Wednesday, August 19, 2020

City Cultural Exchange: This Friday August 21 at 19:00 we'll have our first cultural exchange with another city/country on reddit, this one will be with /r/Lebanon - at the same time it's a way to show our support for another capital going through an extremely hard time!

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all as well as you can be in the End Corona Times, the mods of /r/Berlin were thinking for a while of starting a city cultural exchange program on reddit. It will work just like the country cultural exchanges, except with a focus on city cultural. This sort of cultural exchange would give us an opportunity to meet the culture of other cities through reddit! I’ll try to organize this on a semi-regular basis, I hope it’ll be fun and informative for all.

If you have any questions or suggestions, comment below!

The first city will be Beirut, Lebanon.

We thought that perhaps we could also do some good with this as well and asked the moderators of /r/Lebanon if they would want to be our first cultural exchange, representing Beirut. We also asked if they could recommend any charities and NGOs to donate to and they sent us an explanation with a list of organizations that they trust. If you have any other way of helping the people of Beirut, share it with us, they need all the help they can get.

The date and time of this event is Friday August 21th, 2020 at 19:00 Berlin-time.

The event will be stickied on /r/berlin on Friday and I’ll edit this post to include a link to it here:

(Future Link)

Without further ado, this is a little introduction from the moderators of /r/Lebanon in preparation for the event about Lebanon and what is going on:

There is an important link in the introduction to another reddit post where they list out the NGOs and charities that are safe to donate to. They took a lot of time researching and even calling some of these organizations to make sure the donations get to the places they are needed.

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Quick explanation of what is happening in Lebanon (Before the explosion): https://imgur.com/a/Ixo3v8S

Introduction

Lebanon is a tiny country in the middle east. It's bordered by Syria from the north and east, Israel from the south, and the Mediterranean Sea from the west. Syria has been in a deadly civil war since 2012.

Lebanon went into a long and deadly civil war in the 70s and 80s. It only ended when the war lords sat together and decided that instead of attempting to kill each other, why not become rulers and split the gains. Thus from the early 90s until today Lebanon has been ruled by the same warlords that fought in the civil war. The speaker of the parliament never changed, not even once, and the rest of MPs and politicians just switched ministries and places every few years to present the image of democracy.

Lebanon also has Hizbollah, an organization that is labelled as a terrorist organization by many countries. Hizbollah has more powerful intelligence and military than the Lebanese government itself. The organization has unobstructed powers, for example, it started the 2006 war with Israel without the acceptance of the official Lebanese government.

Lebanese politicians save their billions and billions of dollars in savings in banks across Europe, mainly Switzerland.

Lebanon doesn't have oil, nor a serious construction sector. Lebanon relies on the service sector and tourism to survive, both of which are almost non-existent at this point. Lebanon has a huge crippling debt. Lebanon's capital, Beirut, was voted the most expensive city to live in in the middle east two years ago. Lebanon's passport is one of the worst passports in the world and doesn't allow you to visit any notable country without a visa.

October 2019 - Political, COVID-19 and Economical Problems

In October 2019, the government approved a law that would increase taxes, and tax the usage of Whatsapp. The Lebanese population attempted a peaceful revolution, the country effectively closed down from October until December. The revolution was successful in forcing the government to resign, but wasn't able to make the president, MPs or speaker of the parliament resign.

Things went to shit after that, unofficial capital control started in October. The bank declared that people can't withdraw money from their savings or current accounts. People weren't allowed to transfer money outside Lebanon or use any credit or debit card internationally. The government started considering a haircut. The currency started to lose value rapidly.

The official rate is currently 1$ = 1,515 LBP while the black market rate is 1$ = 8,500 LBP

The money stuck in the bank is useless, almost frozen because it can't be withdrawn without losing ~65% of it's value and even then, in small quantities.

Add to that COVID-19 is ripping the country. We're having exponential growth in the number of cases right now.

The Explosion

On August 4, 2020 multiple explosions occurred in Beirut Port that destroyed half the city, killed hundreds, with an additional large number of people missing, injured hundreds of thousands of people and made 300,000 people homeless. 80000 children displaced. The explosion was so big that it was heard and felt in Cyprus and Syria. There were reports of damages to properties from the explosions all over Lebanon, not just in Beirut.

The explosion destroyed half of the city including busy hospitals, which ended up causing people to have to deliver or have critical operations using the flash light from the doctors' cellphones.

The explosion killed several foreign nationals including French, German, Canadian, American, and Australian citizens. LINK

This post is made to raise awareness about what happened in Lebanon by sharing the videos of the incident. Please note that those videos are graphic as they show the moment the explosion happened.

Donation Help

Any kind of monetary donation will go a LONG way during these times.

You can donate using your credit card, paypal account, bank transfer or bitcoin donation.

You can find a list of verified and safe NGOs to donate to here: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/iaaksr/list_of_lebanese_ngos_that_are_verified_and_safe/

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You can check out some of the videos here:

Reddit Links:

The /r/Lebanon twin-announcement thread to this can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/icllh8/this_friday_august_21_8pm_cultural_exchange_with/


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