AFTER the BLAST

When a catastrophic ammonium nitrate explosion ripped through Beirut on August 4, it killed more than 200 people, wounded thousands of others and left 300,000 displaced. Sarah Ayoub talks to the women on the frontline about the anguish, the aftermath and, now, the recovery effort

- Sarah Ayoub

The NURSE

Pamela Zeinoun was working her shift at Saint George Hospital University Medical Center at the time of the blast. As her colleagues lay injured around her, she rescued three premature babies and walked five kilometres to another hospital with them in her arms.

Pamela Zeinoun was a few days shy of her 26th birthday. She remembers the floor shaking beneath her feet at the Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where she had been working since graduating from university five years earlier. Buried under rubble, glass and metal shelves, and with her colleagues motionless and bleeding around her, Zeinoun realised the incubators that had housed the unit’s three premature babies – 15 to 20 days old – had shifted from their positions upon impact, and forced herself to act.

“Everything was destroyed,” she recalls. “I had rubble above me, next to me, on the floor. I wasn’t able [to move] at first because there was a bit of weight on me, but I thought that these babies needed someone, so I just got myself up and ran towards them.”

Zeinoun was relieved to find none of the babies – who were born at 30 weeks and weighed less than two kilograms each – had been injured, despite their fragile bodies. “One of them was crying when I reached him, but the two girls were safe and asleep,” she says. “I just grabbed them and ran. But I was very scared, because I still did not know what was happening.”