In the rare quiet moments, when the phones stop ringing in tandem, bringing news of still more refugees arriving from further south, Bahia Hariri cannot help wondering what her late brother would have made of it all.
The bombardments that have pummelled parts of the country beyond recognition, the rising civilian death toll, the endless stream of refugees fleeing homes that no longer exist and the speed with which it all unfolded.
Her brother, Rafik Hariri, was Lebanon's local boy made good, going from farmer's son to prime minister and something approaching national hero before his assassination last year. More than anyone he is credited with masterminding Lebanon's reconstruction, lifting the country from the ashes of its civil war past and turning its face to the future.
Now much of that is gone. The international airport renamed in Rafik Hariri's memory is closed, its runways pounded in the first days of Israel's bombardment. Many of the modern highways - roads and bridges built to connect every part of Hariri's brave new Lebanon - are useless now, pocked with bomb craters. His hometown, the southern port of Sidon, is teeming with thousands of bedraggled refugees from areas close to the Israeli border. Many of them are sleeping on the floors of the mosque Hariri built and dedicated to his father. The hope and optimism the Lebanese had dared to adopt in recent years - Bahia calls it "Harirism" - has been replaced by something much darker.
"We Lebanese have been through a lot but this crisis is different," Bahia says, sitting in her office as volunteers poke their heads round the door to confirm aid and food deliveries. "We were not prepared for it. For the first time in this country we had stability and peace - everyone was preparing for the future, not a return to zero. Now no one sees a window for the future. The danger is that everything my brother worked for - a peaceful, secure, modern and moderate Lebanon - is gone."
An MP for predominantly Sunni Sidon, Bahia is co-ordinating relief efforts to provide three meals a day for the displaced, most of whom are poor Shia Muslims. Hundreds of local university students have volunteered to help the Hariri Foundation, an organisation founded by her brother in 1979, provide for refugees at designated centres in the area. Refugees are nothing new for the people of Sidon. One of Lebanon's biggest Palestinian refugee camps is situated in its outskirts.
The town's 36 schools, its two universities, mosques, and even a former jail have been converted into makeshift shelters for more than 35,000 of those who have been driven from their homes in the last two weeks. Others have been offered sanctuary in private homes. Dozens of wounded, ferried from some of the worst hit areas further south, have been treated at Sidon's hospitals.
"We noticed a big increase in the number arriving in the last two days," says Ghena Hariri, Bahia's daughter. "That's probably because people were warned to get out of the south as soon as possible. Had the roads been better, there would have been far more."
The drive here from Beirut, once a 30-minute zip down the modern highway that hugs the eastern Mediterranean, now takes two to three hours through rutted side roads in the Chouf mountains. The Israeli army has bombed almost every bridge on the coastal road.
Streams of cars and vans, their roofs piled high with luggage, block the narrow mountain roads to the north and south of Sidon. Hastily erected cardboard signs scrawled with arrows in the direction of Beirut provide some guidance in the maze of potholed back roads. The refugees wave anything white - rags, sheets or even plastic bags - from the windows of battered old Mercedes taxis. "We hope it will protect us from attack," says Ali, who has driven with his wife and four children from their village near Tyre. "Even though we know it probably won't make a difference."
Below on the coast, the Jiyeh power plant, targeted in an Israeli air strike last week, still burns, belching out a constant stream of black smoke. Despite that attack and the repeated shelling of the coastal highway, until last weekend the people of Sidon clung to the belief that their town was relatively safe.
That changed early Sunday morning when Israeli jets bombed the city for the first time. Their target? The Fatima Zahraa complex, referred to locally as a houza or Shia religious school. The four-storey complex, which took its name from Fatima "the Radiant", the Prophet Muhammad's daughter and mother of the Shia's revered Imam Hussein, contained a mosque, classrooms and clinic. It was a well-known local Hizbullah institution.
Today all that remains is the mosque's green dome perched at a tilt on a pile of rubble, the black flag common to Shia mosques still fluttering from its top.
The blast tore through a wall separating the mosque from a Hariri Foundation school next door, blowing out windows and scattering debris across the playground. Nine people, mostly residents living nearby, were wounded.
It caused widespread panic among refugees sleeping in classrooms at Sidon Technical College just down the street. Some upped and left for Beirut. "People believed Sidon was the last safe place in the south and that's why we opened our arms to those fleeing more dangerous areas," says Ghena Hariri. "Now people are wondering if we are going to be attacked again."
Ghena's mother, sitting surrounded by photographs and portraits of her beloved brother, reels off figures and data to do with the relief effort. The enormity of the task to hand, now and in the future, is almost too daunting to contemplate, Bahia Hariri admits. "We have to take the challenge firmly with two hands but really, it is a catastrophe for our country. Right now, it is a matter of life and death, but in the long term this whole situation will have far-reaching consequences.
"What we face is so huge, you can only deal with it in the moment, day by day. I have stopped thinking about the future."