S5: E20: Helena Husseini: Like it’s Going to be the Last Day
I usually live day by day. I always live every day like it's going to be the last day. We learned that during the war. We don't know when we're going to die. So, you live every day like it's going to be the last day. That's what I do.”
– Helena Husseini
Helena Husseini is the vice-president of BETA, Beirut Ethical Treatment for Animals. BETA is the first and largest shelter in Lebanon with 850 dogs, many cats, a few horses, and a couple of monkeys.
Helena is also an architect. She has been with BETA since 2006, a few months before the Lebanon War started. As bombs dropped nearby, she drove around in her Jeep saving the injured and abandoned dogs that had been left behind.
Since then, she has been rescuing animals during the too many crises and catastrophes that have plagued Lebanon, including the 2019 financial collapse, the riots, COVID-19, and the blast that decimated Beirut.
This conversation is really one that's about resilience, about grit, about what it means to show up every day, even when bombs are dropping, when there's no access to money, when people are starving, and no one knows what tomorrow will look like.
It's a conversation about what it means to choose the meaningful life. I hope that you are as completely floored by Helena and her stories as I was.
Learn More About BETA
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Support BETA’s "Surviving in Lebanon" fundraiser to provide shelter to their hundreds of rescue animals before they are left without a refuge.
Transcript:
Helena: [00:00:00] I usually live day by day. I always live every day like it's going to be the last day, and we learned that during the war, we don't know when you're going to die. So you live every day like it's going to be the last day. That's what I do.
Elizabeth: [00:00:22] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Helena Husseini. Helena is the vice president of Beta, Beirut Ethical Treatment for Animals, and she's an architect. Helena has been with Beta since 2006, rescuing animals all over Lebanon. This conversation is really one that's about resilience, about grit, about what it means to show up every day, even when bombs are dropping, when there's no access to money, when people are starving. It's a conversation about what it means to choose a meaningful life. Hi, Helena, it's so good to see you.
Helena: [00:01:35] Hi, how are you?
Elizabeth: [00:01:37] Great, thanks. So, Helena, I hear that you have 10 dogs and I know you live in Beirut. What is it like having 10 dogs in the middle of a city of two million people?
Helena: [00:01:45] I live in a building. I don't live in a home with a backyard. I live in a building. Now I'm lucky, my father was the architect of the building and half of the building, it’s my parents, my mom, my sisters, my brother in law. It's the families. But we still have two or three apartments. It's not the regular neighbors. At the beginning, they started to complain and then they decided to let it go because they know me. I grew up here. They saw me growing up, and they know I can be pretty crazy if they touch any of my dogs. They decided that they're going to let it go. With five girls in the family I'm number four, so all my sisters have dogs. My sister Maya has six. My sister Nadia has three. My sister Somble has one, my sister Nahla, one. So we all have dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:02:40] I love it. I love it. And everyone lives in the building. That's incredible, wow.
Helena: [00:02:45] I don't really cook, I mean, I know how to cook and I like to cook, but I don't have time. So I usually go to my mom. What do you have for lunch? No, I don't like it. I call my other sister. We have a very close family before COVID.
Elizabeth: [00:03:02] So let's go back for a minute. How did the war affect your life growing up in Lebanon?
Helena: [00:03:07] We had many wars in Lebanon. The big one was from seventy five to ninety one. I was in the Red Cross when I was 17 and 18. I remember when the war started in seventy five, we were in class.
Elizabeth: [00:03:21] How old were you in 75?
Helena: [00:03:23] I was 12. I lived through the war. When the war started nobody expected it to last that long. It started in April. So when we discovered that we were not going to go back to school, we went to France, where my uncle was married to a French woman from Marseille. We were French educated, at home we speak French. So we went to France for a few months thinking it's going to, you know, finish. We stayed for the summer. Then when we discovered that it's lasting, we stayed in school there for a year and then we went back to Lebanon for a year and then back again to France for a year. Then Lebanon three years and then France one year, and then in Lebanon two years. Then I went first to Florence to start architecture and then to Paris after a few months, to continue architecture for three years and then went to the US to finish architecture and get my master's degree. I stayed in the US for six years and then when I was done, I went back to Paris to work for two years in an architecture firm before going back to Lebanon to work with my dad. He had an architecture firm.
