When the blast wiped away the climbing dream

As the people of Beirut slowly emerge from the remnants of their houses, they face yet another challenge: the big question of how to resume life from here.

Along with those having lost everything is Diala Sammakieh, CEO and co-founder of FLYP urban park and climbing gym. Not only her own house but also the sites of her business were located only 500 metres away from the heavy explosion in August in Beirut’s harbour. Whilst the government is not supporting the people, Diala relies on her own mindset and the help of the international sport community to be able to rebuild her future.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the Lebanese business woman and mother of three had had a bad feeling to open the climbing gym on 4 August. She texted her team to say that they would stay closed for another week. Her announcement was followed by messages on Instagram of gym members who begged FLYP to open its doors as they were desperate to get back into climbing after the corona inflicted month-long break.

But the decision was made and instead of spending the day in the chalky hangar, Diala took her family out for a climbing trip to nearby outdoor crags. Little did she know that rock climbing would literally save her life.

In fact, FLYP and its climbing community would be mourning the death of 60 to 70 climbers if Diala hadn’t listened to her gut feeling that day. The shock wave that followed the explosion of over 2000 kilograms of ammonium nitrate caused the climbing walls to implode and collapse.

“No way someone would have come out alive. Especially in the climbing gym. Because most of the wall fell and the entire hangar imploded. Sharp things were flying around, twenty meter slices. Everything imploded. So, alhamdulillah, nothing happened. Because no one was there” she recounts.

Da sapere...

In April 1975, a 15 year-long civil war broke out in Lebanon which caused 120,000 casualties and forced almost one million Lebanese to flee the country.

The clashes, mainly but not solely, occurred between the pro-western Maronite Christians, also called Phalanges, and the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), that consisted of Muslims and Palestinians. In the course of the events, LNM joined forces with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an armed formation that arrived from Jordan in 1970.

The conflict evolved with the interventions of Israel and Syria and the involvement of the Multinational Forces (MNF) which consisted of the United States, France, Italy and later Great Britain, but withdrew in 1984.

The war climaxed in the Ta’if Agreement of 1989, in which the Arab League began to debate a Lebanese parliament on the basis of parity as a solution for the conflict with additional peacekeeping troops in the country.

This plan however could only be realised after the anti-Syrian minded Prime Minister Michel Aoun was defeated in Oktober 1990. In the aftermath, the Maronite Aoun fled to France and the installed peacekeeping troops of the Arab League that already had mostly comprised of Syrian forces, grew to become the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.

Following the death of Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad in 2000 and the succession of his son Bashar al-Assad, the resistance of the Lebanese people against the occupation rose and built up to the Cedar Revolution in 2005. Consequently, in October 2005, Bashar al-Assad withdrew all Syrian troops from Lebanon.

That same year, Aoun returned to Lebanon and became Member of Parliament. He took office as President of Lebanon in 2016 and remains in power until this day.

After a phone call from her mother with brief information on what had happened and a hasty journey back to the city, Diala and her husband went to observe the remnants of what once was her work and her passion. But little was left, and the same applied to her home. The two buildings that held her life crumbled to ashes.

She knew immediately that there was no point in waiting for help from authorities. As response to the question of why that was, she laughs cynically and tells her perspective of the situation: “So let's start with the part that the government is the one who blew us up. Let's start on this,” she opens the conversation about the political situation.

“The next thing is [that] the government stole all the money that is in Lebanon. All the politicians, they live in castles, they send their kids to schools in Switzerland for 140.000 USD tuition per year. And the people here have nothing.”

In a speech to the country on 21 September, the president of Lebanon, Michel Aoun, said that Lebanon “is going to hell if the situation remains as it is”, and adding that “what Lebanon needs most in light of all its successive crises is some resolution and solidarity so that it can rise and confront its problems.”

But solidarity isn’t what people receive from the government.

