Hurting Yourself in Lebanon

Yesterday over coffee, when a friend described how she fallen on cockroaches on her way to the café, it struck me how many peculiar ways there are to hurt yourself in Lebanon.

For my friend it happened on one of the steep streets in Clemenceau. As she picked her way carefully down the sidewalk she came across a patch of dark objects scattered over the concrete. Normally a wearer of eyeglasses, she had only non-prescription sunglasses on at the time and mistook the spots for small fruits fallen from an overhanging tree. She took care not to step directly on any of them but nonetheless suddenly found her foot coming down on something which rolled, and she fell to her knees. From her position near the ground, she now saw that the fruits were moving, and that they weren’t so much fruits as cockroaches. They covered the sidewalk, skittering about in their peculiarly revolting fashion, and the sight enabled my friend to leap rather youthfully back to her feet and disappear around a bend in the road before she had taken in what had happened.

And just this morning, when Dude got his finger stuck in one of the decorative holes cut into the backs of our kitchen chairs, I was reminded of the time he got his head lodged between the stone balusters of a balcony. That was when he was just five and we were living in one of the poorly planned but over-sized apartments so cherished by the Lebanese. The ‘salon’ of this apartment was the classic bowling alley design, meant for hosting guests or local track meets, and we hardly ever went in there. One day Dude, carried along by some private whim, went out through the salon to its balcony and put his head through the curved balusters. Once through it wouldn’t come out again and he had to wait there until we noticed him missing. His head didn’t come out easily, as I recall, and involved a good deal of pulling, vegetable oil and debate as to whether or not ears could be sewn back on again, but in the end we got it out and he retired to his bedroom with red, swollen ears for a evening of quiet reflection.

This spring, when we were still in our old apartment, M and Dude and I left the house to go watch Noonie in a play at the school one evening. When we came out of our building we found the back glass of our car completely shattered but still in place, with a bullet hole in the middle of it. So recently had it happened that the glass was still making crackling, settling sounds. A lady sitting on a nearby first-floor balcony called out to us that she had heard gunshots just a few minutes before. As it turned out, that was all we were to ever learn about it. M secured the glass with many criss-crosses of Gorilla tape and we went off to watch the play. 

Another time, during one of those nights of fighting in our neighbourhood I talked about in a previous blog, Dude’s friend who lives not far from us was woken by a bullet coming through the window and shattering his computer screen.

My cleaning lady, who comes once a week to do the floors and bathrooms, has been trying to kill me for some months now but doesn’t realise it yet. Her favourite weapon is a puddle of water left on the tiles while she’s finishing washing one room and about to start another. I’ve asked her repeatedly to cease this perilous practice and use a mop but she cannot. For a Lebanese woman like her, the only proper way to clean a floor is to tip a pail of water onto it and push that water around with a giant squeegee before directing it all down a drain set into the tiles.

My ancient Croc sandals are partly to blame. They’re old and ugly and I should retire them but can’t find anything else so spongy and comfortable to wear on stone flooring. I’ve bought several newer models but they don’t fit as comfortably as the old ones. Unfortunately, old Crocs are absolutely deadly on smooth, wet surfaces. As soon as that bumpy tread is worn off the bottom, you really should toss them out because if you hit a patch of water on a slippery surface you may end up with the back of your head caved in all the way to your nose. I have already sustained permanent brain damage and the reason I know this is I have fallen twice in my old Crocs but am too stupid to stop wearing them.

The first fall wasn’t too bad because my head remained upright that time. It didn’t happen in Lebanon, which might at first seem to render it ineligible for inclusion in this blog post, but it was a Lebanese accident all the same. It was in Newfoundland one summer when I barrelled through the front door of our cottage, unaware that my mother-in-law had just washed the floor with a large quantity of water (you see, this is why it counts as a Lebanese accident, because Canadians don’t clean floors that way). My leading leg shot straight out in front of me, the other rocketed backwards, and if anybody tries to tell you that an out-of-shape forty-year-old can’t do the splits, you can tell them they are wrong.

