MZAAR KFARDEBIANE // Seated around a table in the darkened Val d'Isère rental shop, at the foot of the Mzaar ski resort 50 kilometres north-east of Beirut, half-a-dozen employees smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and wait, futilely, for the snow to come. Nearly a month into the ski season in Lebanon, at one of the most popular winter resorts in the Middle East, business has yet to begin. While Europe and North America have been pummelled with record snowfall and low temperatures in recent weeks, Lebanon has seen unusual highs and virtually none of the fluffy white stuff.
"It's very bad," said one employee, Rami Kai, 20, who studies business administration at Notre Dame University in nearby Zouk Mosbeh, when he is not working at Mzaar (formerly known as Faraya). "There are other things to do here - we have ATVs, for example - but there are not a lot of people coming for that." Temperatures in the mountains have reached the upper teens this January - not record highs, necessarily, but far too warm for snow to accumulate. Beirut too has experienced a decidedly summery month, with temperatures reaching into the high twenties.
Mr Kai and his co-workers were dressed, optimistically, in their uniform of red ski outfits. Meanwhile, outside the shop, it had begun to rain. Across the empty car park, a high-speed chairlift was at a standstill, its chairs suspended over the rocky, brown terrain of the resort's lowest runs. Patches of snow could be spotted in the higher reaches of the mountain, remnants of a tantalising storm in late December that did not last.
Mr Kai's boss, Mike Geara, 27, explained that his 50 or so employees were still earning their salaries - about US$400 (Dh1,500) per month - but there was not much work to go around, and no tips to be had. Tips can amount to $100 per month. "All of us lose money, let's be honest," Mr Geara said. Mr Geara has worked at Mzaar for 12 years - for the remainder of the year he works as a dealer at Casino du Liban - and he has never before seen an entire holiday season pass without snow. "Usually, if the snow comes late - like, late late - we still have Christmas, we still have New Year's."
Marc Wehaibe, the head of Lebanon's meteorological service, said the past few years had witnessed a steady delay in the arrival and conclusion of Lebanon's rainy season, although total precipitation had remained within 30-year averages. The effect of this delay on local businesses can be drastic, because businesses in the area tend to take in the plurality of their income during the three weeks surrounding Christmas.
According to Ronald Sayegh, the founder of SkiLeb.com, a website that arranges ski-holiday packages for all of Lebanon's resorts, bookings typically account for about 40 per cent of the season's earnings. Virtually all were cancelled this year, he said, and so far most of January's have been as well. "What are you going to do?" Mr Sayegh said, throwing up his hands. "I haven't seen this before, but you can't do anything. You just have to deal with it. We're totally helpless."
The mood was even gloomier at Mzaar operations headquarters. Christian Rizk, who runs the resort, said 35 per cent of the season's income was lost. "There's nothing we can do. The holiday is already gone." To open, Mr Rizk said, the resort would need at least 50 centimetres of snow on the ground - two or three days of continuous, heavy downfall. Mr Rizk, like the people at Val d'Isère, was continuing to employ the 200 or so people who run the mountain - chairlift operators, maintenance men, restaurant staff, ski patrol - but he was losing money fast.
Small businesses faced even greater challenges. At the family-run Hotel San Antonio, near the bottom of the village, the owner, Charbel Faddoul, had shuttered operations and moved his family into a small suite at the hotel, to save on expenses. Mr Faddoul took over the business, which had previously been owned by his father, nine months ago. Since then, he has put $340,000 into renovations, most of it out of his own pocket.
"Knowing you only do three months out of the whole year," Mr Faddoul said, "I've calculated I would need to make $755 per day to break even. And I've already lost a month and a half." Mr Faddoul has continued to pay his small staff, but many of the locals who work at the mountain have not been so lucky. Tony Mhanna, one of Mr Faddoul's Lebanese employees, said his friends in Faraya, who work seasonally as ski instructors or at local restaurants, have had nothing to do, and no income.
"They're staying in the villages, waiting for the snow to come," he said. Normally, these resort employees can earn the same amount of money in the winter months as they do as construction workers or mechanics over the course of the rest of the year, Mr Mhanna said. "It's affecting everybody," Mr Faddoul said, "Starting from the beach up. Because you have only one road, only one motorway, to get here. As people go up, they stop at supermarkets, tyre shops, petrol stations - everybody is affected."
Wael Hmaidan, an environmental activist who runs the Beirut-based IndyACT, says this trend is only going to get worse. "Eventually, if climate change continues the way it is, we're not going to have any snow," he says. "Our politicians have to take the issue seriously." "We cannot say that each climactic event is due to climate change," Mr Hmaidan acknowledged. "But we do know that, probability-wise, this trend will be on the rise."
For Ronald Sayegh, one solution business-wise might lie in a venture he started recently, in partnership with SkiLeb: SkiDubai. The indoor ski slope at the Mall of the Emirates is open year-round, regardless of the weather, and is indifferent to climate change. "We do have that alternative," he said with a shrug. "If you want." * The National
