Help! De Dokter Schrijft Voor

Elk land kent zo zijn eigen gewoontes en gebruiken als het gaat om de behandeling van veel-voorkomende ziektes en mankementen. In Libanon roept men direct ‘vitamine C!’ bij een niesbui, serveert men 7 up bij maag- en darmklachten, en is panadol de aanrader voor zo ongeveer alle andere kwalen. Mochten bovenstaande middelen onverhoopt niet het juiste effect bereiken, dan is een bezoekje aan de dokter zo gemaakt. (De ratio dokters : inwoners is in Libanon zó hoog, dat velen van hen achter de apothekersbalie staan en de medicijnen op recept direct aan je meegeven.) De eerste keer dat ik hier in Beirut naar de dokter ging was in de zomer van 2006. Ik had een vreemde plek onder mijn arm en toen die na anderhalve week maar niet weg bleek te gaan, ging ik ermee langs bij de ‘familie-arts’ in het ziekenhuis van de Amerikaanse Universiteit van Beirut. De arts was verbaasd dat ik er zolang mee had rondgelopen. ‘Is het iets ernstigs?’ vroeg ik hem enigzins geschrokken. Nee, dat was het absoluut niet, maar voor de zekerheid kreeg ik toch maar een antibiotica-kuur voorgeschreven. Op mijn vraag of dat wel echt nodig was, lachte hij hartelijk en zei me dat ik ook wel wat kruiden mocht plukken uit zijn tuin om een magisch drankje mee te koken… Het ging erom dat het zo sneller wegging – zo zou het geen week, maar slechts 4 dagen duren! Hoewel niet geheel overtuigd van het nut van de door hem voorgeschreven medicijnen, heb ik de pillen braaf tot het einde van de kuur geslikt.

Walid, toen hij nog in Nederland woonde, had er een hekel aan om naar de huisarts te gaan als hem iets mankeerde. ‘Ze zeggen toch altijd “kijk het nog maar een paar dagen aan”!’ klaagde hij dan. Een eveneens in Amsterdam woonachtige Israelische vriendin was ook al stomverbaasd toen mijn huisarts me antibiotica had voorgeschreven. ‘Mijn huisarts wil geloof ik eerst dat ik op sterven lig, voordat ik ooit een antibiotica-kuur van hem zal krijgen!’ Het verschil met de artsen hier die er lustig op los voorschrijven is inderdaad groot.

Zo groot zelfs dat ik een aantal weken terug aarzelde een doktersbezoek af te leggen, ondanks het feit dat ik een knobbeltje in mijn nek had dat niet van plan leek vanzelf weg te gaan. Ik had er geen last van, het deed geen pijn, maar je weet nooit. Ik besloot uiteindelijk rond te vragen naar een arts die erom bekend staat niet nodeloos naar de medicijnen te verwijzen. Via-via werd er voor mij een afspraak gemaakt. In een klein kamertje op de derde verdieping, behangen met posters vol fotos van nare huidziektes, werd het knobbeltje bestudeerd. Ah, zei de dokter, dat is het gevolg van een instectenbeet. Niks ernstigs, het trekt vanzelf weer weg. Mooi, dacht ik. Hij liet het me zelfs nog zien in een boekje, een oud exemplaar uit de jaren ‘70 waarvan de pagina’s alle kanten op wapperden. ‘Ik zal je wat voorschrijven om de huid schoon te houden. Heb je toevallig nog darmproblemen?’

Ik begreep het verband tussen die laatste twee vragen pas toen ik volledig verbouwereerd op de stoep van de apotheek stond, alle voorgeschreven medicijnen in de hand: anti-muggenspray (2x per dag aanbrengen); desinfectie-zalf (2x per dag opsmeren); antibiotische anti-zwelling-zalf (2x per dag aanbrengen); en een flinke doos pijnstillers for extra pain, (3x per dag innemen, niet voor een zwakke maag).

Eenmaal thuis heb ik het nog maar eens een weekje aangekeken. Knobbeltje? Helemaal verdwenen. Zak met medicijnen? Onaangeroerd in de kast…

Poor Lebanese

It struck me, my first time in Lebanon in 2005, how little poverty I saw. No beggars, no people scouring the garbage, hardly any street-vendors, panhandlers, little kids trying to sell gum or polish shoes. Maybe I was blinded by the bling of the upper class, or maybe it was indeed hardly there. I remember asking my friend about it. After all, she often complained about Lebanon being ‘not even’ a third-world country. Her answer was that Lebanese people were too proud: nobody would let anybody in their family get so poor that they had to display it for the rest of society to see. Bedouins would go around begging, she said, but Lebanese people would always make sure that no one could accuse them of not taking care of even their most remote family-members. But over the course of the past few years, life has not become easier in Lebanon. War, political crisis, and simply being part of a world in which the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer – whatever be the cause, the result is increasing suffering for many Lebanese people. Following the definition of the World Bank, an astounding 28.5% of the Lebanese live below the poverty line. That’s about one million people, in a country of around four million.

I now do see beggars. I see people digging in the garbage for cans and bottles, but also for food-items that are still edible. I see more and more children trying to sell roses on busy roads late at night. I see people riding around their (grand)parents in wheelchairs to collect money from passers-by. I see the old woman who knocked on my door, today, after walking 8 flights of stairs, to ask if I have anything for her to clean. I see a van-driver whose minibus breaks down and can only be repaired if he buys the required part, which costs $400 – news which sends him into a screaming panic… crying, completely desperate, the driver hit his front screen so hard it broke. He broke the glass with his bare hands.

