Nearly 24 years ago, when my father died suddenly in Sierra Leone, my brother-in-law and I flew to the small and largely impoverished West African country to bring his body home. Our first stop was the government hospital, the best in the capital of Freetown, apparently.
It was a miserable, fetid place. I couldn’t see any nurses, let alone doctors and it was family members, as far as I could see, who were caring for their loved ones.
“I am glad you’re taking him back tonight,” said a weary, middle-aged British doctor who performed a very basic autopsy on my dad. “The refrigeration unit is on the blink. We couldn’t have kept him in good nick for much longer.”
This was back in 1990, a period of relative calm and prosperity for Sierra Leone before an 11-year civil war that shredded the country and the Lebanese community happily doing what the Lebanese do in Africa – mining, trading, building and generally infuriating the local community with whom it has lived for decades.
The ties between West and Central Africa and Lebanon are tightly woven into the Lebanese immigrant experience of the 20th century, and much of the remittances that are key to the Lebanese economy come out of Africa. There are villages in the Bekaa and south Lebanon that are built with African money and in some cases, judging by some of the designs, African spirit.
There are no accurate figures about just how many Lebanese ply their trade in West and Central Africa, but a friend of a friend, an academic at Cambridge, has written a book on the diaspora. He puts the number at anywhere between 150,000 to 300,000 (narrowing down this yawning margin is hampered by the fact that many have what he calls “often unconventional citizenship and residency status”), while according to a report in the Lebanese media there are 12,000 in Sierra Leone, 6,500 in Liberia and 3,500 in Guinea.
Which, in case you were wondering where I was going with this, brings me to my point. The Lebanese are a curious contradiction. They are scrupulously clean – they view most Europeans as dirty – and are notorious hypochondriacs, ready to break out the antibiotic armoury at the first sign of a sniffle. But with the world in an Ebola frenzy, no one in the country seems to be overly troubled by the fact that hundreds of Lebanese fly into Beirut from West Africa every day, albeit mostly in transit.
On August 1, when the death toll stood at 750, the health minister Wael Abou Faour casually reassured us that he had asked airlines bringing people from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia to inform Lebanese authorities about anyone displaying “suspicious” symptoms. Since then, we haven’t really heard much from the state.
A friend in Beirut who has been following the spread of the virus tells me that as far as he can tell “the ministry of health has done little to allay public fears. Surveillance is sketchy and there are no figures of the movement of Lebanese in West Africa”.
I can’t help but feel that Lebanon will take another battering in the face of the Ebola crisis. Even if the virus does not make its way across our border (and it surely must), there will be considerable pressure on the expatriate community in the affected countries. Businesses will close, families will come home (many already have) and remittances will dwindle.
I hope I’m wrong. Lebanon has suffered four years of economic decline, which has made real GDP growth drop almost 7 percentage points to just 2 per cent annually, according to the IMF. Regional instability, unemployment, national security concerns, fragile state institutions and a colossal public deficit with rising government spending to cope with 1.5 million Syrian refugees have all played their part in the deterioration. Can we really bear another burden?
A Lebanese friend in Ghana, a country that has so far avoided the outbreak but that nevertheless sits on the rim of the epidemic’s cauldron, admits she and the rest of the community feel like sitting ducks even if their fears are tempered by an element of black humour. “The running joke here is that we either go back to Lebanon and get blown up by a car bomb or stay here and catch Ebola,” she says.
Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton
Follow The National's Business section on Twitter