Elizabeth: [00:04:40] When you went back to Lebanon for good, what year was that?
Helena: [00:04:43] I went back to Lebanon for good in nineteen ninety four.
Elizabeth: [00:04:46] So the war had been over.
Helena: [00:04:48] Yeah, it was over in ninety one.
Elizabeth: [00:04:50] What was it like going back after being gone for so long?
Helena: [00:04:57] When I went back in ninety four, I went back with a lot of hopes and thinking that we're going to rebuild and it's going to be fine. We're going to get back to what we had before. Lebanon used to be a little paradise, especially in the sixties. It was horrible at the beginning, but still the situation was better than it is now because Hezbollah did not exist yet. The extremist was not settled deep in the government. It was still OK, even though we lost the war, and they signed some treaties that removed some of the powers for the Christians. You have to understand that before the 75 war, Christians were seventy five percent of the population. Now we're twenty three percent. Many Christians left the country, especially now after the blast, because it happened in the Christian area.
Elizabeth: [00:05:58] So you come back in ninety four, you're young, you're an architect, you're starting out and you're hopeful.
Helena: [00:06:04] I had my jeep and my German Shepherd had only one dog in my neighborhood. I was the only one with a dog with a dog. A big dog.
Elizabeth: [00:06:13] Did anyone have pets?
Helena: [00:06:17] No. In my neighborhood, the only other people who had dogs were a French couple who worked at the French Embassy that was situated at the time near my house, and they had to be shown. Otherwise, I had my huge big German shepherd. I would be walking my dog and people would just cross the street to the other side. Imagine, now you have dogs in my neighborhood, everywhere, in every building you have at least four or five dogs, at five o'clock, everybody goes to walk and jog and they have their dog. So I say, Well, it has changed. And now instead of one dog, I have 10.
Elizabeth: [00:06:59] So the next 10, 12 years you're working as an architect?
Helena: [00:07:03] I'm working as an architect and I’ve had my french boyfriend and we've been traveling Mongolia, the states, Brazil everywhere. It was perfect. Until one day in two thousand six, I lost my German Shepherd. He was 14 and I had at the time four dogs, the German Shepherd and the three Huskies. I was very depressed, and my sister asked me, why don't you come to the garden festival? You're going to see it's nice and it's fun. It was May summer, so I went. It was the first time I went and there was this kiosk where people had a donation box and it was written BETA. I went to see, Oh, what is this? So they told me, Oh, you don’t know? I said, no, I've never heard of BETA. What is BETA? So they told me BETA is Beirut for the ethical treatment of animals. We rescue dogs and cats. I said, Where are you located? They told me where and it was like five minutes away from my house. I said, Oh my God, I didn't know. So I went there during lunchtime or in the afternoon, I'll go there. After my work was done, I started to volunteer and the shelter we only had at the time 90 dogs that were renting a place from a boarding facility. They rented a few kennels with some play areas. So I volunteered. Then in July 2006, we woke up one day at eight o'clock in the morning under the bombs. They bombed the airport. It was terrible and we were at war.
Elizabeth: [00:08:51] Did you have any idea this was about to happen?
Helena: [00:08:53] People thought something was going to happen because Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers. That shelter was close to the southern suburbs where Hezbollah was located. It was like two minutes away. There was only one bridge between us and the southern suburbs, and we received some shrapnel in some of the kennels, and the dogs were terrified. It was horrible. So we were trying to see where we could relocate the dogs, where we could move and imagine it was only 90 dogs. So imagine now with eight hundred and fifty dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:09:30] I can't imagine actually, though, waking up at eight o'clock in the morning and bombs going off and being as casual as you sound right now. Well, I mean, I know you've been through a lot. You've seen a lot.
