Group finds alternate homes for Lebanon’s health workers
Inequalities bared as French territory fights surge in cases
BEIRUT — In the middle of the destroyed Beirut neighborhood of Gemmayzeh, a small team in masks and gloves was sanitizing and packing oxygen machines to be sent to those in need.
It’s the latest venture of a Lebanese civil group that arose with the coronavirus pandemic and has been finding new avenues to help as the country’s crises expand.
“No one is exempt from COVID. Nobody. Nobody has super-power immunity,” said Melissa Fathallah, one of the founders of Baytna Baytak, Arabic for Our Home is Your Home.
“We saw that our own relatives and our colleagues are suffering with this, we decided, OK, we are going to start another fundraiser and to specifically focus on the oxygen machines.”
Raising more than $27,000, they currently have placed 48 machines with those who need it across the country.
Baytna Baytak, with 110 staffers, launched at the start of the pandemic with a very different initiative: Finding a home away from home for front-line workers who were worried about exposing their families to the virus. During Lebanon’s first lockdown in March, they housed 750 front-line workers in various apartments.
Chloe Ghosh, a 26-yearold medical resident at a government hospital in Beirut, has been living in
accommodations provided by the group since the start of the pandemic.
Her family is from Tannourine, a town 50 miles north of Lebanon. For her, putting her family at risk was another burden she couldn’t fathom.
“If I got COVID or anyone my age got COVID, we could survive,” Ghosh said. “But our families, no.”
Her first accommodation with the group was wrecked when another disaster struck Beirut, the massive Aug. 4 explosion at the city’s port. The blast killed more than 200 people, injured 6,000 others and destroyed thousands of homes.
Ghosh was unharmed. She moved and now shares a four-bedroom apartment with three other medical workers who work in different hospitals around the city.
On a recent afternoon, Gosh and one her apartment mates, Issa Tannous, were decompressing after
a long day, sipping a cup of coffee in front of the lights strung across the apartment’s windows. It was a rare instance when they were home at the same time.
“At the end of the day, someone cared for us,” said Tannous, a 28-year-old medical resident at a private hospital. “Someone appreciated what you are going through and all that is going through our heads.
The apartment was donated to Baytna Baytak by a philanthropist to help accommodate the front-line workers. The same donor gave several other properties around Beirut for the same purpose.
After the port explosion, Baytna Baytak rushed to expand its efforts to help those whose homes had been shattered. It placed them in temporary housing while it helped raise funds to fix their homes. Within the first 24 hours, they had six apartments donated.
MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte — Mayotte’s main tourist office stands nearly empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking a people-less port. Its only hospital, however, is overwhelmed.
The demand for intensive care beds is more than quadruple the supply, as medical workers fight to contain the French Indian Ocean territory’s worst coronavirus outbreak yet.
The Mayotte islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, tucked between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique in southern Africa — and were the last spot in France to receive any coronavirus vaccines.
Local authorities feel forgotten and say their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect long-standing inequalities between France’s majority-white mainland and its far-flung multiracial former colonies.
The French army is sending in medical workers and a few ICU beds, and President Emmanuel Macron’s government pledged Wednesday to step up vaccine deliveries. But the aid will only go so far on the islands where masks are a luxury, where nearly a third of the region’s 300,000 people have no running water and where a new lockdown is suffocating livelihoods.
“We used to work at the big market to sell things, to have money to feed our families,” said Ahamada Soulaimana Soilihi, a 40-year-old father of six living in a shantytown in Mayotte’s capital city of Mamoudzou.
Then last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy, ordering people to stay home to combat
fast-growing cases of the virus variant dominant in South Africa.
“How can we live without work, without being able to move, without anything?” Soilihi asked.
While ocean waves lap empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou’s business district, many people in Soilihi’s neighborhood seem unaware of lockdown rules or social distancing measures. Clusters of children play barefoot on the dusty ground, girls carry buckets on their heads to fetch water from a collective pump, an older woman at an informal street stall braids a younger woman’s hair. Almost no one wears a mask.
Health workers acknowledge there’s no easy solution.
The virus is attacking Mayotte in a “brutal and
rapid” way, Dominique Voynet, the head of the regional health service, told Associated Press. “All indicators are getting darker and darker ... people are dropping like flies.”
Mayotte’s weekly infection rate is now nearly four times higher than the national French average. The territory has registered 11,447 virus cases since the pandemic began — a third of them over the past two weeks — and at least 68 deaths, double the per capita virus death rate nationwide. Many cases and deaths are believed to go uncounted.
