prove I have a legitimate reason to be here), my Lebanese wife’s identity card (to prove she’s who she is) my wife’s ikraj qaid, a document without British equivalent  which goes back to Ottoman Empire days and records her family history (it proves that the marriage certificate is registered as part of her family history and has therefore  been properly processed and is legitimate), property deeds (to prove I have somewhere to live), bank statements (to prove I am of independent means), two photographs (of me!) and, finally, my previous and now expired permit.

Armed with all the above, in duplicate or triplicate as required, together with a sum of money, I headed off to my local General Security Office. I noticed a queue of people four abreast on the pavement, stretching back hundreds of yards and held back by Police. I walked into the courtyard and found another huge queue, which I was invited to jump and did so. The lobby of the building was heaving. I had to give up my iPhone and, seeing it heaped on a pile of cell phones, feared that I would never see that trusty instrument again. I climbed the stairs (no chance of getting into a lift) and on the appropriate floor found a melee that would have done justice to a local football derby with the turnstiles closed.

This was nothing like anything I’d seen on previous pilgrimages to General Security. I asked myself “what is going on?” And then the penny dropped. Everyone was Syrian, except me and an Iraqi woman who’d come to study for a Ph. D. in computer science. The Syrians are all fleeing from the civil war there and many are applying for residency in Lebanon. Some would want to re-occupy the second homes they already have, some to stay with relatives, some to seek the assistance being offered by the already heavily indebted Lebanese Government. All want the chance to stay alive and have a life.

No-one can be sure, but word has it that a million people have arrived from Syria since last summer; as is the way, half a million have registered and the remainder is a guess.

It is a still unfolding tragedy bringing this about, but is there a worse tragedy in the making? Water, electricity, roads, housing and food all have to be supplied and there weren’t enough of some of these to go round the three million Lebanese before the human tsunami gathered strength; the waste all has to be disposed of too.  How can any country absorb an increase of one third in its population without warning in less than a year? Imagine the entire population of the Netherlands arriving in England. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against either the Syrians or the Dutch, indeed I have considerable admiration for many that I’ve met, but there is enough of a good thing. While Lebanon has an amazing track record of absorbing displaced peoples, one thinks of the Armenians and Palestinians in the last century alone, this Syrian exodus is likely to change forever the demographics of a country already an uneasy patchwork of religions and ethnicities.

While the news is full of the waging of war and the consequent appalling destruction of humans and buildings, that is just the bloody and violent tip of the iceberg made up mainly of quiet but emotionally distressing human suffering. I have now seen it for myself in the lines of people, waiting for the chance of a new life.

I would like to say I waited quietly amongst these sufferers for my turn at the overcrowded hatches. It wasn’t like that. I was spotted and asked to go into the captain’s office, where we chatted while he had one of his staff fill out my form and check all was in order. He told me that they were coping and holding to the system, but only just. I say we chatted, but it was while he was signing papers from a continual human stream and rapidly issuing instructions to assorted staff in person and over two ‘phones. I asked him how he kept sane amidst the stress of continuous interruptions. “It’s the physical that’s difficult, I keep getting sick and I’m sure it’s being exposed to strains of bugs I’m not used to”. While he could well be right, I think the stress is much more a factor.

As proof the system still worked, I was reunited with my iPhone when all was finished.

At current course and speed, how long before foreigners become the norm, even the majority and will we all still be welcome guests?

BLBG Meeting May 2013

Lively, exciting, even occasionally confrontational, so what was the subject under discussion? Amazingly, the answer to the question is … registration of British nationals in Lebanon with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the FCO’s travel advice to Lebanon, and the British Embassy’s telephone service here in Beirut.

Atif Janjua has the wonderful, Romanesque sounding title of Vice Consul at the Embassy. He was standing in for the Deputy Head of Mission, called away at the last minute to another appointment. Sincere thanks to Atif for leaping into the breach with so little warning.

In living memory, the communications part of the embassy’s crisis plan has depended on a network of volunteers, the wardens, to be the major branches of a communication tree. Each week every warden has received a list of British nationals registered in his or her area to be able to be ready with said communications should they be needed. Registration used to be by going to the embassy and filling in a form, then the job could be done by fax and most recently using an on-line service called LOCATE. This was essentially a “registration just in case” service and has recently been withdrawn. Atif’s first task then was to try to explain why the powers that be in London had taken such a decision and what the role of the wardens might be now.

