Beirut still looks, on the surface, like a city getting on with things. People go to work, queue for coffee, sit outside in the evenings. But drive south, and the noise of ordinary life just stops. Streets empty. Shops shut. Families stay close to home, and closer still to the bags they keep packed by the door.
That’s the picture Sarah Easter brought back from her latest trip for CARE. She’s spent the past year reporting from South Sudan and eastern Ukraine too, so she knows what a country under strain looks like. Lebanon, she told me, is holding several crises at once: an economic collapse that never really ended, a conflict that flared up again this spring, and, in the north, a climate disaster nobody’s had the bandwidth to fix.
The Bag by the Door
More than 430,000 people are currently displaced inside Lebanon. Behind that number are individual households making impossible calculations about what to save and what to leave behind. One father of four has already fled once, and returned once, because Beirut was too expensive to survive in. Now he waits.
„The bag waiting at the door is packed with spoons, plates, cups, because he says: I can’t afford to buy them again if I lose them,“ Easter told me. „And he’s packed food for ten days, because he can’t even buy his children a sandwich on the road when he has to flee.“
Grief on Hold
Not every wound in Lebanon is visible from the outside. Easter met a woman whose husband was killed in an airstrike, and who has decided, consciously, that she doesn’t have time to mourn him.
„She does not have the privilege to feel her own feelings,“ Easter said. „She does not have the privilege to grieve losing her husband, because she needs to be strong for her twelve-year-old daughter.“
The woman now shares a small apartment with three other families. Her daughter is on antidepressants. It’s the kind of detail that rarely makes it into a news bulletin, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that tells you what a war actually costs a family, long after the missile has landed.
Even in parts of Beirut considered relatively safe, fear has become a daily companion. One mother now keeps her three daughters home for online schooling, too afraid to risk the street outside.
„What if I don’t return?“ she asked Easter. „What if I die while searching for food? Or what if I come back and my house isn’t there anymore, and my children are dead?“
The North, Underwater and Overlooked
While the world’s attention stays fixed on the south, Lebanon’s north has quietly been dealing with a disaster of its own. Early this year, catastrophic flooding, driven by climate change, tore through communities that were already struggling. Easter met a mother whose home filled with water in minutes.
„She showed me how high the water stood inside her apartment; one metre, one and a half metres, up to her neck at one point,“ Easter said. „There’s a little emergency door in the house, and when the flood came, she had to take her small children and dive through that door to reach safety.“
CARE had a repair project running there before the spring escalation pulled funding and attention south. It’s only just restarting.
The economic fallout compounds the damage. People who’ve lost their income in the conflict are turning to fishing and farming, trades they don’t know, competing with families who depended on them for generations.
„Those who were already fishermen or farmers now struggle to sell what they produce, because so many people are doing the same thing,“ Easter explained. „So poverty is rising again in the north.“
The Helpers Are Living It Too
It’s easy to think of CARE staff as outsiders looking in. Many of them aren’t. Easter met colleagues who’ve been displaced themselves, or who still have family in the areas hit hardest. One told her she’s already lived through five separate wars.
„Her earliest memory was when her father was carrying her down the stairs in order to get her to safety,“ Easter said, „and pushing the mattresses together in the corridor so they could sleep together as a family, but in a safer area.“
That colleague now has two young children of her own, aged three and eleven months. When the bombs fall, her three-year-old has started asking a question she doesn’t know how to answer.
„Every time the bombs dropped, her three-year-old asked: is it thunder? And she says, yes, my son, it’s just thunder. But then he looks out of the window and says: but there’s no rain.“
The next morning, Easter said, that same colleague goes back to work, running distributions, offering psychological support to other families, carrying her own fear quietly alongside theirs.
What Aid Can and Can’t Fix
CARE runs weekly distributions across the country: food, water, hygiene items, support for families with nothing left. But Easter is candid about the limits of that work, especially now, with humanitarian budgets shrinking worldwide.
„It’s absolutely difficult to reach everyone, especially now, with the reality of funding cuts hitting humanitarian work everywhere,“ she said. What people need, she argues, isn’t just emergency aid. It’s training, new skills, ways to rebuild a livelihood, so families can eventually stand on their own again rather than depending on the next delivery truck.
Are We Getting Used to This?
Easter has reported from enough crises now to worry about a different kind of danger: the world simply losing interest.
„That’s what we witness at CARE every single day, that the attention is lacking,“ she said. „Which is, at some point, also understandable, if there’s so much suffering going on and so many conflicts throughout the world.“
She says that attention doesn’t have to mean money, or a solution. Sometimes it just means listening. We all have a human need to express ourselves and feel heard. Suffering in silence makes everything worse.
„For just one person, paying attention matters the world,“ she said. „Because these things are still happening even if we’re not paying attention. And just being there, talking to these mothers, talking to this father, helped them so much, because they were able to tell their stories.“
Crises don’t end when the news cycle moves on. The families she met will still be rebuilding long after Lebanon drops out of the headlines, whether or not the rest of us are still watching.