You already know that it was Selma’s floor cleaning that got me the second time. But that time was much, much worse. First of all, I wasn’t in Canada with its wooden houses and forgiving, force-absorbing floors. This time I was in Lebanon and I went over backwards, head first. My skull struck the ceramic tiles with such force I distinctly remember thinking it could be curtains for me. But I soon realised that I had to be conscious to be able to form such a thought and, immediately cheering, began to focus on how I would kill Selma as soon as I was back on my feet. She was in the same room when it happened and flapped over, hyperventilating with well-meaning, brainless concern, genuinely sorry and fully prepared to leave more water puddled on the floor even before she went home that day.

After some days with a sore head I made a full recovery, but privately I was disappointed not to have undergone any interesting personality changes. I thought such a knock on the head would cause me to start cursing uncontrollably in public, for instance (but it turned out that I did so only at home, and then only in regards to Selma). Similarly, I wondered if some untapped cerebral synapses had been shaken into alertness which would allow me to effortlessly solve Rubik’s Cube, thirty years after stamping one to bits on my bedroom floor. (Not only was I unable to solve it, I could no longer get even part-way along, as I had used to do.)

Selma didn’t learn her lesson about leaving water puddled on the floor, nor I about worn-out Crocs. I do wear one of my new pairs when she is here now, though. They aren’t as comfortable as the old ones but they grip the floor a whole lot better.

New Crocs won’t protect you from poisoning, however, and, worryingly, I don’t have any idea of what could. When at home I am never far from my teacup. I have used the same set of teacups for years. They’re vividly floral and unmistakable. The point is, Selma knows I sip tea continuously throughout the day. She’s watched me do it one afternoon a week for two years. She knows which cups I use.

When she was here cleaning last week she took it upon herself, with no word to me, to remove the tea stains from my cup. The problem was, it was the cup I was currently using. I left it sitting on the kitchen counter while I went to fold some laundry and when I came back it was more or less where I had left it, but full to the brim with slightly-tinted water. That was perfectly normal. I always fill it up with water on top of the bit of tea left in the bottom because it makes the water taste better. I did note that I hadn’t filled it up to the brim with water before going off to fold my laundry but, alas, that thought didn’t detain me. I assumed that Selma, in pouring out the last of the water from one of the 5-gallon bottles, had looked for somewhere to put the last drops and so topped up my cup.

I guess you can see where this is going. The cup wasn’t filled with water but with bleach solution. Bizarrely, I didn’t smell it. Maybe it was because the air in the kitchen was already choked with the smell of Selma’s beloved Dettol or maybe I’m missing some olfactory connections as a result of the fall on the tiles. I don’t know but I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, not even my own imminent death. I just scooped the cup up for a quick sip on my way past and the next thing I knew I was spitting into the sink and splashing handfuls of water into my mouth, swishing and spitting again, as fast as I could.

Except for an hour of mild burning sensation in my mouth, I emerged from that attempt on my life unscathed. Certainly it wasn’t easy to overcome the urge to push Selma off the balcony, but I was getting used to having to deal with such feelings.

Last year I was cleaning the floor of a built-in closet in our bedroom when the most ridiculous of my situations arose. The closet was a strangely-shaped thing, built into a cleft in the wall, and rather deep. M’s instructions to the carpenter at the time of the commission had been to put only a very thin doorsill on the floor between the inside of the closet and the outside, but the man who would later become known in our house as The Idiot instead built a huge, step-like sill, six inches high and three or four wide. It was annoying but, compared to the mistakes being made elsewhere around the apartment, something we decided we could live with.

For cleaning I had removed the big tote bins I kept in the bottom of the closet, as well as the laundry hamper and M’s travel bag, and then stepped inside with a wet rag. The shelves of the closet were deep, so the spaces under the lowest shelves at the back of the closet were very hard to reach. I had to get down nearly onto my face to run the rag around at the very back and that’s when trouble struck. When I tried to extract myself from beneath the shelf I found that I had somehow become wedged, with my legs against the stupid giant doorsill and my back jammed up against the underside of the shelf.