Helena: [00:09:42] I'm going to tell you, you have to look at the positive side of war. The positive side of war, you have no traffic jams because if you've been to Lebanon, the traffic in Lebanon is a nightmare. So now with the lockdown also, it's great. I can go everywhere because I have the paper of the organization. I'm allowed to go everywhere. It's great. No traffic. I know it's hard to say that, but when you live through the big war and what we saw. Two thousand six was hard, but not on the Christian, because even the Lebanese Army was not involved. It was between Hezbollah and Israel. But the only thing is in the southern suburbs, people left and in some of the pet shops, they just left the animals in the pet shop. We broke down some doors to get the animals out, and we still under the bombs will go every day and my Jeep Wrangler that I removed the the top so the Israeli plane can see, you know, because they saw everything. We had some bags of food, and women would go to those areas where nobody was there. The people left except the militia, Hezbollah. We'll put food for the dogs and of course, at the beginning, they'll come, What are you doing? You're not allowed to be here. So while we're feeding the dogs, one of the guys will take the kibbles and smell it. But still, we kept going and we got in touch with the ABC crew. We went with them to the south of Lebanon under the bombs to rescue from a pet shop, twp baboons, two macaque and one hyena. The hyena passed away on the way to the sanctuary. They broke her teeth and stuff, but the baboon and the macaque now are in Wales in the UK. We asked for help, first of all, because we needed a place to go, and a friend contacted me telling me there is this guy. He has an old pig farm that is abandoned. Maybe you can move there. It was far from the war site. It was fine, but we needed funds to be able to transform it into a dog shelter. We got some help from many organizations like the SPCA International. We got enough funds to work on it and we had to move the dogs and buses. At the same time, we were working on the farm that was abandoned. You had trees everywhere and garbage, so much garbage, and we had the dogs and at the same time we had to clean and arrange the areas.
Elizabeth: [00:12:31] How many of you were there doing this?
Helena: [00:12:33] Because when the war started in two thousand six, all the construction workers left Lebanon, they went back to Syria. So we were using the Lebanese plumber, electrician, engineer to do the work of the regular workers to clean, to build concrete block walls, to paint and to install the bathroom because there was nothing to tile the floor. We were doing all that, even though it wasn't our job, but we did not have a choice. We were like 10-12, not often better. There were some volunteers, but we still did the whole thing and we managed. There was this volunteer, this American woman who decided to come to Lebanon and help us. She was blonde, blue eyes and she flew to Syria, you know, during the war, we were still at war. She flew to Syria, took a cab from Damascus, crossed the border to come to Beirut. She stayed with us.
Elizabeth: [00:13:39] Who is this woman? That's amazing.
Helena: [00:13:40] She's amazing. Her name is Linda. At the time, it was Linda Nealon, she was married. She came and helped out, and she told us, You need to have the press. You ladies are beautiful. We were four women. Let's put some makeup on, you know, was two thousand six still young, it was the July, the summer, so we went to the hotel where all the journalists were CNN, ABC, NBC, and she got to talk to them because, you know, she's American, and they were asking her, What are you doing here? She told them, and they decided to come to the shelter and do a story. They did a story, and we managed to get the attention of Best Friend Animal Society in Utah. She said, ok, they are taking the dogs to the states because at one point people were leaving the country and they were dumping their animals because the boat, the military boat who came to pick up the French, the Americans, were not allowed to take dogs. So people were dumping them, they thought they were going to be gone only for a few days. Some dogs even were locked in homes that would contact us and we had to go rescue them from the apartment. Best Friend did come and took 149 dogs and 148 cats. They rented a huge cargo plane and in September they came and they took all 300 animals. They came at night with a huge 18 wheelers. We loaded all the animals. We went to the airport. We went to the back and the tarmac. We spent the whole night on the tarmac and were exhausted. We had to clean the crates when we arrived. Some dogs were carsick. Others, you know, they were afraid, they pooped, they peed. The workers at the airport did not want to touch the crates at the time. In 2006, they were not used to having dogs and sending them, so we had to clean and then we had to carry all the crates down. The porters refused to touch the crates that were Muslim. They didn't want to touch dogs. So we did the whole thing and then they put them on the pallet and stuff, and we waited.
Elizabeth: [00:16:00] You had to carry 300 crates down to the plane.
Helena: [00:16:02] They were not the big ones. Not only me, there were five of us.
Elizabeth: [00:16:06] Yeah I know but still. That's nuts.
Helena: [00:16:09] We waited till the plane arrived, we kept giving them some water, staying with them. Then when they loaded them on the plane, we were so exhausted I will send you a picture.
Elizabeth: [00:16:22] That's incredible.
Helena: [00:16:25] I went to Utah, but afterwards three of the BETA members flew with the team, the Best Friend team on the cargo plane. It took two days because, you know, they had to stop many times and clean, and they told me the smell was terrible.
