Escalating since October 2019, the political and economic crisis is driving Lebanon to the brink of bankruptcy. The tragic situation has been exacerbated by a gigantic explosion of chemicals stored in Beirut’s seaport in 2020. The middle class has virtually ceased to exist. Educated citizens are fleeing hyperinflation, unemployment which rises every month, power cuts and fuel shortages.
15.10.2025
We sit on a worn-out sofa in Beirut, listening to lessons very different from those usually celebrated on Teachers’ Day. Many of them begin with the explosion that tore a cathedral-sized hole in the city. They begin with banks that shut their doors and took people’s life savings. With wars that do not end with treaties being signed.
The seniors of Lebanon teach us from armchairs with sagging springs. From kitchens that smell not of a hot meal, but of simple flatbreads made from flour and water. From bedrooms where medicines stand in line like palace guards—watching over life so it doesn’t slip away too quickly.
Lesson one: A person is great not when they have much, but when they share.
They offer us tea and fruit, even though they haven’t eaten breakfast themselves. They ask us to help others, though they themselves are standing on the edge. They share what they do not have. And in this reversed arithmetic—where zero multiplied by love equals infinity—we, Europeans with full refrigerators, relearn our multiplication tables.
Lesson two: Dignity does not live in a wallet; it lives in one’s attitude.
An apartment may be flooded, the rent unpaid for months, illness may cut into the body like a knife. But hands can still be washed, clothes ironed, a guest welcomed with a smile.
Lesson three: Hope is not an emotion—it is a decision.
You can stop believing. You can give up, close the door, turn off the light. Stop letting anyone in. Our seniors choose something else—they get up in the morning. They take their medicine. They hug every visitor like a long-lost friend. They do not waste a single lettuce leaf or slice of vegetable they receive from Charbel. This is not hope as a grand belief that tomorrow will be better. It is hope as a small, everyday choice: today, I will not give up yet.
*****
Adopting a Senior is regular, symbolic support that allows someone on the other side of the world to live without pain, without hunger, in warmth. To keep a roof over their head. To buy medicine. To welcome guests without going hungry themselves. To know that someone remembers.
It is also your lesson. Because the seniors of Lebanon teach us something that cannot be learned from theory alone: that a person’s value is measured not by what life gave them, but by what they managed to preserve within themselves when life took everything away.
Thank you to our Teachers. To the people who teach us how to live when everything seems to be over. Stay with us in this classroom.
10.12.2025
Big declarations are signed under flashing cameras, in Geneva or New York. But human rights are most often violated quietly. In a cold apartment in Lebanon, where an elderly person living alone must choose between buying medicine or food, even though they worked their whole life and the crisis has taken everything from them. At […]
21.10.2025
“The good shepherd knows his sheep, and they know him.” A truth known since biblical times comes alive here, in practice, with Doumith—a good shepherd from Lebanon. The farmyard drops steeply down a Lebanese hillside. Beyond the fence, by an unpaved road, stands a building you reach by walking down steps so low that the […]
10.10.2025
“— I was wounded here, it hurt like hell,” George says, reaching for his thigh. “Roger was hit too. He was lying in a pool of blood. I thought he was dead. When we saw each other in the same ward at the military hospital, we both cried with happiness,” George recalls. “— In war, […]