This Saturday was hiking day with the students. We headed for Byblos at 100 km/h on a road that was, thankfully – for once – largely empty given the early hour, then made a rapid ascent to Ehmej at 1,200 meters, a prime hiking destination in Lebanon, which forms part of the national trail circuit that crosses the country from north to south. A village of five thousand inhabitants, with thirteen churches! It is a 100 per cent Maronite region. The guide turned out to be the representative of Crusade Campus for Christ, which led to some lively theological discussions along the way!

As the path was sometimes barely visible, several participants, unaccustomed to this sort of activity, had to keep their eyes fixed on their feet more often than on the surrounding countryside. The ground was surprisingly damp and soft, given the heat here. But the combination of morning dew and the sea’s influence is enough to sustain fruit orchards at over 1,400 meters and to allow tall grasses and magnificent oak trees to thrive. In fact, the fog caught up with us towards the end of the walk. Some students clearly had a strong urge to let their hair down and fully explore the freedom of wandering freely throughout the countryside, particularly off the beaten track, and to « conquer » symbolic features of the landscape, such as small peaks or isolated rocks, even if it meant taking risks. They were talking constantly and very loudly, which contrasted sharply with the soothing silence of nature, the steady footsteps on the fallen leaves, and the spirit of contemplation and the environmental awareness the guide was seeking to foster. It was only on the way back that I realised this wasn’t down to being accustomed to living in a constantly noisy environment in Beirut, but to the fact that these were students from the Bethlehem area, who live completely surrounded, are unable to leave and can only see nature from a distance – a sight reserved for Israelis… Once we reached 1,600 metres, we were able to admire the surrounding oak forests and a natural landscape that remains largely untouched.

After this uplifting experience, the reality of the country caught up with me as soon as the local news channels came on. A piece of news that was both worrying and tragic – and which many on the ground had already sensed – was confirmed by a study by a professor of demography at the Lebanese University, published on the country’s army website: by the end of 2024, Lebanon had a population of 6.9 million, broken down as follows: Syrians: 2.1 million, Palestinians: 230,000, other nationalities: 830,000. The number of Lebanese residing in Lebanon is therefore only around 3.7 million, or just 54 per cent of the total population. This proportion is expected to fall further to 45 per cent by 2035. Even more alarming is the fact that between 2024 (the latest Israeli invasion) and the present day, the country has lost approximately 700,000 people – three times as many as between 2020 (the economic collapse and the blast at the port) and 2024. In 2012, the outflow was still modest, with fewer than 50,000 Lebanese registered abroad. The economic and social crisis has gradually intensified the exodus: 80,000 in 2021, followed by a historic peak in 2023 with more than 1540,000 Lebanese leaving in a single year.

These figures also serve as a wake-up call on the economic front, signaling a massive drain of human capital at a time when the country needs its workforce to revive its economy.

In the short term, however, this mass exodus does support the economy: remittances from the diaspora sustain nearly a million Lebanese households. Officially, bank transfers amount to between 6 and 7 billion dollars a year, but in reality, they are closer to 18 billion, of which more than 10 billion circulates in cash from Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Gulf. These flows act as a vital financial lifeline for families who have remained in the country.

‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ read a piece of graffiti I spotted whilst waiting for the hiking guide, near the half-destroyed silo at the port. Whilst this is certainly true when it comes to hiking, it is clearly much more complicated when it concerns the fate of a country divided by opposing political visions and plundered by private interests.