Elizabeth: [00:16:40] What was it like seeing these dogs that were just leaving a war?
Helena: [00:16:44] Oh my God, I cried. I cried so much. Not only that, I cried the next day in the morning when I went to the shelter. It's like silence. We only had some puppies and there was no noise, no barking, nothing. I mean, we were happy, yeah, but it was very weird, and we love those dogs. Everytime a dog travels, every time a dog is adopted, I'm happy. But at the same time, I do cry. I cry because, you know, that's why I have 10 dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:17:24] Well, you have 10 and you also have eight hundred and fifty.
Helena: [00:17:27] I know the name of ninety nine percent of them.
Elizabeth: [00:17:33] The amazing. Yeah. So these dogs all get on a plane, they go to Utah. They go to one of the nicest sanctuaries in the world.
Helena: [00:17:40] It's beautiful, beautiful. The horses, it's amazing. They found them amazing homes. Some of them were not spayed or neutered, so they had to do it because, you know, a lot of them were rescued during the war. When we first started and we were spaying and neutering, people would get upset that we spayed and neutering because it wasn't in the norms to spay and neuter. Now everybody is doing it. We started to rescue again. We found the shelter very fast. The problem now, more and more people have dogs, and it's a double edged sword. Because the more people buy dogs or get dogs, the more you find dogs on the street, especially dogs who cannot survive on the street like small size dogs, house dogs, not the strays that were born on the street and know how to survive on the street. We have some dogs who have been with us since two thousand six.
Elizabeth: [00:18:45] It's like here they buy dogs and then they decide, Oh, this is too much for me.
Helena: [00:18:49] They buy dogs to have this dog for the summer, for the kids to play in the mountain house. Or they decide it's too much work or we got the dog for the kids, but now they're grown they don't want it anymore, take it. Or, we have a dog but he's old, so we can exchange it for a younger dog.
Elizabeth: [00:19:09] Culturally, pets are so new, right? So a lot of people just have zero experience.
Helena: [00:19:16] Zero experience. Or they get designer dogs depending on what's the flavor of the year. This year it's Akita and Swiss Shepherd. Last year it was the Ciao Ciao, and some of them are so aggressive they bring them from the back backyard breeder in Russia and Ukraine. They're horrible. Of course, now it's a lot of teacup Pomeranian. Yap, Yap, Yap, Yap. Many people now have Malinois because it's so in. Malinois that we rescued the past three years now in the states that are adopted by US servicemen or veterans because they are friendly. So we send them and we are very strict in the adoption. We do interviews and out of 10 people applying for dogs, maybe we accept two, on a good day.
Elizabeth: [00:20:20] Is most of your adoption within the country or outside?
Helena: [00:20:23] We have both, but usually the one within Lebanon. 50 percent of the dogs are returned. We have a dog that was adopted 11 years ago. He was one year old when they took him. Now he's 12, they returned him after 11 years because they are traveling. They don't want to be bothered.
Elizabeth: [00:20:46] That's heartbreaking.
Helena: [00:20:47] It's horrible. It's horrible.
Elizabeth: [00:20:48] That is heartbreaking. So this is two thousand six you're working as an architect. This is like the next 15 years, pretty much, you're working as an architect and you are at the shelter.
Helena: [00:21:01] Actually, I took over my father's firm in '94. I was working nonstop till 2006, when I got involved after the war. I got more involved with BETA and I became the vice president and became even more involved. So I didn't have a lot of time for architecture. I started to delegate, but I kept signing the plans and stuff. But I would not do construction sites, I'll just do the design. Then I was more involved in the rescue and fundraising. We were very active before COVID. We have a network of amazing people everywhere.
Elizabeth: [00:21:42] You designed the new shelter?
Helena: [00:21:43] I designed the new shelter, yes.
Elizabeth: [00:21:44] It's unbelievable. Will you describe it?