I think I might have panicked a little. Afterwards, over a calming cup of tea, I reflected that I could probably have eased my way out comfortably if I’d just been patient and wriggled myself one way and then another. I know that’s what M would have done. Probably he would have calculated the angle between his back and the shelf and done a quick bit of math involving Newtons and counter forces. But not me. It was dark and stuffy in there, and I was in as undignified a position as a woman who once sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door could find herself in. As soon as it became evident that I had tried all possible directions and couldn’t move in any of them, any chance of reasoning my way out of the closet fled. I began to push with my legs as hard as I could. One of the them found a bit of  an opening at the top of the sill so I rammed it as hard as I could. The leg went over, but at great cost, and I more or less mangled it in my desperate bid for freedom.

These are just some of the many strange ways in which you can come to harm in Lebanon. There are many more. I didn’t talk about chunks of concrete falling off buildings and crashing to the sidewalk at your feet, or the “slow motion hit-and-run”, whereby you bounce off the bonnet of a car travelling at low speed while you are trying to cross a busy, traffic-clogged road. Nor did I mention the absence of safety tape or barricades around holes in the ground, some of them immense. You have to be on your toes to make it here. I don’t really, as you can see.

Lebanese People Do Use Toilet Paper

The first time I saw that someone had been led to this blog by entering the search terms “do Lebanese use toilet paper” I chuckled. It’s a perfectly legitimate question, of course, but I was surprised to find that it had preyed on someone’s mind to the point that they took to the internet in search of answers. (I was equally surprised that Google supplied my blog address in the search results but perhaps I shouldn’t have been, all things considered.)

The second time those same search terms cropped up in my blog I thought, “Huh, what do you know, there it is again”.

When I saw them for the third time (but in a slightly more focused form – “do Lebanese men use toilet paper”) I thought, “Okay, either a whole bunch of people really need to know the answer to this or there is one person trying week after week to put an end to the question that is consuming him body and soul.”

I don’t actually know how many times these search terms have led some poor, disappointed sap to my blog. It might be many. I don’t look at the Search Keywords list in my traffic sources page very often because it depresses me. I always see that people have come to my blog after Googling such terms as " lice from haircut" or "showed up for party on wrong day" and I know that they will be as disappointed to reach my blog as I am to learn that they didn’t mean to come here. (Just between you and me, what exactly are people hoping to discover when they search for "showed up for party on wrong day"?) In the beginning I used to scan the list eagerly, hoping to see that people were finding me by typing in things like “embittered sarcastic but deep down good-hearted expat living in Lebanon blog” but no one ever did. I didn’t even see terms like “expat Lebanon”. It was, and remains, the lice, wrong party day or toilet paper.

Well, I can’t answer the lice question with any authority and I don’t know what to tell you people who show up to parties on the wrong day. (Try harder next time? I show up on the wrong day myself sometimes and I think it makes me a bit of a clod, frankly.) But I can answer the question of whether or not Lebanese use toilet paper.

They do use it, but they’re not totally dependant on it the way we Canadians are because they use water to do the cleaning. The toilet paper is mainly for drying. Most toilets in Lebanon have a sprayer hose rigged up at the side and when you’ve done your business you turn the sprayer onto your relevant bits. Now, it’s not as easy as it sounds because the holes on the sprayer head are pretty small and the water comes out with quite a bit of force. You can soak your pants, half the room and most of your shirt if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Lebanese people also use bidets, but these are found only in homes, not in public bathrooms. The old kind of bidets that sprayed straight up from the bottom were a far superior design, in my opinion, to the new ones which have a faucet at the back. What is this supposed to do? Are we meant to clean our bum cheeks? I don’t know about the majority of people but when I sit down on a bidet the bit I want to clean is on the bottom, not around at the back like some kind of birdhouse.

Some people use soap during the washing process, some don’t. If your water pressure is high you don’t really need soap, though you don’t want the jet too strong. If you’ve ever used an old hose sprayer which has bad calcium build-up and is down to about four open holes you will have experienced what I like to call “the needles”, a vivid reminder that water can cut concrete. 

Men and women both use the above washing methods and they both use toilet paper to dry with (some have little personal towels hung by the bidet in their own homes). When you remember that you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet in most buildings in Lebanon you will readily appreciate the bonus of having relatively clean toilet paper filling the wastebasket.

