Positive Forces

I received a comment on my last blog from Peggy at Middlebury, and she asked me to tell a more upbeat story. I read her comment, and I started thinking for hours about what I could write in reply. What about the success stories? Initially I was a little mixed up since my experience in Lebanon has been generally upbeat punctuated by only a handful of sad stories. It was only after a while that I realized how my world, nestled here in upscale Beirut is what's so pleasant. Far from the squalor of the Palestinian camps, the bombed out houses in the south, and the fields of deadly cluster bombs, my little street in the neighborhood of Gemmayze boasts dozens of bars, food ranging from spaghetti to sushi, and more people speaking French than Arabic. It's only when I remove myself from my little bubble and head into the wilds of Lebanon that I see the massive problems the country faces.
But central Beirut aside, I began thinking about my experiences as a whole in my travels to the south, the Bekka Valley, the southern suburbs, the Chouf, and the Palestinian camps. Clearly my most vivid memories of these trips were of the awful smells of the back alleys of Chatila camp or of the terrified shepherd who was weekly losing sheep to cluster bombs. These are the things that will stick with me for years, but today I began to realize that they are not representative of life throughout Lebanon. There's another force at play out there, tirelessly toiling against the powers of destruction. Lebanese NGO's are carrying the back-breaking burden of a country plagued by decades of strife and riddled with politicians too self-involved to work on fixing things.
The NGO's grab none of the headlines that a Hezbollah sit-in strike does; they make for none of the riveting television that riots do; but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of these groups working relentlessly, but quietly, in the slow march of progress. Over the past two and a half months, I've been privileged enough to spend time with a handful of these groups while working on various stories.
Some of the most impressive NGO work is going on inside the Palestinian camps. Although nearly half a million Palestinians live inside Lebanon, the vast majority of them live inside the dirt poor camps that are scattered across the country. They have a fraction of the rights afforded to Lebanese citizens. Against all these odds, non government groups are flourishing here and are doing the good work that others are not.
I have one friend named Ahmed who works as a science teacher in a school in Sabra camp. He was one of five founders of an NGO they began fifteen years ago. What's amazing about their work is that they aren't focused on only one issue. They change or grow the scope of the organization to recognize needs of the community. Ahmed showed me the maternity clinic his group recently opened. Mothers receive inexpensive medical consults from doctors all because Ahmed's group has managed to tap into the vast amounts of international aid that are available to Lebanese. Ahmed's organization also bought a multi-storey apartment building and has converted it into very low cost housing. In return, Ahmed's staff checks up on the tenants to make sure they're working, the theory being that level of income is less important than simply maintaining steady employment given the low legal status of Palestinians in Lebanon.
I’ve met with mothers who started a campaign to bring quality education to autistic children. I’ve talked with a group that has launched a campaign against eye disease. Intel corporation is pioneering telemedicine in Lebanon to bring quality healthcare to the remote corners of the country. Another group is working on a project in the south to bring high school students of different religions together to engage in inter-faith dialogue. Yet another NGO has created a cooperative of organic farmers as part of a campaign to rehabilitate agriculture in the south of the country. And the list goes on.
I’ve been privileged to do much of my work in Lebanon on these groups because although they’re not headline grabbing, it’s important that the world see the work they’re doing, that group by group and person by person they are the ones building the civil society that is so often threatened here.

View from a Hilltop

Have you ever met somebody who has nothing? I don't mean somebody living in poverty, I mean someone who, already poor, goes on to lose everything. No? Meet Ali.

Ali lives in the tiny mountain-top town of Maroun Ras in southern Lebanon. Maroun Ras, while small, was the site of one of the most intense battles of the summer war. I visited it last Tuesday as part of a tour I was taking to find stories. After going down to the coastal city of Tyre to spend Monday night, I hired a taxi for the day Tuesday to take me around and show me a few towns in the south.

Let me interrupt myself for a second to allay the worries some of you may have. My process for deciding where to travel in the country is long and involved. I have a whole series of people I ask about the places I want to visit. Knowing each person I ask and their level of adventurousness and risk taking capacity, I can then make a judgment about where I can and cannot go.

Back to Maroun Ras. I ended up there after going through the towns of Yater, and Bint Jbeil. Let me give you a tour of the town. Imagine I'm standing on the narrow dirt road that passes by Ali's house. I'll give you a 360° tour, labeling the way I'm facing as one would label the face of a clock.

12 o'clock to 2 o'clock: open farmland. From where I stand on the road, the landscape drops off, not severely, into a long shallow valley. We're on top of a tall hill in Maroun Ras, and while it's short-sleeve weather on the coast only an hour west, I'm bundled in a heavy fleece as I survey the scene. About three or four kilometers away, the other side of the valley gives way to a set of steep rolling hills. They rise quite a bit higher than the hill I'm on, and I quickly learn that the tops of these hills mark the Israeli frontier. The Israelis, smartly, retain the high ground since many of the Hezbollah attacks last summer came from right where I was standing. It's unclear to me whether the Israelis grabbed the hills during the war or whether they already occupied that territory before the war began.

Three o’clock: A crumbling house, grand and somewhat out of place in a humble village, that was nonetheless another victim of the summer war. It’s a two storey house sitting at the high point of the hill. Columns support the second storey which overhangs a spacious porch on the ground floor. I would later go up to the house and knock on the door. No answer. I walked around to the other side, where an odd number of shoes waited outside the door. But again, no answer.

