2020-October-16

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The Day I Will Never Forget

BY FARAH ALI HASSAN · ENTERPRISE ARCHITECT · DUBAI

Do you ever feel like you were in the right place at the right time, or that someone or something is looking out for you?

That is exactly how I felt on August 4, 2020.

I was on vacation in my hometown of Beirut. I had many errands to run because the COVID-19 lockdown had just lifted. Tragically, no one coud have predicted what that day held for the people of Lebanon.

Farah, her brother, and their parents just days before the explosion.

I went about scheduling my day, and although I was on PTO, there was an important meeting that I wanted to attend. It was a rare opportunity for me and a group of female colleagues to meet Ruba Borno, a Cisco leader that I look up to.

My entire day was scheduled around being at my house in Beirut at 4 p.m. to take the call.

5:00 p.m.

The call went great. It was such a delight to meet with a group of highly accomplished females at Cisco. Little did I know how much the conversation would later resonate with the events to come.

Some of the attendees on the call, including myself, come from places that have witnessed political instability and wars. We discussed how we’d had to leave our home countries to create a better future for ourselves.

I’d left Lebanon for a place that would support my work ambitions, and that’s how I ended up at Cisco Dubai. I wouldn’t say I am a war-child, because I wasn’t born during the civil war in Lebanon. But my parents did, and they have a vivid memory of the 2006 war.

What was to come is something that neither myself, my parents, nor many of whom witnessed the civil war in Lebanon had seen before.

6:08 p.m.

My father and I had just left my grandmother’s house to pick up my mom and head to the mountains. Suddenly, boom! A very strange, extremely loud, terrifying sound exploded around us.

For what seemed like ages but was only about five seconds, everything went silent and froze in front of me, except for the buildings that were shaking from left to right. “What is this? Are we under attack?“ I muttered to my dad. I was shaking and praying.

As I realized what happened, chaos erupted around us. People were running, some were screaming, many were thrown on the floor due to the intensity of the blast. People were helping each other.

I felt like I was I was living in a Hollywood movie.

The aftermath of the explosion.

Fight or Flight Takes Hold

Sadly, like most Lebanese, I know what a bomb sounds like.

It’s no surprise that my immediate thoughts were, “We’re under attack, we need to escape! There might be more explosions!” No doubt most of the city had a similar reaction.

It would be a long, torturous 20 minutes before we learned it was not an attack. Shaken but thankfully not hurt, we called Mom. She was fine, and so was Grandma.

My brother called to tell us that he had been taken to the hospital. He was OK, but he’d had to run, while being bombarded by debris, with no shoes on for 15 minutes. He eventually found someone who could help him get to the hospital to get stiches.

As I write this, images of the incident circle in my head. Nobody should have to go through this.

It was horrifying.

Many people had even worse encounters with the blast. I cannot imagine what they went through. We were all traumatized and deeply wounded in a grieving city.

That Was a Close Call

As I reflect back, I can only think that had it not been for the Cisco meeting that I decided to attend, I would have been on my way to the mountains and directly in the path of the explosion that rocked the Beirut port.

All the errands that I had finished up that morning were nearby the explosion area — the place I should have been had I done my errands later that day instead of being on my call.

What might have been is a scenario that I don’t even want to think of. Call it fate, destiny, or whatever, I’m just thankful that I decided to attend my meeting. It’s definitely an experience that I will never forget.

Farah with volunteer colleagues on the clean-up team: Karim Kattouf, Ryan Kadri, Rabah Zarzour, and Hanin Joudieh, whose daughters also helped out.

Helping Is the One Thing We All Can Do

Thankful to be alive, my first instinct was to go to the ground and help. I reached out to “Lebanese at Cisco,” a Webex Teams space with more than 192 Lebanese Cisconians from all around the world to see how I could volunteer.

Six of us got together on August 8 to partner with an NGO to help clean up the house of a woman who was severely impacted by the blast. It was heartbreaking to walk down the streets that used to be buzzing with restaurants, now filled with glass and debris, and those buildings that were left, barely standing with gaping holes.

This was not the Beirut we know.

In this terrible time, it was beautiful to see people coming together to help each other. I witnessed heartwarming acts of humanity.

Thanks to the Cisco Foundation, a $25,000 Beirut Explosion matching funds campaign was launched to support the Lebanese Red Cross and International Medical Corps.

Rising Back Stronger

The blast altered so many lives, and we will remain haunted by the catastrophe. We all have been impacted —physically or mentally, or both.

However, I believe that the human brain has this magical power to instinctively cope and help us overcome traumatic events.

Lebanese people have proven over the years to be resilient, and we will rise back stronger.