It’s hard to know what’s too little information on any subject and what is too much, but I sense that this time you might have been happy with less. Most of you will not have relished such toileting details – I doubt you’ve even read as far as this -- but hopefully you’ll understand that I had to help that person out there who can’t sleep at night for wondering.

You know what’s going to happen now that I’ve written this post, of course. My blog was already coming up in Google searches for Lebanese toilet paper concerns and now I will have reinforced that relevance, probably raising it to some kind of position of prominence on the results list. On the other hand, I have answered the  question so at least it will no longer be a fruitless visit to my blog for those seeking these toilet paper truths. Well, I’m here to serve. Expat ear wax queries, concern about sebum production in the Lebanese population, whatever it is just go ahead and ask me.

It's Actually Somebody's Blog

I can’t believe it. I’m stunned. Just five minutes ago, as I was reading over yesterday’s post to check for spelling mistakes I may have overlooked, I made a spur of the moment Google search for ‘happy mommy blog’ just to see what would come up. Frankly, I didn’t expect much.

Well, you could knock me over with a pinch of dandelion fluff. There is a blog out there actually titled Happy Mommy and it's not of the facetious variety. 

I realise now that this is probably something I should have done yesterday, before I wrote my sarcasm-drenched spiel, but it simply hadn’t occurred to me that someone might actually call their blog Happy Mommy and that such a person would be Canadian with two young sons (just adding a third, according to her blog). I mean, what are the odds?

I only spent a few moments flipping through her pages because, as I’m sure you will have deduced from yesterday’s post, it’s painful for me to read through the minutiae of someone’s mothering and homemaking (unless that woman’s name is Erma Bombeck) but I saw enough to report that this Happy Mommy had lots of photos of her boys and recipes for healthy dinners. I tell you, my jaw was just about touching the keyboard as I looked over the site.

So there it is. I feel bad because I don’t want to hurt the real Happy Mommy’s feelings (she seems like a very nice person with not so much as a hint of my Jessica’s ridiculous smugness) but not so bad that I’m going to remove yesterday’s post in the off chance that it might offend someone. Over the years I have been led unwittingly to more happy homemaker blogs than you could shake a stick at and I always knew the day would come when, trying to find out how to clean leather or prepare artichokes,  I would find myself on a happy homemaker’s page showing eighteen photos of her toddlers dressed up for their first Halloween and it would just be eighteen photos too many.

Look, I know it’s not the fault of the happy mommies. They have as much right to clog up the ether with their empty musings as I have with mine, and no one is forcing me to visit their sites. I guess I just wish there was a super quick and easy way – like a one-click, pop-up box -- to give a banality rating for any blog you visit, the results of which Google would display beside the sites’ names when they came up in searches. That way you could narrow it down a bit, save yourself some time. 

I Could Make My Own Happy Mommy Blog

            Lately I don’t feel like writing about Lebanon. I don’t even want to remember that I’m here. But I like writing and don’t want to see this blog crust over completely from disuse. Too bad I can’t find joy in baking cupcakes and taking photos of them and then posting all about it on a blog called “Happy, Perfect Mommy’s Happy, Perfect Life”.

            Ah, yes, I can see it. The homepage of this blog would show my husband (who would be called Matt, or maybe Peter), our two apple-cheeked toddlers and myself all hugging each other on a green lawn in front of our home with Errol, our yellow Labrador, grinning at our feet.

            I wouldn’t overlook the little introductory blurb beside the ecstatically happy family photo. It would say: My name is Jessica and I am a Christian and a mother to two beautiful boys. My husband Matt (or Peter) is almost as perfect as I am. He teaches grade five at our local school and still has all his hair. We live in a town that isn’t too big or too small and where neighbours still look out for each other (we even have a white picket fence around our back yard! lol). My greatest pride in life is being the best mommy I can be to our boys and recording every precious moment of their childhood in my scrapbooks. In this blog you will find thousands and thousands of photos of my scrapbooks and of delicious, nutritious meals I’ve prepared and funny stories about our little family (my favourite is one in which Matt gets a flat tire on the way to bible study and in changing the tire gets some grease on his shirt and then later at bible study everyone chides him for showing up in dirty clothes ha ha ha oh, you had to have been there, it was so funny!)