Poverty, I think, is one of the most debilitating conditions a person can live in. Real, deep poverty, the one where you have to choose between using the bed-net as a fishnet to be able to eat, or as a mosquito-net not to get malaria. The one where you have to choose between giving your children to eat, or eating the food yourself so you will have enough energy to go out and try to find work. The one that makes you break your windshield in desperation because you know you will never be able to afford the necessary car-part, which means your single source of income (and that of all those who depend on you) just disappeared.

Today is Blog Action Day, and on many, many blogs, people will write about poverty. I hope some of it will translate into small or big actions to finally get everyone up to an acceptable standard of living. If you’d like and you have $25 or more to lend to someone for a while (and get them back later!), join me in micro-financing a loan through Kiva. And if you have another idea to get rid of poverty, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

I made you a mix tape!

Some Lebanese songs to go with the stories... enjoy!

Photographic evidence

We are having guests this week, and part of my duties as a tour-guide is a morning walk on and around the Corniche. While for my guests – a Spanish couple – everything they see is a surprise, for me this is a great opportunity to discover new details in buildings and areas I have come to know oh so well. I love passing by this building, for example:

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There is always something going on here – some rooms, apparently, have sleeping shifts, because the beds are almost never unoccupied. There will always be someone having a drink on a balcony, someone doing laundry on another, yet someone else surveying the street from up above.

Now that the political posters have been taken down, it’s time for other questions:

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And also for more cryptic decorations, it seems. (For those of you unfamiliar with Arabic super-stars: that second picture is a graffiti of Umm Kalthoum, a famous Egyptian singer of endless poetic songs, uttering the words of another (in)famous singer, Haifa Wehbe: bous el wawa – 'kiss the booboo'.)

When we got to Raouche, home to the famous stones-sticking-out-of-the-sea known as the Pigeon Rocks, we were joined by a busload of tourists busily snapping pictures of this attraction. A small guy with a Polaroid camera approached us and asked if he could take a picture of us. Not interested, we told him no, but then he explained in broken Arabic that it wasn’t for us – there were two Iranian men standing with him who wanted to be in the picture with us. Who are we to deny anybody our pretty faces? we reasoned, and agreed on the portrait. The Spanish couple and me in the middle, the two guys on each side against the backdrop of the Pigeon Rocks… beautiful. Except that just before snapping the picture, one of the Iranians moved closer to the middle, pushing the Spanish boyfriend to the side, and draping an arm around the girl. Click! I didn’t see the end-result, but I am pretty sure that it showed 4 people maximum, and I wonder what their story about it will be at home…

Wedding Season: 2008 (extended edition)

Tomorrow is the finale of wedding season 2008: I will attend my fifth (and last) wedding of this summer. It will be the fifth time that I am supposed to get a new dress, new shoes, new purse, and a professional to do my hair and make-up for a considerable amount of money. (And to think that five is not even considered to be a lot, knowing that one of my friends had to attend no less than 14 weddings over the course of four months – that’s more than one a week!) (And to add that I am lucky that not all my friends know each other, so I can get away with alternating dresses and switching shoes to look all new and shiny for the next party…) (But I digress.) The season was actually kicked off in The Netherlands by my cousin who finally got married to his boyfriend. Hilarity all over, of course, when I came back to Beirut and was asked to recount my holiday-adventures in Arabic class. ‘So, I went to my cousins wedding, and his husband…’ ‘HER husband’, my teacher immediately corrected, ‘ehm, no, HIS husband….’ Oh yes, that’s how we do things in Holland, as she remarked rather displeased, but in Lebanon, weddings aren’t to be taken too lightly.

Weddings in Lebanon are serious business, in fact. Everything is important: the amount of invitees, the number of guests, the prestige of the location, the abundance of the decoration, the costumes of the dancers, the freshness of the flower-arrangements, the amount of food, the sparklingness of the bride’s dress – everything. For upper class Lebanese, weddings are the ultimate way to show their position in society, and for those longing to be part of the upper class they are the ultimate way to create a gigantic debt and pretend to have a position in society to show off. Upper class weddings are nothing like the village wedding that I attended two years ago, where all the guests fitted in one front yard.

A typical wedding will include all or most of the following: - 1/3rd of the more than 500 guests are friends and close relatives of the couple, the rest are very-far extended family and business-partners invited by the parents - after the groom has walked in on his own, all eyes are out for the grand entrance of the bride, who will be accompanied by her father and preceded by up to 8 traditional dancers jumping and twirling - of the three camera-crews present, one is instructed to focus on the bride and on the bride only. The other two are for the groom, the couple, the decoration, and the audience (excuse me: guests) - the couple will spend the evening going around the room to have their picture taken with everyone of the 500+ guests, who will receive a copy of the picture on their way out as a thank-you note - a five layers high wedding cake, which will be lightly cut by the couple jointly holding the saber, then carted off to a corner of the room while the guests are served pieces of another inedible cake decorated with white glazing - a band with a keyboard or a dj, who plays the exact list of songs the bride has told him she likes, in complete disregard of the mood of the guests who are supposed to have dinner or dance to it - the throwing of the wedding-bouquet, even though blindly over the right shoulder, inevitably straight into the hands of the best friend who is, unfortunately, still unmarried - an amount of make-up on the guest’s faces that could sustain a theater-company for a year, and a collection of glittering jewelry on the guest’s necks, ears, arms, and fingers that would make the Rockefeller Christmas-tree look pale in comparison - the incessant repetition of the wish Ae’belik – ‘may you be next’, even if you have no intention of getting hitched anytime soon - and, not to forget, a worried mother of the bride who keeps running around her daughter to make sure the dress is always draped in perfect position. You know, for the pictures.

And if you don’t believe me? Come join me tomorrow. There are 1200 invitees – I think I can sneak in one extra…

Wishing all my friends who got married this year luck and happiness in their marriages. Alf mabrouk!