InLebanon, underdogs take on soiled streets
Doggie deposits seen as metaphor for bigger issues.
On a quiet, expensive BEIRUT— Beirut street, the dog walkers began to appear. It was precisely that moment in a Mediterranean evening when the light turns golden and the bougainvillea blossoms seem to glow from within. The lengthening shadows magnified a series of lumps on the sidewalk, like cairns marking a mountain trail.
Oncloser inspection, they were hills of poop.
Jad Nawfal, 34, paused with his German shepherd, Boiko. As the dog sniffed a pile, the human regarded a newish sign that said: “Please! Clean up after your dog.”
“To Lebanese people,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “it’s kind of embarrassing to pick up poop.”
How about picking their way past dog feces on the streets?
If it is noton their personal property, he said, “They just don’t care.”
That is exactly the problem, said Carole Babikian, part of a small band of Beirutis trying to drag their city into the 20th -centuryworld of poop-scooping.
“If you feel you belong to a nation, you will take care of this nation,” Babikian said. “But here everybody has an idea of his own Lebanon.”
Ask anyone here about canine excrement and the conversationmoves quickly to concepts of citizenship, nationhood, belonging, Lebanon’s sectarian political system and ultimately the civil war that reshaped the country from 1975-1990.
Civic activists say those years of sectarian violence and lawlessness, and the ensuingmistrust, destroyed Lebanon’s sense of shared public space, whether physical or political.
During the civilwar, “peoplewere afraid of the streets and the sidewalks,” said Jad Chaaban, a university professor who is a member of BeirutMadinati — Arabic for “Beirut, My City” — a group thatmade a stir last year by taking the radical step of running inmunicipal elections on a platform of improving public services.
After thewar, reconstruction was carried out with “almost total disregard” for public streetscapes, he said.
“People don’t feel that they ownanything,” he said. “They don’t own the street. They don’t belong. The sidewalk is a very nice metaphor for the Lebanese situation.”
Despite that, or because of it, a loose-knit coalition — an underdog movement, dare we say — has sprung up to battle the problem of soiled streets. It includes just a few people: Babikian and other neighborhood boosters, animal rights activists, a veterinarian and the politician son of an assassinated president.
What they shared, at first, was a tenuous hope that dog droppings— unlike, say, government corruption or the war in neighboring Syria — might be a problem small enough to solve. What they found insteadwasthat it contained nearly every classic Lebanese problem.
Lebanon’s weak government has failed to deliver public goods that it should be able to afford, like sewage treatment, clean water, consistent lawenforcement or reliable electricity. Clean sidewalks are not even on the agenda.
So about two years ago, Babikian and several other advocates, all of whom had gotten used to feces-free streets while living abroad, took matters into their own hands. Parallel efforts began in the largely Christian east side of Beirut and the largely Muslim west, a divide that itself is a legacy of the war.
On both sides, they hit fierce resistance.
Babikian said officials told her neighborhood group, Achrafieh 2020, which pushes for pedestrian-friendly streets in east Beirut, that working with it might anger people in the west. That exasperated the activists, who wondered, why not work with both?
A brief collaboration with trash collectors died during a contract imbroglio that left mountains of garbage nationwide in 2015.
And advocates struggled to enlist foreign domestic workers, often underpaid and overworked, who do much of the dog walking in a citywhere pets are largely a luxury.
“Itwas a total fiasco,” said Dr. MaherYehyia, 42, a veterinarianwho had started his own campaign in western Beirut. I had found his number on a box on a lamppost. It was supposed to contain free plastic gloves for dog walkers, but it was empty.
When Yehyia returned in 2006fromCanada, wherehe hadmoved as a child during the war, he set about picking up after his Chihuahua.
“People thought I was crazy,” he said.
He did not proselytize much at first. Fouled streets were a bigger issue in the Christian east, sincemosttraditionalMuslims do not keep dogs in their homes. Veterinary patients on the west side are 80 percent cats, he said, while in the east they are 80 percent dogs.
But with growing secularism and returning expatriates, the number of dogs in his practice tripled, a trend he sawreflected underfoot.
So Yehyia started to clear the “land mines” outside his clinic. Then he hung 300 glove dispensers around town. Fellow vets started calling — not to join him, but to accuse him of self-promotion for printing his clinic’s name and number on the boxes.
A city official arranged a meeting, then canceled. The gloves vanished; Yehyia saw vendorsonthe seafront using them to hand out roasted corn.
For the veterinarian, the whole episode was a reminder of why there is no lawrequiring cleaning up after dogs in the first place: thelaxenforcementandrampant use of bribes and connections that doomed other recent public-minded laws, like those requiring seat belt use and banning smoking in restaurants.
“The war made it so no one respects the laws,” he said. “If you stop at the red light, they will shout at you and say, ‘Do you think you are in Europe?’”
He did find sympathy in one quarter: Babikian’s group. Theyhad addedpoop to their agenda as they held street fairs promoting walking and biking.
There was a glimmer of hope in Sioufi, the district where Nawfal walked his German shepherd. The next pair to passwere Josine Pacaro, 46, and Bruno, a miniature Doberman. Pacaro, a houseworker fromthe Philippines, wore a pink uniform and plastic gloves.
Asked if she scooped, she said: “Yes, of course. We are the ones to step in it!”
She became a convert after a single misstep “on the kaka.”
“Enough,” she said. “I pick it up.”
She gazed down a line of dog deposits, of various vintages, leading to one of the city’s few public parks. Flies hovered, gleaming in the sunset.