            In one photo you would see me standing in a bikini two weeks after delivering my second son and with the aid of a magnifying glass detect a tiny bulge just above my bikini bottoms. Here I would have the caption: OMG! I would never have posted this if I’d noticed that huge roll of blubber around my middle! Well, thanks to boot camp I was able to shed all my “baby weight” two days after this photo was taken and get right back to running sixteen miles a day (BTW I’ve already got Jayden up to two miles a day and have promised Dylan that he can start coming out with us on his second birthday).

            I would fill pages with photos of my knitting projects, and there would be dozens of comments from dedicated readers of my blog (many of them perfect strangers!) who would say kind things or ask me for patterns. Many more pages would show our family sitting around the supper table, or blowing out birthday candles while a roomful of friends and relatives cheered and didn’t look at their watches. There would be a shot (possibly my favourite) of Matt wearing a green fisherman’s sweater I had knitted – one of my earliest successes. He would be chopping wood behind the house on a crisp October day, pausing just long enough to look over his shoulder and smile tenderly at me while I snapped the photo.

            My blog would have a huge following. Not a single male would feature amongst my followers but with women it would be a hit. Entering my blog site would be, for them, like stepping into the set of a Hollywood sit-com, where the world is a cosy living room and things always end well. They would never have to know about Matt’s affair with the school janitor or Errol’s habit of biting my mother-in-law.  I would die before letting them guess at the pure evil that was my older son or find out that we’d never been able to get another babysitter after he teased the last one by dashing out into the street into oncoming traffic (the tractor-trailer passed right over top of him, not harming a hair on his head. GOD WILL PROTECT US). I would see that it never got out that I hate cats and turn the hose on any I find taking dumps in my flowerbed. I could manage to keep anyone from finding out our true identity by dropping misleading hints about which province we lived in and lying about our names (which would actually be Tammy and Raul). My followers would never know that Matt (Raul) hated my cooking and would wait until after I went to bed to get out the Doritos and Captain Morgan.

            You know, I find myself suddenly warming to Jessica, now that I know she’s actually Tammy (who, by the way, suffers from bulimia and has never run farther than from her car to the door of a Dunkin’ Donuts in her life). Raul sounds more interesting too, what with the Doritos and extramarital affairs, and as for the kids, well, I could learn to respect a kid with Jayden’s resourcefulness. Maybe I should make a blog about this family. They’re really starting to intrigue me.

Been Away Too Long

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Driving in Beirut

            Instructions: attach a thick strip of rubber all the way around your car at thigh height, buckle your seat belt, and try not to worry.

            That’s all you really need to know about driving in Beirut. When you first come here and see the way they drive you may be tempted to buy a Brinks armoured van for the family car or, as an even more attractive alternative, to simply stay at home until it’s time to leave the country.

            “I can’t possibly go out there,” you may whimper, looking at a traffic roundabout where the world’s longest-running game of chicken is being played out under the insouciant hands of Lebanese drivers. As you watch, the cars converge on the roundabout from four directions, each one rushing recklessly toward the vehicle-clogged epicenter as though alone on the road. To your disbelieving eyes, no car smashes into another. But how do they do it, when no one appears to yield to anyone else?

            Well, there is a sort of system, you just might not realize it at first. Before I tell you about it, however, I must stress that it is only a sort of system and that any motorist at any time may flout the rules.

            The system boils down to one word: bravado. In almost any situation, right of way is given to the boldest driver. At a roundabout, for example, the speed at which you approach the intersection indicates your willingness to pulverize anybody in your way, and the drivers already in the roundabout will note this. During the next few seconds they will make a further assessment of your manner, and based on that will make a decision either to apply their brakes and let you go in front of them, or, if you have shown hesitancy, to continue moving into your path, forcing you to hit your own brakes.

            It sounds like a ridiculous system and it assuredly is, but that is how it works. There are as many fender-benders as you would roughly guess, knowing what you know so far. The reason there aren’t many more serious accidents in Beirut is that there aren’t a lot of opportunities to drive at high speed. Nevertheless people do try their very best to crash into walls and plunge over the cliffs at Raouche and mow down pedestrians, but the crushing density of cars on the road limits their chances. Driving outside Beirut is another story and I’ve touched on that in other blog posts. I titled this post ‘Driving in Beirut’ for a good reason. Once you venture beyond the protective congestion of the city streets you enter another stratum altogether. I would never advise anyone setting out on Lebanon’s highways not to worry.