Helena: [00:21:48] All the dogs are in play areas and are very social with each other, so they play, they run. So I didn't want to lose the sense of freedom for the dogs. So in the new shelter, because the land is like a very steep slope, we had to do things like leveling with the steps. Every level the dogs are all friends with each other. I have bungalows on it. Every bungalow has 10 kennels. Every kennel has its own outdoor area. When it rains, I don't want to release the dogs everywhere, but at least I want them to have an outdoor space to go in and out. But during the day when it's sunny, everything is open. Every level is all fenced, so they stay free. They run everywhere. They have fun and stuff. But at the same time, as soon as it rains or if it's cold, they have their indoor space, an indoor room with beds, with blankets. The third phase, when we finish the dog area, we have the horses, the donkey, we have two monkeys. But the third phase is going to be the cat areas and the offices and a small clinic. That way, we can spay and neuter our dogs there. We have a vet who will come. We still need funding. We have a go fund me set up. Because we registered BETA in the US, we managed to last that long after what happened in Lebanon. We had an economical crisis and it started in October with riots. The bank took all the money. It's like an accumulation of bad luck for the Lebanese people. The Lebanese pound crashed.
Elizabeth: [00:23:33] When was this?
Helena: [00:23:33] October 2019. Before October 2019, for one dollar, you had one thousand five hundred Lebanese pounds. Now for one dollar is eight thousand seven hundred fifty pounds. So suddenly people with a good salary end up with one hundred and fifty dollars a month. All the prices went up. Even though you had dollars in the bank, they would not give you dollars that will tell you you can take Lebanese pounds. People were starving and they went down the street rioting. We had no more dollars in the country. Even if you have millions of dollars in the bank, you could not get a single dollar. Of course, if you want to buy anything, if you want to fix a car, buy an oven, everything, whatever, they don't want a credit card, they don't want cheques. They only want cash dollars. Then the riots and the riots and people starving and all the bad luck after bad luck and then the blast. The blast happened in warehouse 12. That is a warehouse for Hezbollah. The chemicals were stuck next to the arsenal of one of the arsenal of Hezbollah. That's why the destruction was terrible. I can see the port from my terrace because I'm high up. It started with a small fire. I saw the fire. My dog started to go nuts, barking everywhere. My TV was moving. Then I said, What? What's happening? I thought that was going to be an earthquake, so I went outside on my terrace. The dogs kept barking, and then the blast. I'm like ten minutes away from the port on the highway when there is no traffic and I was pushed back with a blast and my building, my windows did not break because it's all open. But the neighbors were in the mountains and their house is all closed because of the pressure. The glass broke and we were so far everywhere. Even they heard the blast and felt it in Cyprus. They felt it in Cyprus. In the mountains, they felt it. We were lucky, for one thing, if it happened in September. We would have more people who died because it was in August before the 15 in Lebanon. The 15th of August is the holiday. It's the mother of Jesus Mary. It's Mary's celebration, the week before the 15th, everybody celebrates in the mountains. They have fireworks, they have church services, festivals and stuff. Because it's the Christians and it was a Christian area, everybody was in the mountains, homes or renting mountain houses. So not a lot of people were in the apartment. Otherwise we would have had more people who died.
Elizabeth: [00:26:49] What did you think was happening when you saw it?
Helena: [00:26:51] At first, I thought it was maybe a car bomb or a terrorist attack. Nobody expected that. The news started to come and on WhatsApp and on Facebook, the video started to come and we were saying, Oh my God, what happened? People were saying, Yeah, they put a bomb for the prime minister and and they were saying, you know, how Lebanon is a small country? They started to talk and then after the truth came out and the reality and I had friends there and I was going to be there at six o'clock with my two other friends because for the past month and a half, every evening at six o'clock, we are in this cafe facing the port to have the daiquiris or mojitos. This bar does not exist anymore, and three people die in this bar. It was wiped out and you know why we didn't go because I just came from the shelter. I was exhausted. I had a bubble bath. I called my friend. I said, Come on, I don't feel like getting dressed again to go back out. Let's leave it till tomorrow. We were three women, we always do that. My friend Michelle said, OK, you're right, Rita, who lives across the street from the bar. She said, I'm here in case you change your mind. She was getting out of her car when it happened. She was ejected from one side of the sidewalk to the other. Her house was completely destroyed. She lost everything, everything.
Elizabeth: [00:28:23] But she was OK.
