Gabriella Rizkallah watched in shock as the video of the explosion in Beirut played on her cell phone screen.
“I was like, oh my God, I have family there! What’s happening?”
On Tuesday, a warehouse exploded on Beirut’s port destroying the port and wrecking parts of the city. Over a hundred people have died and thousands injured. About 300,000 people have lost their homes and dozens are missing. Some people have spent the last few days in windowless and doorless homes with nothing to shield them from theft or the potentially toxic air. The blast has also left the country on the verge of a food crisis with the loss of its major grain silo.
Gemmayze, where trendy galleries, bars and restaurants meet traditional architecture and historical buildings, is now filled with glass and debris. Downtown Beirut, which was rebuilt in a multi-million reconstruction project after the civil war, is almost unrecognizable with its fast-fashion and high-end shops damaged. Houses in Karantina, Ashrafieh, Burj Hammoud and Mar Mikhael, the lively neighbourhoods closest to the port, were destroyed.
Rizkallah said the whole country has been affected because of how small Lebanon is.
“If people weren’t affected personally by the blast, they’re going to be affected by knowing someone who was there.”
The cause of the explosion remains under investigation. Reports from the two days following the explosion show Lebanese people looking after each other – cleaning, repairing, offering used clothes, and giving out food with little or no presence of the government. But their efforts are no where close enough to remedy the tragedy. Beirut’s mayor Jamal Itani told MTV news in Lebanon Thursday that Beirut has no emergency system in place to deal with the disaster.
‘You’re kind of a little numb’
Rizkallah’s family is mostly safe. Her cousin, Sobhi Fares, is an ER doctor at the St. George hospital, a fifteen-minute drive away from the port. The hospital was damaged and without electricity.
“A lot of his colleagues and friends are injured and it’s in shambles right now,” said Rizkallah.
Fares shared in a Facebook post how he worked with his colleagues to help victims of the explosion. They worked through the night in the hospital’s parking lot and ER driveway.
“I found myself between a mother holding her newborn begging me to save her husband and a father crying over his daughter with a critical head injury,” he wrote.
Rizkallah has never been to Lebanon. For as long as she remembers, the country has been struggling with a disaster after the other.
“Just the fact that something tragic has happened there … You’re kind of a little numb.”
Before the blast, the country had been facing the worst economic crisis in decades. Lebanon’s debt levels have been one of the highest in the world for years. The country continues to struggle with providing people with basic needs, such as electricity and public transportation. The COVID-19 pandemic put great pressure on the country’s frail economy and medical system, exacerbating its downturn.
The challenges in Rizkallah’s life as a Lebanese Canadian are different, so she feels it’s difficult to speak about the situation in Lebanon.
But she said it’s still important to raise awareness.
“I feel like we have a duty, especially as a generation who grew up in Canada, to speak on the experiences our family members have had.”
When people in Halifax know that the crisis affected their neighbours, friends, and colleagues, they would be able to better understand the magnitude of the damage.
Art in the face of calamity
For the Lebanese diaspora in Canada, Rizkallah, who is an art therapist, said they need to know that everyone deals with such tragic events differently. Her biggest advice was for people not to bottle things up.
“Talk about what you’re feeling and maybe articulate it in some form of art,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be painting or drawing, it can be music or writing … because keeping it in is harder.”
Rizkallah has heard stories about Lebanon from her father who fled the country in the 1970s after the start of the Lebanese civil war. She saw photos of her brother’s and cousin’s visits to the beautiful country in recent years.
The stories and photos are inspiring her to raise funds for Beirut.
“I know everything is so ugly right now, but there’s beauty still in that country and with the people in that country,” she said.
She went to buy a canvas Thursday and is working on creating an art piece for an auction where 100 per cent of proceeds will be donated to Lebanon. She hasn’t determined the specific organization, yet.
Follow her on Instagram to watch her create the piece which will portray a colourful scene from Beirut. Her handle is nsarttherapy pic.twitter.com/7JBCNQeLcD
Rizkallah said she’s bringing Beirut’s beauty alive by recreating a scene in vibrant colours from the many iconic places in the city.
She is calling on artists in Nova Scotia to donate art pieces for the auction. The pieces can be remakes or originals.
Rizkallah didn’t want to specify a theme for the auction.
“However you want to contribute, thank you,” she said. “I don’t want to limit people, plus everybody interprets things differently.”
Artists who would like to participate can contact Rizkallah on her Instagram @nsarttherapy or email nsarttherapy@gmail.com. She will also post progress shots of her painting on her Instagram stories.
Nebal Snan is a local journalism initiative reporter, a position funded by the federal government.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