            The bravado system functions less well in the little one-way streets which make up most of the city’s road-miles. Because of the permanent scarcity of parking spots, there are always vehicles double-parked, leaving barely enough room for one car to go down the street. Since Lebanese drivers don’t trouble themselves about pesky one-way street rules too much, there are always cars going in both directions on these tiny roads. Two such cars meeting head-on can’t begin to get past one another unless they’re lucky enough to meet where an open driveway has left a gap in the line of parked cars. Then one driver can carefully inch into the gap, letting the other by. If there is no gap, one of the cars simply has to back up, either to the end of the street or to the closest gap. And who should be the one to back up? It ought to be the one without the legal right of way, but it isn’t always. Bravado features in these situations, too, and if someone is aggressive enough, a meeker driver might decide to backtrack even though he is in the right.

            I get behind the wheel myself now and again in Beirut but it’s generally just to sit there with the motor off while I make engine sounds and pretend I’m overtaking Fernando Alonso around the last turn at Monte Carlo. I’m kidding, I don’t do that. Not anymore, anyway. What I mean to say is that I do drive occasionally in Beirut and it’s the tiny streets that terrify me. I can rip along the main roads with a weird, adrenalin-fuelled kind of confidence, but I’m no good at judging how much space there is beyond the burly shoulders of our SUV so I’m worried about scratching it in narrow places. I have to rely on the helpfulness of the men who stand around shop fronts at all hours of the day on every street in Beirut. They always step over to signal me through a tricky spot and never laugh at my ineptitude.

            M is an expert at gauging how much clearance he has on either side of the car at any time. Many years ago in Calgary, when I’d only known him a short time, we were driving in Kensington and decided to take a short-cut through a back alley. It is an old part of the city and the alley was quite narrow, with vehicles and rubbish bins dotted along the sides. M shot through that alley at about thirty miles an hour with no more than an inch or two to spare on either side of the car, but he didn't do it to show off. Indeed, he didn’t seem to realize that there was anything remarkable in it. He drove as he always did, with one hand lightly cupping the wheel, elbow on the armrest. He might have been steering the May Queen float down Main Street in the annual Sundre parade.

            The first time I came to Lebanon I quickly saw that most young people drove more or less the same way M did. My father-in-law was a steadier sort though, and I felt relatively safe when he drove me around. Their family car at the time was a skin-pink Mercedes which they called The Sow. It was, I think, only my second day in the country when M’s parents decided to take me on a little driving tour of Beirut in The Sow. 

            At some point in the afternoon M’s dad, for reasons best known to himself, left the main road and started climbing slowly up steep, tiny streets towards the top of a hill. The street switch-backed and seemed to grow narrower with each turn. Since the traffic was two-way I couldn’t see how the cars could keep managing to get by one another if the road continued to shrink. It did, and they didn’t.

            The moment came when the road became so narrow that drivers pulled their side mirrors in and inched past one another with shouts of guidance from bystanders. We, too, folded in The Sow’s side mirror and crept our way past cars going in the opposite direction, close enough to count their occupants' moles and slowly enough for me to feel like rolling down my window and saying, “It was nice to meet you, call me sometime,” when we finally nudged past them.

            Then one car didn’t get past. As they nosed with painful slowness past one another The Sow and the other vehicle made contact. A metallic groaning sound came up from our girl’s stricken flank but my father-in-law didn’t stop driving. He didn’t even change expression or turn his head to look at the other driver. Both drivers simply kept creeping forward while we, the passengers, stared wide-eyed into each others’ faces through two sets of window glass. The horrible grinding noise seemed to go on for a long time. Finally they managed to open an inch of room between the two cars and the sound abruptly stopped. I let out my breath in a huge sigh of relief but my father-in-law, if he felt any relief himself, revealed nothing. He simply kept going. The other car kept going, too. I watched the backs of the occupants’ heads as the car slowly moved away but no one turned around and soon they were lost from sight in the long line of cars. Nobody in our car commented on the incident then or at any time afterwards.

