Some of our Sisters in Montana, Lebanon
The war in the Middle East has widened. Iran is now part of it, and the region that was already exhausted has lurched further into uncertainty. Sr Paoula Mourad is from Lebanon. She has been in Ireland for several months now, working on the OLA Justice Desk, and she carries all of this with her in the way that people do when the place they come from is somewhere that does not allow you to look away. When we sat together recently, she spoke for a long time. About the sisters still there, about the people living alongside them, about what this latest period has cost and what it continues to cost. She spoke without drama and without distance.
What follows is drawn from that conversation.
The aircraft are audible through the night. One of the Sisters described it to Sr Paoula recently – from two in the morning until six, the planes pass overhead and there is no sleep. The day begins in exhaustion. Monday morning begins that way. The school week begins that way, for teachers and children both.
Sr Paoula described the sound of it: the sister calling her mid-conversation, asking, do you hear the airplanes? The aircraft are always above our heads. Even those not in the direct areas of bombardment are living under a sky that is not their own.
When the displacement intensified in recent months, schools across Lebanon closed. Then they reopened to house families with nowhere else to go. The government directed official schools and universities to receive people arriving from the heavily bombed regions. Classrooms were emptied of furniture, benches pushed to the walls. Families were assigned rooms, one family per classroom. The enclosed winter playground became a shared kitchen. Bathrooms became communal. Children who had learned in those rooms were now attempting to study online – most of them traumatised, some themselves displaced, some whose teachers were in similar positions.
The private schools where OLA sisters work move between opening and closing. Online teaching continues, incompletely, in conditions that Sr Paoula described plainly as “not good for study”. Can you imagine your child studying in this context? She did not ask it as a rhetorical question.
The OLA have been present in Lebanon since 1932. The first community opened in Salima, in what is now the Metn region, with a kindergarten and primary school. Sr Paoula spoke of meeting a man in his mid-sixties recently who told her he had been a student there when he was three years old. The school is now closed. The convent is still there. The memory runs long.
A second school followed in 1935, built on a large plot of land, and a third community opened later near the capital. Montana was established after that, a retreat house in the hills set among pine trees and with a view of the sea. This is where the congregation gathers and where groups come for reflection and spiritual accompaniment.
Each house served a particular moment, a particular need, and most of these communities are still there.
The community gathers in front of the 300 year old Chapel in Salima
Before public education systems developed after the Second World War, missionary sisters and brothers were often the only providers of schooling in rural areas, and in many Lebanese villages the OLA school was simply where education happened. Families travelled from surrounding areas to attend. Sr Paoula has seen what that built over time. It is personal for her. She had met the man who remembered being three years old.
There is a history that belongs to OLA in Lebanon, and to what presence has come to mean there. After one of the earlier conflicts ended, communities that had dispersed were slow to return, and the families who had left were afraid to go back. A bishop in one region wanted to call people home, to re-establish a Christian presence in an area that had been largely abandoned, but no one came. He invited Sisters. Three women went – only three, to a region where they were the only Christians remaining. They were afraid. They kept their windows closed through the summer nights. But they stayed.
People came back.
Convent and School and part of village in Kab Elias during the winter
Sr Paoula told this story without flourish. It was not an account of heroism. It was an account of what presence costs and what it produces. When Sisters come, when they remain, it means something to the people. It is a language that communities in Lebanon have learned to read over a long time. Sr Paoula described it in a single sentence: as long as the sisters are there, the situation is not as bad as it looks. A small light, she said, in a large darkness.
Now, with the region at war on multiple fronts, the picture inside Lebanon has changed again. This time, the people coming to the sisters are not asking for food or medicine; that work has been taken up by the municipalities, stretched to absorb the scale of displacement. What people want now is different. They want to speak.
The tension is visible in small things. In queues, where people once waited with the patience of those who have learned to wait, there is now an edge. People are quick to anger, quick to lash out. The composure that ordinary life requires is in short supply. When people come to the convent and sit and speak, the sisters say, you can feel them begin to relax. They come carrying something they have not been able to put down anywhere. For a time, they put it down there.
This witnessing is not a new role for the sisters, but the demand for it is sharper now, more frequent, more immediate. The sisters’ role has not expanded into organising aid or coordinating resources, as they have in some previous conflicts. They are simply there, available, listening, and in this moment that is what is needed.
The economic picture is one that does not resolve quickly, and Sr Paoula was clear that it will not. Lebanon’s economy runs on services, tourism, healthcare, banking, and all three have been severely affected. The damage to these industries accumulates across time and in ways that will take years to work through.
The hotels, not only local establishments but international properties too, along with restaurants and the commerce around them, have lost their summer season before it began. People who had planned to come have cancelled. A summer lost is not recovered by the season that follows, because trust takes longer than a single year to rebuild.
Major hospitals were struck, and the equipment inside, built up over years of investment and at considerable cost, was destroyed. Many of the staff have lost their positions. Healthcare workers who had trained for years in one of the region’s most respected medical systems have been left without work. The patients who previously travelled from across the Arab world specifically for the quality of care available in Lebanon can no longer come. That does not return quickly either.
Families who have managed school fees for years can no longer pay. Their children are embedded in these schools, some of them for five, six, seven years. But the family income has been lost because industry has collapsed, because the ripple of loss spreads. One OLA school employs 125 teachers and 60 additional staff. The salaries are payable at the end of every month. The mathematics of it is unsparing.
Sr Paoula spoke too of the banking sector, which Lebanon had built into one of its most significant assets over decades. The system of financial confidentiality drew deposits from across the Arab world. That trust was fragile before this crisis. It has not recovered.
Microsoft had an office in Beirut. After the explosion in 2020, it closed and moved to Dubai. When a company of that scale leaves, it takes more than jobs with it; it tells everyone watching that Lebanon is not a place where things can be built with any certainty. Young people who had worked in those offices, in those hotels, who had used their salaries to fund a sibling’s university place or to service a loan, found themselves without income, without prospects, and without the stability that had allowed them to hold other things together. One loss pulled the next behind it. Sr Paoula kept returning to the connections between these losses. You cannot separate the war from the education system, the healthcare, the economy: in Lebanon, these are not separate things.
The community in the south has been closed for two years, since the bombardment of southern Lebanon by Israel made it impossible for the sisters to remain safely. That conflict, which predates the current wider regional war but is continuous with it, has not stopped. Sr Paoula was direct about it: You stay, you risk a bomb on your head. The sisters are in Beirut. The house is there.They will go back when it is possible to go back.
The instability is not only physical. Sr Paoula has two sisters and a brother who are no longer in Lebanon; they are in America, as many Lebanese families now have members scattered across the world. The proportion of Christians in Lebanon has changed significantly over forty years, from majority to minority, as emigration has continued and communities have not been replenished. The Christians who remain, she said, have their faith. That is all they have. The Pope prays, and the people are grateful. But prayer does not pay a teacher’s salary or bring a family home. The loneliness of that sits in the room with us without self-pity and without accusation. Just as something that is true.
Sr Paoula Mourad has been in Ireland only a short while. She holds her home while living here where the sky is quiet. She spoke for a long time and she spoke carefully, and when she had finished, what she left in the room was not despair exactly, but something closer to the reality of a situation that has no near resolution, and in which the people she loves are living one day at a time, in faith.
The sisters are still there. That is what she said, more than once, in different ways. They are still there.
Sr Paoula Mourad OLA is from Lebanon and is currently on mission in Ireland, where she serves on the OLA Ireland Justice Desk.
Old Rawda Convent
Spiritual Animation in Rawda
Convent in Kab Elias in the Bekaa Valley