Beirut is slowly coming back to life

Three months after the explosion that ravaged Beirut, traffic flows through the avenues of the Gemmayze district, one of the most devastated, and the ringing of hammers and the roaring of drills are interspersed with a timid bustle of people heading for the newly reopened bars and shops.

Walking through this area, located just a couple of streets away from the port, where the tragedy that caused more than 200 deaths and 6,500 wounded on August 4 originated, you can still see cafeterias without glass, with tables on the floor, immersed in darkness, and shops of all kinds closed to the public.

However, some establishments have left messages of hope on their doorsteps such as "Our place is destroyed, but we are not" or "Beirut will rise again", while others have begun to reopen in recent weeks after a hard process of reconstruction.

On that fateful Tuesday, several people were injured at the Barbell House gym in Gemmayze, including a "close friend and excellent client" who ended up losing his life after two months in a coma, owner Nicolas Antakly told Efe.

He himself was hit by glass and his wife, Tania, had to undergo a "major" operation on her head and stay in the Intensive Care Unit for eight days because of the impact.

"The gym was completely destroyed, we had to rebuild it from scratch," remembers Antakly sitting on an exercise machine, from where he details that some of the walls even collapsed.

Today the establishment is alive again. Techno music echoes through the new walls as customers struggle to lift huge weights.

"The first thing that pushed me to rebuild it was my wife, who when she left the hospital and came to see the gym said, 'When are you going to start restoring it,'" says the owner of Barbell House.

"The love of the clients for this place" also helped, as there were two collective microfinance campaigns promoted by Antakly's brother from the Netherlands and an athlete from Australia, in which many collaborated to help rebuild the facility.

He remembers that most of those who know them assumed that they would leave their business and move away from Lebanon, as Tania is Austrian-Lebanese. "I didn't do it because I love this place," she says.

In a parallel street, workers are putting the finishing touches to the Aaliya's Books bookstore/cafeteria/bar after a long process of repair lasting about six weeks, and the owners hope to open their doors in mid-November.

"We were seriously damaged, you can see that we have a lot of glass and the explosion pushed it inwards with a greater or lesser extent, and the two big ones at the front came completely out of their frames," one of the owners, Niamh Fleming, told Efe. The glass in turn affected the air conditioning system and areas of the bar. And rehabilitation did not begin until a month after the explosion because even calculating the material damage was not easy.

"It was very difficult to know how much it would cost, because because of the economic crisis in Lebanon the prices of everything that is imported are in dollars and the dollar exchange rate fluctuates dramatically," explains this Irish woman.

As in Barbell House and many other locations in the area, a microfinance campaign made possible the renovation of Aaliya's Books, an "absolute lifesaver" without which Fleming believes they would still be wondering how to move forward.

Just as many have helped this multi-faceted business, the owners of this bookstore/cafeteria have donated an unused pizza oven to a nearby bakery, also badly damaged, allowing the business to resume operations.

Not far away is the capital's Café Cyrano, which claims to be the first to reopen in the area just under a month after losing a worker named Rawan in the explosion.

"We commemorate our Rawan, our friend and colleague who we lost when we went back to work and reopened the shop," café manager Simon Obegi told Efe, acknowledging that the impact of the tragedy on the employees was "enormous emotionally and physically".

The premises were "destroyed", as they are in a straight line to the port, but Obegi is proud to have managed to put them back into operation as soon as possible. A picture of the explosion and a photograph of Rawan now hang in Cyrano. "We will never forget that day", concludes the manager.