            Kassem is a skilled close-space driver, too, but for all that our car comes home with a new dent in it about once a week, so he’s certainly hitting something on a regular basis. His real Achilles’ heel seems to be the wide wheelbase of our car because he routinely overestimates the tire’s distance from curbs (which are of the sharp-edged design here) and bounces violently off them while travelling at speed, causing wheel and rim damage and hopefully nothing worse. If I am with him at such a time he’ll dart an anxious glance at me out of the corner of the eye as my head is thrown sideways and bobbles back to its upright position, and then go on driving wordlessly as if nothing has happened.

            What with one thing and another, you’ll appreciate that we don’t rush to the phone to make an appointment at the body shop every time our car gets a scratch. We let the gouges and dents accumulate for a while before sending the car in for a full facial. Last week I mentioned to M that I could see some rust starting in the deepest of the current scratches – a strange, clawed-out kind of gouge under the edge of the rear passenger door which Kassem couldn’t explain – so we called the garage and made an appointment.

            Yesterday morning the shop called to say the car was done and we dispatched Kassem to go pick it up. He brought the gloriously refurbished automobile back to the house and left straight away again with Dude, who needed to get to the skate park to meet a friend.

            A few hours later, As Kassem and Dude were on their way home and crossing a large intersection just a few blocks from our house, a young man on a moped carrying a delivery backpack from Roadster Diner collided with them.

            The young man wasn’t badly hurt. Apparently he had misjudged Kassem’s speed and thought he had time to cut in front of the car but, seeing at the last moment that he hadn’t, yanked on his brake and wrenched his handlebars so that he slid sideways into our front passenger door. It was enough of an impact for the end of his handlebar to leave a large dent in our car but the young man didn’t even drop his bike. Undoubtedly used to this sort of thing, he brushed himself off, got back on his moped and sped away. Somewhere, there were people waiting for their hamburgers and if he hurried he might still get a good tip.

           

             

Is Smog Giving Lebanese Women Breast Cancer?

            “Lebanese women get breast cancer ten years earlier than women in Western countries.”

            It was a statement to make me sit up in astonishment. I was sitting in my doctor’s office, having come to see him for my annual check-up.

            Dr. Honeydew (no, of course not) sat behind his desk in a spotless blue shirt and red tie. He had asked me if I would like to have a mammogram and I was bemused by the question, having expected that he would tell me if I needed one this year. Mammograms aren’t a barrel of laughs, as you may or may not know. Why would I go to all the trouble of making an appointment and driving to the hospital if didn’t need to? I could give my boobs the equivalent experience by going home and asking M to back the car over them.

             “I had one done last year,” I said. “Do you think I need another one this year?”

            That’s when he told me about the cancer rates here. “The average age of breast cancer patients here in Lebanon is ten years younger than in places like Canada. That is why I recommend an annual mammogram for my patients over forty years of age, but because you are Canadian I will recommend that you have one every two years until you are fifty.”

            “But those rates don’t make any sense,” I said. “What about the healthy diet here, the low rate of obesity?”

            “Ah, but Lebanese women smoke a lot,” he said. “In Canada people are ashamed to smoke. They try to stop. Here, they are proud to do it.”

            Since he said it wasn’t necessary I opted to skip the dough press until next year, but a part of me was thinking that breast cancer rates in Western countries are presumably based on environment and lifestyle, not genetics, and since I was living in Lebanon wouldn’t that make me prone to the Lebanese cancer rates?

            Dr. Honeydew’s words kept coming back to me in the days following my check-up. I didn’t exactly doubt them, but I did suspect them of being an exaggeration.

            Finally I had a look on the internet for confirmation and guess what? It’s true. Dr. Honeydew did not exaggerate.  

            I learned that the median age of breast cancer patients in Lebanon is 52 years, compared to 63 years for developed countries such as the US.

            Unfortunately, other than one or two cautiously speculative observations about the high incidence of smoking in Lebanon, none of the researchers had submitted any theories as to why the breast cancer rate is so high here.