The reasons he advanced were essentially threefold. When crises have happened in the last ten years, including the Bali bombing, the grounding of all commercial airlines’ flights in and out of Europe thanks to the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud (see picture at the end of this piece), the tsunami in Japan (pictured above) and even the hostilities in 2006 here, LOCATE had proved ineffective due to low usage and insufficient data. With the arrival on the scene of social networking tools like Twitter and facebook, together with mobile phone penetration, a plethora of “push” information systems are available to communicate to those with access to those services. Finally, when a crisis hits, experience shows that the local embassy and the FCO are inundated, nay swamped with requests for help and information; a single full-time professional crisis management centre can be resourced to far greater levels than might be available to any individual embassy, so the investment has been made such a centre is now operational centrally in London (pictured below).

This naturally led on to the telephone service, which has not always been seen in the past as a model of efficiency. Here’s where the meeting got lively, with the following question being posed in a number of different guises – given that the telephone service at the embassy is perceived as unresponsive, how can it possibly be expected to be a satisfactory instrument in time of crisis? Atif’s response to this was simple – a significant investment has been made in a new ‘phone system with a menu driven front end, personalised voice answering service and improved reception staffing. He invited us all to try it and let him know of any problems. Another recurrent theme was what if the internet is affected or even offline. It was then he assured us that wardens were still seen as a major part of the support structure for Brits abroad with new guidance expected out from the FCO in the near future.

Finally, Atif explained the way in which the travel advice was debated before change – at the highest levels of the UK government even  –  and the balancing act needed between looking after the interests of British nationals (without trying to appear “nannyish”) and managing the relationship between the governments of the UK and the various host countries. Opinions were mixed about which should take priority and the discussion showed just how sensitive a subject this topic is.

What you may ask, has all this to do with business? Well above all, business is looking for the unattainable nirvana of stability. Second best is to know that in the event of a crisis, people and systems are in place to minimize and cope with the extent of a consequent disaster. The short list above shows they can occur anywhere, anytime without warning,

For Wimps, Nerds and those who like the Big Bang.

Last Monday night was the inaugural meeting of the Beirut Big Bang Club. No, it isn't a group of aging hippies trying a bit of swapping with “50 shades” as the operating manual. Rather it has the high minded purpose of trying to make sense of the recent developments of modern science. The group is the brain-child of Vicky, an Anglo-Dutch lady ex-pat living in Beirut, together with two of her friends, Brighid and Tracey.

I was told never to accept lifts in cars from strange men, but I thought it was safe to offer some ladies of my acquaintance a lift back to Beirut after a memorial service up in the mountains for a late friend. They just happened to be the same three mentioned above. Rewarded for my gallantry by their company over an Indian meal, wine and conversation flowed. Vicky suddenly turned to me and said “You know something about black holes, Graham, could you come and talk to us about them?” She explained that there was a small group, including all those then round the table, interested in such phenomena but the group needed someone to explain things in understandable terms. Some years ago I had written a poem about the Large Hadron Collider (it’s published elsewhere on this blog) and Vicky thought I could, well, sort of, you know, expand on it a bit; in prose; with a few diagrams and pictures.

How could I possible resist? Quite easily you might say. “Sorry the buses don’t run frequently enough”, “but you have a car, you've just given us a lift”; “I’m going on a very long trip”, “No, you aren't  you've just come back”; “But I don’t know anything about the subject”, but that damned poem and my even more damned ego got in the way of that one. So I heard myself say “Yes”. Oops.

I prepared for what I hoped would be a twenty minute talk, covering a bit of the “Sky at night” with a dash of relativity propped up by a childish drawing of a space ship (courtesy of Prof. Richard Feynman), a few impressively big numbers and a teaspoon.

The day arrived. Vicky had accumulated about fifteen intelligent, enthusiastic, questioning people, gave everyone food and drink, and then started proceedings with an amazing introduction of someone that, I realised with some trepidation, was me.

And then we were off.