Helena: [00:28:24] Her mom's car, the apartment, her two cats disappeared. We looked for them. She found them three weeks later. We went right away, by the way, to start trying to help. It was a nightmare, even as during the war when I was in the Red Cross, I was at the American Embassy when it was bombed, you know, removing the corpse, but it's nothing compared to what we saw that day and the next day and the next day. We were there the next day at nine o'clock in the morning, helping and feeding the dogs at the port, helping people be reunited with the animals. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. Of course, the government is not paying anything. We don't have FEMA, you have either your insurance pays or you pay from your pocket. People lost everything. Nothing is left, nothing. All the new buildings, the new downtown is all facing the port. Nothing. Nothing. The cars who were on the highway. You see the cars projected. One guy spent 24 hours in the sea. He was ejected into the sea. They found him 24 hours later in the water, alive. I mean, the Mediterranean is warm, it's not cold and it was in July, actually it's hot. And we have no sharks.
Elizabeth: [00:29:53] That's true. That's true.
Helena: [00:29:58] People want to fix their homes and they can't because everybody wants, you know, to change the aluminum, to change the glass, the windows to clean. Everybody wants cash, money and nobody has it to fix it. If you go, it's like a ghost town. They can't get the money.
Elizabeth: [00:30:19] People still can't get money right, like the financial situation has not stopped.
Helena: [00:30:23] Unless it's fresh money. Fresh money means somebody wire the money from abroad to their account. The fresh money they can get, but the money they already had, they cannot. For the moment.
Elizabeth: [00:30:34] I mean, things were horrific pre blast and then the blast.
Helena: [00:30:39] And then COVID and now we're in lockdown. In Lebanon, you have many people who work daily. They have their salary, the daily salary, and they cannot work. Those are the people who don't have the means to put money on the side. So they're starving and they're not getting any help from the government. The government does not give you any money, anything. So you have some NGOs who are bringing boxes of food, bread and stuff. But still, it's not much. They can't pay their bills. Today in the city of Tripoli, in the north of Lebanon, no yesterday, there were people on the street rioting. This guy said I'd rather die of COVID than die of starvation. I need to feed my family. I'm willing to kill to feed my family if they keep the lockdown. So, it's terrible, and because of the economic crisis, a lot of medicine is not available either for animals or for people. A lot of products are not available anymore because they cannot send money abroad to buy the merchandise and bring it because they can't get the money.
Elizabeth: [00:31:58] So what do you say? Because I know many people must say this to you, and trust me, I would not and I do not agree with it, but I know many people must say when there's so much suffering happening around you every day. How are you helping animals? Do many people say this?
Helena: [00:32:18] Oh yeah, oh yeah. How can you help animals when people are starving, when kids are starving? How can you ask for money, when we can't even feed our family? That's why we need international help. I understand it's very difficult to ask for financial help in Lebanon, when they can't even feed their kids. Plus, after the blast, many people did not have blankets, did not have clothes. So a lot of the people outside the blast zone were donating clothes, blankets and stuff. We even help. We did. We help. We help animals because our slogan is, it's the planet too. We all live on this planet. There are so many organizations in Lebanon to help kids, old people, and those with special needs, but there are only very few in Lebanon, for animals. We help the animals, and at the same time when we help the animals, we help our society.
Elizabeth: [00:33:21] You've been doing this for so long and you've been doing it through so many hardships and wars and blasts and economic, you know, complete failures. You've seen so much suffering your entire life and you've stayed really steadfast with a very clear mission. BETA has as an organization, it's incredible.
Helena: [00:33:42] We started in two thousand six. I remember we were trying to cross a highway to get to a dog who was hit by a car, and he was on the left side of the fast lane and we crossed the highway to get the dog and then cross back. You had people honking and giving us the finger and getting upset with us and stuff. Now, people, when we do that, they slow down. They clap their hands. Some even stop to see if we need help. This did not happen before. We are part of the change and we are very proud of it. I'm proud when we go like, for example, now you have checkpoints because it's a lockdown. So when the police stopped me at the checkpoint to ask why I'm on the road and I took the paper, I said, I'm BETA. They say, Oh, OK, go. Good luck.
Elizabeth: [00:34:35] That is how you shift culture and when people start caring about everything that's around them, not just their immediate, whether it be even their immediate family versus their neighbor. Same as people versus animals. It shifts everything.
