BEIRUT | White smoke, an orange explosion then a black cloud … These are the last things that Rony Mecattaf saw in Beirut before a gigantic explosion ravaged his city, and his eye.
“I lost all of my side vision and maybe even my image. When I look at myself in the mirror, I lost the perception I had of myself with my two eyes, ”says this 59-year-old psychotherapist.
The blast on August 4 at the port of the Lebanese capital left at least 177 dead and injured more than 6,500 people, most of them by shards of glass.
At least 400 of them have had eye injuries, more than 50 required surgery and at least 15 are blind, according to data collected by hospitals in the Beirut area.
Ten days after the tragedy, sitting in his office, Mr. Mecattaf continues to wipe up the blood which still sometimes flows from a long scar streaking his right eyelid.
“The effect of the explosion,” he said, pointing to his wound.
He was sitting on a friend’s balcony, looking out over the harbor, when the blast propelled him to the front door like “dust.” He still doesn’t know if it was the door or a shard of glass that mutilated his eye.
His doctors told him that his eye might have burst from the blast alone, making it more difficult to repair.
“Stages of mourning”
It was thanks to a “series of angelic interventions” in the hours which followed the tragedy that Mr. Mecattaf was able to be treated.
A stranger on a moped crisscrossed the debris-strewn streets like “a madman” to bring him to a hospital, but it was too damaged.
A nun then put him in his car to drive him to another hospital, also out of service due to the explosion.
“The city was a vision of hell,” recalls Mr. Mecattaf, who was finally able to undergo surgery in Saïda, in southern Lebanon, thanks to a friend. But after two hours of trying, the doctors couldn’t save his eye.
“Half blind”
The blast was so powerful that it shattered many windows, sometimes throwing shards more than five miles from the harbor.
In a hospital north of Beirut, Maroun Dagher does his weekly check-up. For this 34-year-old IT developer, the explosion “changed everything”.
As with anyone who has lost binocular vision, the simplest tasks are now a challenge. Serving yourself a coffee without spilling it is a feat, he says.
His face found itself glued to a window on a street very close to the harbor and a two-centimeter shard of glass pierced his left eye.
The first days after the explosion, the pain “was only physical”. But his agony did not end there. A few days later, he learns that his vision is surely permanently affected.
“I have dreams where I can see everything, but then I wake up,” he explains. “This is where I feel bad emotions springing up (…) You just wake up half blind”, he said
“The safest place”
Makhoul al-Hamad, 43, is from the town of Minbej in northern Syria. This construction worker, who has lived in Beirut since 1995, believed that his neighborhood, Mar Mikhaël, was “the safest place in Lebanon” and definitely safer than his country at war.
This is why he brought his wife and four children to Beirut in 2016, including his daughter Sama, born in Minbej, when their city was under the yoke of the Islamic State (IS) group.
Sama was sitting a few feet from a window on the day of the explosion. Shards of glass pierced her eye and the five-year-old was bleeding profusely.
A week later, on the roof of their damaged house, Sama smiled, his eye covered with a bandage. In the distance stretches the port, almost leveled.
With her retina fully bursting, doctors told her parents their little girl should undergo restorative surgery overseas. But they don’t have the means.
“I would have preferred that all the suffering that struck people fall on me instead, if it had saved Sama,” says Mr. Hamad, hugging his little girl.