That made it all the more disappointing that Mayotte was the last French overseas region to get a vaccine shipment, a month after the first doses landed in Paris, more than 5,000 miles away.
“We were equipped
much later than other (French) regions, to my great dismay,” Voynet said.
The French Foreign Legion delivered the superfreezer needed to store Mayotte’s initial deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. More shipments have trickled in, and the territory has so far vaccinated 2,400 people, or less than 1% of its population.
In Paris, government spokesman Gabriel Attal initially argued that Mayotte’s young population — just 4% are over 60 — meant the region was a low priority for vaccination, noting its “demographic and geographic realities which are obviously different” from the mainland.
But now that infections are raging, France’s central government is increasingly worried.
Doctors are transporting
several ICU patients per day to nearby Reunion island. The French military on Sunday flew in medical workers. The regional health service is organizing water deliveries to encourage the poorest to stay home.
Mayotte lawmaker Mansour Kamardine doesn’t understand why his homeland is in such dire straits.
When the rest of the Comoros islands chain voted in the 1970s for independence from France after a century-and-a-half of colonial rule, Mayotte residents voted overwhelmingly to stay French.
Today, Mayotte has the same administrative status as any region on mainland France — one of the world’s richest countries. The territory uses the euro as currency and is represented in the European
Parliament. A 2003 law promises “liberty, equality and fraternity” to all people on France’s overseas lands.
But when the virus hit, “Mayotte was forgotten,” Kamardine told the AP. “We are far from the eyes, we are far from the heart” of French power.
He wrote to the government to plead for more permanent ICU beds, to no avail. The whole territory has just 16.
Mayotte is among nine territories — mostly French — with a special status in the EU as an “outermost region,” which have access to development funds aimed at reducing the economic gap with the European continent left over from colonial times.
But with Europe now facing its own vaccine woes and protracted economic crisis, Mayotte’s prospects look dim.
SAN DIEGO — The Biden administration on Friday announced plans for tens of thousands of people who are seeking asylum and have been forced to wait in Mexico under a Trump-era policy to be allowed into the U.S. while their cases wind through immigration courts.
The first wave of an estimated 25,000 asylum-seekers with active cases in the “Remain in Mexico” program will be allowed into the United States Feb. 19, authorities said. They plan to start slowly, with two border crossings each processing up to 300 people a day and a third crossing taking fewer numbers. Officials with President Joe Biden’s administration declined to name them out of fear they may encourage a rush of people.
The move is a major step toward dismantling one of former President Donald Trump’s most consequential policies to deter asylum-seekers from coming to the U.S. About 70,000 asylum-seekers were enrolled in the program officially called Migrant Protection Protocols since it was introduced in January 2019.
On Biden’s first day in office, the Homeland Security Department suspended the policy for new arrivals. Since then, some asylum-seekers picked up at the border have been released in the U.S. with notices to appear in court.
Biden is making good on a campaign promise to end the policy, which the Trump administration said was critical to reversing a surge of asylum-seekers that peaked in 2019. But the policy also exposed people to violence in Mexican border cities and made it extremely difficult for them to find lawyers and communicate with courts about their cases.
“As President Biden has made clear, the U.S. government is committed to rebuilding a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.
Asylum-seekers will be released with notices to appear in court in cities close to or in their final destinations, typically with family, administration officials said.
Homeland Security said the move “should not be interpreted as an opening for people to migrate irregularly to the United States.” Administration officials say the vast majority of people who cross the border illegally are quickly expelled under a public health order that Trump put in place in March amid the coronavirus pandemic. But some asylum-seeking families have been released in Texas and California, working against that messaging.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that she was concerned limited releases in the U.S. may encourage others to cross illegally.
“We don’t want people to
put themselves in danger at a time where it is not the right time to come, because we have not had time to put in place a humane and moral system and process,” she said.
Court hearings for people enrolled in “Remain in Mexico” have been suspended since June because of the pandemic. Getting word to them about when to report to the border for release in the United States may prove a daunting job.
Homeland Security said it would soon announce a “virtual registration process” online and by phone for people to learn where and when they should report. It urged asylum-seekers not to report to the border unless instructed.
The International Organization for Migration will help with logistics and test asylum-seekers for COVID19 before they enter the U.S., spokeswoman Liz Lizama said. The U.N. migration agency’s Mexico director, Dana Graber Ladek, said it will seek to inform asylum-seekers across the country about eligibility.