What goes up...

Sietske has a post up about the way things are celebrated in Lebanon: with fireworks. Beautiful fireworks, and dangerous gunfire: emptying one’s Kalashnikov (or recently: RPG) straight up into the air to celebrate (re-)election of one’s favorite politician is considered quite acceptable behavior by many. It’s one of those habits that’s amusing as long as you don’t think about the consequences, because as Sietske says: what goes up, must come down, and a bullet coming at you vertically is no less lethal than a bullet flying horizontally.

Walid tells me the story of the first time Nabih Berri was elected Speaker of Parliament, in the early years after the civil war. Celebratory gunfire erupted in the neighborhood of his school. They were playing in the recreational area during the break when suddenly a boy fell to the floor, blood all over the place. He was rushed to the hospital and the bully of the class was punished because ‘he must have hit him with something sharp’. As it turned out later, a bullet coming down had entered the boy’s body close to his neck and had ended up close to his heart.

A friend of mine told me a similar story. When the civil war was over, she and her sister went out to celebrate. So did many people – with their weapons. The sister was hit by a ‘celebratory bullet’ in her lower back and brought to the hospital; she’s still in a wheelchair.

The most famous of these tragic stories is from a wedding in the Beqaa: when the newly married couple drove off in a convertible, their friends and family were shooting in the air to celebrate. One of the bullets came down and hit the bride; she died on the spot.

I heard this last story so many times I don’t know if it’s true; but it shocks me that these incidents are not more widely reported. If there is fighting, every killed and wounded is counted; but when it’s to celebrate, we hardly ever hear of all those things that go wrong. We may pretend it’s a fun game to guess the difference between the sound of firecrackers and Kalashnikov, but maybe Maya Zankoul’s rage is more appropriate. Not sure about her solution, though…

A whole other electricity problem

One of the most complicated things in Lebanese daily life is paying the electricity bill. That is, if you want to do everything like a good citizen is supposed to do. First, you have to convince Electricité du Liban of giving you electricity. This can be quite costly if, like in our house, the previous tenant of the apartment has not paid their bills for over a year and has left the country with an outstanding debt of about $300 with EDL. You will be given three options: either you pay her outstanding debt in full and they will resume delivering electricity to your place, or you pay a fixed sum which happens to be around $250 dollars with the same result, or you buy a new energy meter for about $250 which you install in the meter box of your building and leave the debt for the tenant after you.

Once this inevitable payment is made, you go to another counter to tell them how many Amperes you want (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 – they can tell you exactly how much you need if you tell them how many appliances you have. The friendly employee smiled broadly when he announced we could even run ‘another A/C!’ on what we chose). You make the rounds past various other counters and offices, get some stamps, signatures and more stamps, pay some more, and then just like that – you have electricity in your house.

And that’s where the real fun starts. Because then, every month, a guy will come by to pick up your payment. He will come during the day, so usually there won’t be anybody home but the cats, so he leaves a little green note with the fact that he was there, found no one, when he will come again, and how much you owe him. (For us, this is usually around $15, or $25 in really hot and really cold months). There used to be an indecipherable name and number scribbled in the corner of the note, but now he has upgraded to a stamp so that you can actually read it and call him.

Which you will do, because the proposed date to pass by falls in the same category as the first one: a working day between 9 and 6 when no one is home. He then says he will pass by at a time you agree on, but you both forget that that’s when the regular powercut is scheduled, so rather than walking all the stairs to the 8th floor where you are waiting, he decides to skip your house and wait for you to call again.

You call him again to ask why he didn’t show up as promised, and hear that he will pass by in a few hours when the electricity comes back. He will ask you to leave the money (exact change, please) with the janitor of the building. This means you have to be on friendly terms with the janitor, which can be assured by monthly payments equal to your entire electricity bill (you should also do this if you decide not to pay your electricity bill at all, because the janitor is the one with the key to the meter box of the building, and the one to turn your electricity back on after the electricity guy has turned it off due to default. But that's only for those of us who do not aspire to 'perfect citizen' status.).

If you are not on friendly terms with the janitor, there is nothing you can do other than to carry with you the amount due, including the little green note he left a few days before, and walk around in the neighborhood until you see the electricity guy passing by. If that happens (hopefully without a lot of phonecalls as to his exact whereabouts), you hand him the money through his car-window, he gives you back a little white slip of paper, and you will have paid your electricity bill for the month.

Congratulations.

And the winner is... (just a comparison)

Compare the ballot of the Dutch parliamentary elections (where each voter gets to choose ONE person):

…to the two ballots (different districts) for the Lebanese parliamentary elections – in the district of the left ballot, voters choose five people, in the district of the right, they choose TEN.

libanees-stembiljet

This is not a giant hand - the ballots are really this small. I guess this is the first time the Lebanese win the trophy for efficiency and environment-friendliness...

Electoral Observations

The polling stations closed just minutes ago, and the results probably won’t be in for another day (can you imagine counting 2.5 million votes by hand?), but so far it has been an interesting day and I would like to share some of my observations with you: - Yesterday on TV a reporter was asking some people in Jdeideh (North of Beirut/Metn) who they were going to vote for. “I’m 71 and I’ve never voted in my life,” said one guy, “and I’m surely not going to start voting now!” Most others said they would vote for ‘the one who is best for the country.’ Nobody actually named a candidate. One man said “I don’t know, I have to ask my son who we’re voting for this time.”