Diala recounts the days after the explosion: “Nobody helped us. I mean, we removed all the debris, all of the debris, even the debris on the streets and everything. We did it ourselves with volunteers. Not one official of the government came and asked us ‘Do you need any help? What happened? Anybody dead here? Anybody injured?’ Nothing!”

She is certain: “No, we will not have the support from the government. In fact, if any support comes to Lebanon through the government from outside, it will go into their pockets and not to the people.”

The politically active Lebanese has witnessed the events of the past decades as the explosion comes as just another link in a chain of tragic events such as the country’s civil war from 1975 till 1990 and the following Syrian occupation that lasted till 2005.

“No, we will not have the support from the government. In fact, if any support comes to Lebanon through the government from outside, it will go into their pockets and not to the people”, Diala Sammakieh, FLYP's CEO

In the following years, Lebanon struggled to form a new government with ongoing protests, clashes and always on the brink of another civil war. Hezbollah’s involvement in the neighbouring Syrian war and the incoming flow of Syrian refugees that resulted from this conflict, contributed to the political and economic instability of the country.

The poor socioeconomic situation led to protests in 2019 and 2020, that were initially started as demonstrations against increasing taxes but expanded to nation-wide protests against the sectarian rule, corruption, unemployment and lack of infrastructure and basic supply of gas, water and electricity.

Until this day, the economy of the country is in free fall. Lebanon’s public debt is worth 150 percent of its GDP, the currency lost almost 80 percent of its value, stated the Washington Post in June already. Food prices rise constantly, medication becomes sparse. People fear hunger and diseases.

And on top of all of this, the country deals with a global pandemic and the aftermath of the heaviest non-nuclear explosion in history.

It seems like the country stumbles from one crisis into the next. The people of Lebanon must have seen it all and yet, the horrific blast marks a new high on the scale of devastation and desperation. Along with the disappointment and anger over the government’s ignorance comes a new feeling of terror and fear: the people have lost the safe feeling of their homes.

When Diala Sammakieh first heard about an explosion in the city she wasn’t surprised. “I thought it was another car bomb. That's how cool we are with things. Oh, it's just another car bomb. Nothing out of the ordinary”. But this changed rapidly after she realised what had really happened.

“The people who died were not the people who were walking in the streets. With any other bomb, the people who die are in the streets. But the people who died mostly were people in their houses. Or they died inside their car because the cars enclosed on them. That's what's so sad. This is what's so disturbing. People were just sitting, chilling at home and then suddenly their lives changed forever.”

But the Lebanese are relentless. There is a saying in Lebanon that people have skin as thick as crocodile skin, which must be true if you take Diala as an example. While she faced questions of how to regain normality, how to get her business back up running and how to provide winter training space for her gym members, she created a fundraising project.

The aim of this project is to raise 30,000 USD with which she could build a mid-term solution. The idea is to recycle leftover pieces in order to build new walls and then to move to a new temporary location - until the company has earned enough money again to rebuild the original urban park. The temporary gym could be accommodated in an unused art exhibition centre as they provide high enough ceilings and are still closed due to COVID-19.

“Yes, we do want to open again. We want to send a message by opening something like this, it gives hope that basically, you can't destroy us. You can't kill us. You can't put us down”, Diala Sammakieh, FLYP's CEO

However, crowdfunding in Lebanon is rare and the project is risky for FLYP’s CEO. If the project raises too much money it would attract attention and therefore, could risk losing everything yet again.

So far, FLYP has managed to raise two thirds of their funding goal, mostly with the help from the international climbing scene. Professional athletes as well as various climbing gyms in Asia, the US and Europe have campaigned on social media in order to get the gym back running.

It is still a long way to go, for both her gym and her country. Diala knows this. But she is determined to fight and to send out a message to her country: “Yes, we do want to open again. We want to send a message by opening something like this, it gives hope that basically, you can't destroy us. You can't kill us. You can't put us down.”

When the blast wiped away the climbing dream

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