In Beirut, Mail Goes Through--at $20 a Letter : Lebanon: Taxi drivers brave mined roads, snipers and shelling to deliver letters and packages.

Domestic postage in Lebanon is the equivalent of three cents, but these days desperate Lebanese are paying $20 to get a letter from West Beirut to East Beirut.

With an inter-Christian war raging in the eastern sector, even the Lebanese equivalent of Federal Express isn’t working. Mined roads, snipers and outbreaks of shelling have put a stop to the normal mail system.

But the Lebanese flair for finding a way around even mines and snipers took only a short time to develop during the latest fighting.

Lebanon Taxi, in West Beirut, now offers a mail and grocery home-delivery service to East Beirut. For $20, a driver will deliver a letter to the eastern sector from worried family members in West Beirut. For an extra couple of dollars you can send bread, bottled drinking water and fruits and vegetables.

“At first I thought 10,000 pounds ($20) was terribly expensive,” said one Christian living in West Beirut. She had not had any news of her relatives in the East Beirut quarter of Ashrafiyeh for two weeks after fighting broke out last month.

“But when I got a letter back from them, I found it very cheap,” she conceded.

Phone lines were ripped down by artillery, which have been fired at such close range that few buildings remain intact in many areas.

When the Christian letter-sender heard the driver also would carry food, she rushed to the nearest bakery to buy two large bags of the flat loaves of Arabic bread that is basic to the Lebanese diet. From the vendor on the corner she bought 30 pounds of eggplant, carrots, apples, bananas, oranges and tomatoes. She topped off the package with bottled drinking water.

Within hours, the driver was back in West Beirut with a letter from her relatives.

“There are tears in my eyes as I write this letter,” the woman’s cousin said. “We aren’t dying, but we’re suffering greatly.”

The cousin asked that her West Beirut relative telex her two daughters living in London. “Tell them that I love them” was her only message.

“When the families see us coming with messages and food, the women start crying,” one of the taxi drivers said. “But inside their hearts, everyone is crying.”

The drivers, who are Muslims, know Beirut from the days before it was divided into East and West. Few streets have name signs, so it is their expertise that sees them through.

“If we are taking people across, like the press, we carry letters for free,” a driver explained. “It’s a humanitarian gesture.”

They admit they are risking their lives but believe that a good deed means “God will repay us by keeping us safe.”