For Lebanese, recovery too heavy to bear a month after blast

A month after Beirut’s devastating explosion, Ghassan Toubaji still sits under a gaping hole in his ceiling — he can look up through the dangling plaster, wires and metal struts and the broken brick roof and see a bit of sky. Between that and Lebanon’s crumbled economy, he can’t go back to work. Teams of volunteers, a symbol of the help-each-other spirit that’s grown up from the failures of Lebanon’s corrupt political class, came by his apartment and assessed the damage.