BEIRUT — “They called me a whore, an animal,” said Rosemary, who arrived in Beirut from Kenya four years ago. Her story, online at Anti-Racism Movement (ARM), is one of constant name-calling, verbal abuse and physical attacks, experiences that are probably familiar for every black woman living in Lebanon.

Rosemary, who withheld her last name, her Nigerian husband and their child vacated their apartment in early September after a string of abuse by their neighbors. Rosemary told Al-Monitor that she had come to Lebanon to work as a cleaner. She met her husband here, and they had a daughter. While Rosemary was pregnant in August 2015, the couple moved into a small apartment in the marginalized neighborhood of Nabaa.

Tired and sick due to her pregnancy, Rosemary began cooking on her balcony, lacking the energy to go up and down the stairs of the apartment to the small, stuffy and ill-equipped kitchen on the floor below the living quarters. The neighbors above — a Lebanese Armenian woman living with her son and daughter-in-law, relatives of the building’s landlord — began complaining about the aroma of her food and threw dirty water at her.

“So, I started cooking in the room,” Rosemary told Al-Monitor. “But it wasn’t enough. They started making problems again. After I delivered, I cleaned and fixed up the kitchen, because the landlord wouldn’t help. But my neighbor was still complaining. I asked her what she wanted. She said she didn’t like black people, that we were animals. Things got worse every day. Each time the woman and her son passed by the kitchen window, they would call me a prostitute.”