            If I were to be instantly and magically endowed with a PhD in the relevant branch of medical research I’d get right to the bottom of this and the first place I’d start looking would be air pollution. If I haven’t said it before, the pollution is terrible here in Beirut. In the three years since we’ve been back living here it has, for me, grown to eclipse all other negative aspects about this city.  Driving down the road is dangerous here; worse are the prospects of a pedestrian. Sitting at home in front of your tv can be dangerous, on certain lively nights. But the most dangerous thing you might do in Beirut is breathe.

            Here are four non-scientific facts from my personal encounters with air pollution in Beirut:

            1. The smell of diesel and car exhaust is strong enough where we live to force me to keep the windows closed most of the time. I air out the apartment in the morning and when that’s done I close the windows tight again.

            2. The pollution leaves a sooty black film on anything left outside. I notice it most on our balcony. If I clean the balcony floor one day (with soap, hose and mop; so that you could eat off of it if you wished), the next day it will be dirty. If, when I’m hanging up laundry to dry, the sleeve of a white shirt brushes the floor of the balcony it will have a sooty-black smudge.

            3. Depending on how windy the day is, my line-dried laundry usually smells strongly of exhaust. I’ve taken to putting much of my washing in the dryer to avoid this.

            4. Last week when I washed the inside of my kitchen window I used a soapy sponge and a squeegee. As the water ran down over the white aluminum frame at the bottom of the window I saw that it was dark grey (and I washed this window about three months ago).

            You can find scientific papers discussing air pollution in Beirut on the internet but they’re long and confusing and often out of date. They all seem to conclude with weak, and, I have to say, stupid summaries in which they take a very long time to cautiously opine that the air is really quite polluted here and more of us ought to use bicycles (have these people ever tried to cycle around Beirut streets? You’d live longer if you took up Highland dancing in a Cambodian minefield).

            I don’t know why the authors of scientific papers are so afraid of speaking in plain English but I have waded through the sludge and selflessly – some might go so far as to say heroically -- plucked out one clear fact for you: particulate matter concentration fifteen years ago averaged 200 micrograms per cubic metre across Beirut. Currently it may run as high as 500 in the worst areas of the city. Compare that to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency limit of 12 as set out in their National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

            That’s a frightening difference even if you don’t have any idea what particulate pollutants are or how they hurt us. You probably know what happens to people who inhale asbestos dust; well, this is the same concept. I’ve read only a little about particulate matter but I do sincerely advise you to avoid pursuing knowledge in this area. Frankly, it’s terrifying. These are microscopic bits of solid or liquid matter suspended in the air and when we breathe them in they sail right past our nose hairs, through the sinuses and down into our lungs. They’re just so very small that our normal defences can’t catch them. If they’re small enough they may even pass through our lungs into our bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream they can reach any organ in the body. In addition to lung cancer and all manner of respiratory illnesses they harden arteries and stop hearts. Really tiny particles may even reach the brain and imbed themselves there, snuffing out precious circuits and mimicking Alzheimer’s disease.

            An increase in concentration of 10 mcg/m3 particulates in the air is associated with an increase of 1% in mortality rate. I don’t know if that relationship is a straight slope into which you can plug any figures, but if it is that means increased mortality here in Beirut is twenty to fifty percent higher than it would be if the air was clean.

            This is really, really bad. I won’t depress you further with information about other air-borne pollutants (particulates aren’t the only bad things in the air) or chronic bronchitis rates in this country. Rather, I will leave you with the image of Dr. Honeydew stepping ahead of me out of his office after the check-up and, going a few metres down the hall, holding a door open expectantly for me.

            The thing was, the door he held wasn’t the exit door. It wasn’t even in the direction of the exit door. Since we had definitely concluded our visit I didn’t understand what was happening.

            I stopped and looked from him to the door he held open and back up the opposite direction of the hall where I knew the real exit door to be.

            “Is this – what--?”

            “It’s the bathroom,” he said, and gestured for me to go inside.

            Well, it was uncanny. The hot chocolate I had drunk in Caribou before my appointment had filtered through and I really needed the toilet but how could Dr. Honeydew possibly know that?

            As I blinked in surprise and stepped past him into the bathroom, he smiled. “I saw during the ultrasound exam that your bladder was full.”

            Honeydew, I thought, you know too much.