ZEFTA, Lebanon — The war closed in. The doctors fled the asylum. The patients took over.
At the Fanar Hospital for Psychiatric Disorders, 250 patients are languishing through this hallucinatory summer of war. The phone lines have been bombed to silence. Family members can't get here. Food is running out. Only a few nurses remain.
And the drugs that hold the patients' shattered psyches together will be gone by the time this newspaper is in print.
At night, Israeli jets scream through the stars and missiles thunder down onto nearby hilltops of this village northwest of Nabatiyeh. That's when the patients howl and scream. They crouch under their cots, race wildly through the hallways. They cram themselves into corners.
"It's very heavy and the pressure, you know? We can feel the pressure," says Mounir Jamal Eddin, a 60-year-old patient in dark, baggy clothes nervously hanging around the front gate. "The whole place starts to shake and we can't do anything."
Beyond the hospital gates, the landscape is scarred and empty. Shutters are rolled down tightly over shops. Only a few men affiliated with the Islamic militant group Hezbollah loiter in the ghostly streets. As afternoon wanes toward evening, explosions begin to rumble anew across the valleys.
Laila Hashem doesn't seem to notice. She sits cross-legged on the linoleum floor in her nightgown and sings a love song in Arabic. A pale, chubby young woman, her eyes probe the room impatiently.
"Make a party for me this evening," she entreats nobody in particular. Then she begins to sing again. "I will fall in love with you," she trills.
A heavyset woman with dark hair and a fleshy face flops stomach-down on her bed and kicks her feet in the air like a schoolgirl. "Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley," she chants. The room is packed with women, curled together on the mattresses. They pick at their hair, stare at the walls and giggle into the empty air. Somebody is moaning. "Let's twist again ... ," one of the women sings.
With a quarter of the population driven from their homes and the death toll inching toward 1,000, Lebanon has sunk into despair. At the Fanar, the desperation is more pointed. They painted an enormous red cross on the roof in hope of protecting themselves from warplanes. But below that crude shield, the patients need medications.
Three exhausted nurses in a panic sift through the dregs of their psychiatric medicine. Straining to make the drugs last a little longer, they carefully sliced each pill in half Friday.