Some TV programs I've seen approach modern science popularisation with a “this is incredibly weird and complicated and difficult and you won’t understand it – see, look at these clever people standing in front of chalk boards writing loads of incomprehensible symbols and things”.  I’d wanted to do rather the opposite and show how the simplest observations like “it gets dark at night” can lead to profound conclusions with a small sprinkling of logic, how even really big numbers can become accessible (that’s what the teaspoon was for) and how the same phenomena that account for those exotic objects known as “black holes” have a direct bearing on things like the working of cell ‘phones and SatNavs.

After an hour and a half, barely half the material had been used and the questions were still going strong: thankfully, so were the answers. But enough is enough, so we adjourned, well, -ish, because the discussion kept going. It had made for an enjoyable if very different from usual evening, the first of a series no doubt.

A few loose ends need to be tied up. Getting dark at night implies the observable universe is finite. The teaspoon, well it turns out that if you count the number of water molecules in a teaspoon, and then calculate the distance to the edge of the observable universe, in kilometres, the two numbers are roughly the same.

Finally and especially thanks to Vicky and her friends for starting the Big Bang Club.   

My pet Phobia come to life

Most of us are afraid of something. For many it’s getting stuck in a lift, for others it’s flying or seeing nothing between them and a bull in an open field. Phobias they’re called and, courtesy of a pub quiz, I came across a really weird one recently – aibohphobia. I’ll tell you what that’s a fear of later.

My own, or one of them anyway, is ornithophobia: fear of birds.

Walking through pigeon infested squares makes my flesh creep, and they seem to know and make an effort to take off close to me and “buzz” my head as they do so.

I used to dread as a child being taken to neighbours’, relatives’ or friends’ houses where there was a budgerigar, because usually the party piece was to let the bird out of its cage to fly around the room. The trajectory was unpredictable except for one thing: it would make for me. “Oh you’re so lucky (s)he likes you and wants to sit on your head/shoulder/hand” would coo the owner. “For why”, thought I, “doubtless to empty themselves on me to distract me before pecking my eyes out, how is that lucky?”

Lucky is winning the lottery; lucky is finding that the person you fancy fancies you back; lucky is being taken to a new a restaurant and discovering that your favourite meal is their speciality. Lucky is definitely not being cooped up in a confined space with a feathered, incontinent, flying dinosaur descendant.

Brown pigeons like to sit on the rail of our small balcony where clothes are dried and aired. To keep unwanted little visitors out, we have what my wife calls “strainers”, fine mesh sliding doors which are a barrier to mosquitos, flies, wasps and, of course in my eyes the most important, small birds. Like all Beirut flats we have a second, bigger, swishier, more imposing balcony adjoining the living area. We’ve enclosed it with windows and put in some furniture to make a second dining and sitting room.

A few days ago, I was sitting where I am now, at my laptop, typing. I could hear pigeon calls. I’m used to the sound the brown pigeons make and don’t believe my pulse rate is severely challenged any more by it, thanks to those strainers. However, this time, the calls seemed louder than normal and coming from a different direction.

Then I saw it, a pigeon sitting on one of the chairs on the big balcony, calling to a friend who flew in while I watched. One of the windows had been left open. My throat dried up, I could taste bile and my breathing rate went up. That’s it; my worst nightmare come true, birds – plural – in the house. Memories of Hitchcock’s masterpiece of horror – the Birds – came into my mind. Then a horrible thought struck me. What about the connecting doors? Were they open? Was the flat vulnerable to further invasion? Screwing up what courage I could, I crept through and shut the connecting doors before further disaster could strike, having dared myself to get from the balcony items that flying things could knock over and break. I still do not know how I walked into that space with nothing between me and them.

Fine, damage limited, but how to get rid of them and close the offending open window to prevent further incursions. Of course, the classic Lebanese solution – get someone else to do it.

I rang our concierge, mercifully a country man, who strode onto the balcony, chased each bird in turn, captured it in his hands and threw it out of the open window to fly away unhurt. This left a mass of feathers on the floor, but I can deal with those once disconnected from their owners. We shut the window and tried all the others. Money and coke (the Pepsi variety, careful now) changed hands. And that was the end of that

.

Well, not quite, I now obsessively check each window every morning. We’re on the seventh floor, so I can’t even pretend it’s to prevent possible burglar entry.

I promised to tell you what aibohphobia is. Look carefully and see if you see a clue in the word. Yes, you’ve guessed it, a fear of palindromes. I wish I had that one instead, there really is no possibility I can see of being invaded by palindromes through an open window.