Business is business: On Place Sassine, flags of competing Christian parties are sold by one vendor.

- Two days ago we were in Laqlouq, in the mountains North of Beirut, where we entered a restaurant full of army and police smoking arguileh and drinking araq. They were sent to the village to guard the electoral process, and were now looking for places to eat and sleep (all 30 of them) until Election Day.

- All voters in Lebanon have to dip their thumb in ink after they have voted, except the President of the Republic. He walked out with perfectly clean hands.

Electoral posters of the opposition and independent in Beirut (third district).

- When you have to cast your vote at a polling station in a district that is very popular amongst the party you don’t like, you’d better bring your own ballot (or remember all the names in their correct spelling): my mother in law did not find a single distributer of the list she wanted to vote for in the entire neighborhood of her polling station, and we had to drive over to the office of one of her favorite parties to get the correct list. When we asked them why they weren’t distributing lists at her location, they said: "Are you kidding? Have you seen the COLOR of that neighborhood? No way can we distribute anything there!"

- When an entirely veiled woman (and I mean entirely, head to toe including the face and the hands) got to the voting station, the policeman at the door asked for her ID, checked the picture, looked at her veiled face and let her pass. I don’t know how he knew it was actually the person on the ID.

- Speaking of entirely veiled: would this woman be required to take off her gloves to dip her finger in ink?

An Electoral Bureau: a place for (in this case) Hariri supporters to gather.

- While we were waiting outside the polling station, a group of 4 ‘observers’ of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections walked up. Two of them, Lebanese girls, went inside the station, while the other two, foreigners, waited outside. A member of the most prevalent political party walked up to the policeman guarding the entrance with bags of waterbottles that he wanted to distribute inside. The policeman stopped him, but the man argued a bit, then took him aside, handed him some papers (we couldn’t see what they were) and was let in the station with his water. The observers looked on, but obviously did not speak Arabic, so they had no idea what happened. I wonder what the report will say. Something happened. It looked fishy, maybe?

Supporters of Hariri expressing their excitement across the neighborhood.

Daar gaan we dan!

Aanstaande zondag zijn de parlementsverkiezingen hier in Libanon. We worden al wekenlang doodgegooid met verkiezingsposters van elke partij, de één nog ‘creatiever’ dan de andere. Partij-programma’s zijn er nauwelijks, het gaat er alleen om iedereen te laten geloven dat jij ‘goed’ bent, dus de ander ‘fout’ – of alleen dat de ander ‘fout’ is, want dat jij goed bent staat buiten kijf. Het lijkt op dit moment een nek-aan-nek race te gaan worden: in de peilingen staan ‘overheid’ en ‘oppositie’ ieder op ongeveer 65 zetels. Iedereen moet stemmen in het district waar hij of zij geregistreerd staat, wat voor velen betekent dat ze terug moeten naar het geboortedorp van hun vader (of hun man), waar ze soms nauwelijks een idee hebben wie de kandidaten zijn.

Kandidaten kunnen zich maar in één district verkiesbaar stellen, en elk district heeft een bepaalde hoeveelheid zetels te kiezen (die dan weer onderverdeeld zijn in verschillende religieuze stromingen). Zo moet Walid bijvoorbeeld stemmen in het Derde district van Beirut, en hij moet 5 Sunnieten aankruisen op de lijst, 1 Druze, 1 ‘minderheid’, 1 Sji’iet, en 1 Grieks-Orthodox en 1 Evangelisch Christen. Hij kiest dus in totaal 10 mensen.

Het leuke is dat je je eigen stembiljet mee mag brengen. Dit is natuurlijk heerlijk fraude-gevoelig, en er staan dan ook mensen van elke partij voor het stembureau om je een voorgedrukte lijst met al hun kandidaten in handen te drukken. Of, als het eruit ziet dat je toch voor de tegenpartij gaat stemmen, de lijst me kandidaten van de tegenpartij waartussen de meest kansrijke van de eigen partij verstopt is, zodat de onoplettende kiezer die de hele lijst aankruist per ongeluk ook hun kandidaat het parlement in stemt.

Er zijn ook andere manieren om aan stemmen te komen: in sommige districten is de competitie moordend en is elke stem geld waard. Er zijn zo’n 20.000 Libanezen (dat is 700 vliegtuigen vol) uit het buitenland overgevlogen om deel te nemen aan de verkiezingen – en de meesten daarvan hebben niet voor hun eigen ticket hoeven betalen. Een vriend uit Saida (zuidelijk Libanon) zegt dat hij op Saniora (de huidige premier) gaat stemmen, omdat die het ticket van zijn broer uit Canada betaald heeft. Een andere vriend die graag oppositie wil stemmen maar in geldnood zit, zegt dat een paar honderd dollar hem daar wel vanaf kan brengen: dan gooit hij een wit papier in de stembus, of een mooie tekening.

Het belooft in ieder geval een spannende strijd te worden, en een overwinning van de ene of de andere partij zal ongetwijfeld gepaard gaan met een hele hoop geweerschoten – in de lucht van vreugde of op elkaar gericht van frustratie. We hebben in elk geval van zaterdag ochtend tot waarschijnlijk maandagavond (afhankelijk van wanneer alle stemmen geteld zijn) een curfew opgelegd gekregen, en samenscholen is verboden. Mijn lerares Arabisch raadde me aan een stapel boeken en films en een grote hoeveelheid junkfood in huis te halen om de dagen door te komen. Dat zullen we maar doen dan.