My family moved to England last week after 22 years in Lebanon. The idea is that my daughter will complete her last two years at school in Brighton, while my son, who is 18, will take a year off to decide what he is going to do with his life. As for my wife, well she just wants a bit of normality in a country where things work.
As for me, I’m probably too old to start over so I’ll be a transcontinental commuter still chancing my hand in a country that promised so much but which is now in a violent spiral to self-destruction.
The decision to relocate was driven as much by economic and social considerations as it was by the obvious security concerns. I want my family to enjoy a country that takes for granted what the Lebanese cannot access: decent and free education and health care, plentiful and clean water, 24-hour electricity, good and safe roads, public transport, an effective police force, workers’ rights and accountable public servants.
British readers might laugh at the idyllic way I am painting their country, but when you live somewhere truly dysfunctional such as Lebanon, the basics suddenly become a luxury.
But the move is also an opportunity to instil in my kids the notion that it is possible to get on in life by merit alone and that there are more careers choices than the obligatory law, medicine, engineering and business.
A less narrow-minded view of education in particular will be a welcome bonus. When my daughter begins her A-Levels at a government school, she will hopefully meet a more diverse tranche of people than she would at the best Lebanese schools, which if we are being honest, are nothing more than grade factories, albeit effective ones.
My son’s decision to take what the rest of the world calls a “gap year” would seem crazy to most Lebanese who are very conservative and who have trouble grappling with the idea that one might want broaden one’s mind and enrich one’s character before settling down to a routine. Many would see it as nothing more than a waste of time, and I am convinced that many people have assumed that he is either dim, difficult or terminally lazy. Perhaps all three.
The good Lebanese achiever simply knuckles down, gets a degree, and with parents calling in a favour or two, finds a job.
I’ve seen how the system works. When I was features editor on the Beirut Daily Star back in the late 1990s, I would be routinely summoned into the office of the then-proprietor, Jamil Mroue, to meet a succession of fathers with embarrassed sons or daughters. Niceties exchanged, I would take them for a coffee and ask them how they intended to set the world of journalism on fire. Nine times out of ten they said they wanted to write on “social issues”. I would tell them to come back with story ideas but none ever did, and presumably by the next week, they were trying their hand at advertising, insurance or even banking.
In fact, a banker friend concurred. “When I was at [names a top-five listed Lebanese bank], there was a department stuffed with the children of friends or clients who just sat around on the internet all day not really sure what they were supposed to do.”
So remember, for every Lebanese that goes abroad and stuns his family with a first from Cambridge or graduates summa cum laude from Harvard, there are a thousands who are forced to feel their way on life’s career path by playing Lebanon’s relationship game. It’s not one I want my children to take.
Each month, thousands of other Lebanese are also emigrating. Many will head to the thriving but inward-looking Lebanese communities of West Africa, Canada and Australia, where uncles or cousins will have fixed them up. An equal number are trying to find work in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.
Others, cannot move for financial reasons, and it was probably indelicate of me to tell the owner of my local petrol station that it was costing me north of $2,000 to take my dog to England. “To hell with the dog! Take me,” he cried.
He wasn’t joking.
Michael Karam is a freelance writer based in Beirut and Brighton
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