Helena: [00:34:50] Sometimes I say, Oh, I should never have come back to Lebanon. I should have stayed in the U.S. but in nineteen ninety one, when I got my master, I could have stayed in the U.S. I was allowed to have one year for my practical training. I didn't stay, my friends who were with me, they stayed and now they still live in the U.S. are still architects. Maybe if I did, I would have stayed in architecture. But at the same time, when I saved all those dogs, I said, that's why we do what we do. When we get videos or pictures or messages from people who adopted our dogs and are thanking us and saying that they can't live without them anymore. They are part of their life, their family, and that's why we do what we do.
Elizabeth: [00:35:39] Going back to what you were saying a minute ago about you could have stayed in the U.S.. I've been an architect your entire career and you wouldn't have lived in this incredible building with your sisters and your parents and your neighbors and all the nieces and nephews and friends and thousands and thousands of dogs that you've rescued over the years. All these animals you've given second, third chances to that are all over the world now. Doing it through so much hardship and showing up every single day over and over again.
Helena: [00:36:44] We're a good team.
Elizabeth: [00:36:45] It's like it's the definition of meaning. I mean, your life, you chose a meaningful life.
Helena: [00:36:17] I want to tell you something. In two thousand and two, you know, in Lebanon, you have people who read the card or who read the coffee, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:36:29] Like tarot cards or coffee beans.
Helena: [00:36:30] Or the Lebanese Turkish coffee, it's the way they read the future. I was at a friend's house and she had this woman who can read the future. So she started to read because I had just broken up with Jean-Pierre, and I wanted to see if she sees him and my future. I swear to God, I had nothing. I only had my own dogs, but I was not involved in rescue or anything, so I was still a full time architect. I was building a hospital at the time, and she was looking and said, OK. Well, first of all, I know what you want to know. You're not going to see him now. You're not going to be with him, but maybe in the very far future. And actually we got back together a few months ago.
Elizabeth: [00:37:19] Wow, so years later.
Helena: [00:37:21] Twenty four years later.
Elizabeth: [00:37:24] Yeah, she was good, this woman.
Helena: [00:37:25] Yeah. But then she told me, Your professional life is going to change completely. You're going to change your career, it's going to be completely different from what you're doing. I said, no, I mean, I'm an architect. I don't know what else to do. I have my father's firm. I'm not going to close it. I'm an architect. I'm going to stay. She said, no, no, you're going to do something the opposite of what you're doing and you're going to like it. But you're not going to make any money. You're going to stay poor, but you're going to be happy. I said, OK. You have to know I usually live day by day. I always live every day like it's going to be the last day. We learned that during the war, we don't know when you're going to die. So you live every day like it's going to be the last day. That's what I do.
Elizabeth: [00:38:17] So twenty four years you didn't see Jean-Pierre.
Helena: [00:38:21] No, we kept in touch. One day in 2020, we were talking and talking and then he decided, OK, in July, I'm coming to visit for a week. You know, when you were here, I only had one dog. Now I have 10, so different. No, but he loves dogs. He has a dog, too.
Elizabeth: [00:38:46] After doing this work for 16 years. Are you hopeful?
Helena: [00:38:52] I'm hopeful. Yeah. I'm hopeful. You know, I always think positive to attract the positive. With my experience in life, iIf you're always negative, nothing is going to work. I'm positive because we're building an amazing shelter with the help of amazing people all over the world. I'm hopeful for the future and I'm hopeful to save more animals to find them amazing homes. I'm hopeful why? Because when I drive now in my neighborhood, the fact you have a lot of people with dogs, you have a lot of people with mixed breed dogs, which a few years ago you did not have. It's a step forward. It's in our area and if you go to other places in Lebanon, it's horrible with the animals and the poisoning and the shooting. We have so many dogs that are blind. They were shot in the face, so many tripods. They were either shot or hit by cars. So many dogs were poisoned and shot. What we have are the lucky ones because there are so many to still save and not enough time, not enough space and not enough money. We have to stay hopeful.
Elizabeth: [00:40:10] Helena, you're incredible. Thank you for this. Thank you so much.
Helena: [00:40:12] Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:40:24] To learn more about Helena, about BETA and to go to BETA’s, go fund me, go to our website, we will have links to everything. It’s SpeciesUnite.com. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @Species Unite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, it's Patreon.com/SpeciesUnite. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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