My driver tells me (and a reporter friend of mine subsequently confirmed) that after the battle for Maroun Ras, the Israelis took over the house. In the middle of the night, a band of Hezbollah members snuck back to the house and killed between six and twelve Israeli soldiers there.

As I walk on the porch, there is debris everywhere: old food items, broken picture frames, etc. I find there a shell casing, and my driver tells me that it came from an Israeli machine-gun. I have no idea if he’s right. On the far side of the porch, is some graffiti, presumably Israeli, depicting a Star of David with Hebrew underneath it. Walking up the stairs, there is more graffiti, impossible to tell whose, showing armed men aiming guns at baby-carriages.

On one side of the house is a virtual garbage dump, piles of old food containers, some labeled in Arabic and others in Hebrew.

Six o’clock: In the fore-ground is Ali’s meager tobacco field. I can’t really tell you the size precisely, but I can say that it would be easy for me to throw a baseball over the length of his field two-times over. Ali and the girl with him that I assume is his daughter claims that he was detained for twenty days by the Israelis during the summer war at the time he should have been harvesting his tobacco crop, and he therefore lost his entire year’s income.

The tobacco field is now ruined. It’s covered by heavy chunks of rubble and the earth is all askew and in disarray.

Immediately behind his field is a school. The façade of the school has been devastated by shelling. Seemingly hundreds of holes penetrate its front. I’m not sure if the school has been re-patched enough on the inside to open itself to students. It’s a grim reminder that every war has its innocent casualties.

Nine o’clock. The main road of town stretches before me. Slightly downhill, the road runs straight just a couple hundred yards until the other end of town at which point it bends out of sight. It’s a gravelly dirt road, and it seems as though every other building along it has been destroyed. Clearly too poor to deal with the devastation, town's only marked sign of progress in the seven months since the ceasefire is that the debris has clearly been pushed off the road, creating an abrupt wall of crumbled building chunks along the way. A few people sit or stand along the road, but the overcast skies and the cold temperatures seem to have driven most of the people indoors. Either that, or they just get sick of looking at their shattered town.

Eleven o’clock. At the mouth of the road that leads through town stands Ali in front of his house. Ali, I have to believe, is well under five feet tall. At first I thought he must be over eighty years old, but the more I think about it, the more I have to wonder how much the lifestyle of a frontier farmer would prematurely age him. He walks stooped over and uses a cane that was once a broomstick.

I try speaking to Ali in Arabic but have a hard time understanding him. I turn to my translator in frustration, but he, a native speaker, replies that even he is having a difficult time understanding him because Ali's age has caused him to mutter and because he speaks a more formal dialect. Ali explains to us that he was “kidnapped” (his word, not mine) by the Israeli Defense Forces and held for twenty days without food or water. During that time, as I already mentioned, he lost his tobacco crop for the year.

Behind Ali is his house. The right side of it has caved in under the burden of bombs and mortar rounds. I was not invited in, but what little I could see from the doorway indicated a very simple way of life. Ali had no electricity and his water pump had also been destroyed. In front of his house was a slab of concrete, under which Ali kept a few modest jugs of water that he had somehow obtained. As I talked to Ali and learned his story, I asked him about the nearly unrecognizable hunk of metal off ten feet to his left. “My car,” he said. There was almost nothing left of it. Or, more accurately put, it was all still there but in a form too bombed out and too mangled to recognize.

I suppose that I was inaccurate when I said that Ali has nothing. It’s not true. He has half a house, a few hidden jugs of water, and a broken broom stick. He has all these things but little more. What scares me so much is that Ali has literally no means of making a dollar. He missed out on last summer’s income possibilities, and with the destruction of his farmland, he’ll miss out again this summer. Clearly, the fact that this town is so remote and so small means that aid has not reached Maroun Ras yet in any noticeable way.

I recount my trip with no political bias. I have long come to terms with the fact that it would be irresponsible of me takes sides in the summer war without visiting the other side of the border, talking with Israeli citizens, and taking in the damage there. But even so, the damage has been done, and I really worry about Ali’s future. Besides his house, his water, and his walking stick, Ali has a few graves in his backyard that belong to deceased family. Set in overgrown, unkempt grass, these graves provide a moment of respite in a town that has so little to be relaxed about. I worry that if Ali doesn’t get the help he needs, a helping hand to put him back on his feet, he could join his ancestors in the tranquility of his back lawn sooner than he should.

Photos (Sorry that they're disorganized)

So here is a new round of photos. Sorry for not integrating them into my writing posts. I'm just a little strapped for time nowadays, so I get stuff on the blog whenever, however I can!
Photos from top to bottom: The first six photos are of Martyr's Square. The ones with no people were taken two days before the protests to mark the two year anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The ones with people are of the day of the protest. The next photo is of the fishing harbor in Tyre in South Lebanon. The next three mountain photos are of Druze territory in the Chouf Mountains. Below that is the boardwalk in Tyre. The last photo is of the town of Qana, ground zero for a lot of violence between Lebanon and Israel. Sorry this is all a bit of a mess, but this program makes it tough to get photos organized.

Redemption

Yesterday, Tuesday, is a day I wish I could quickly forget.
Blessed with a journalist's working hours, my alarm was still an hour from sounding when I rolled out of bed at nine in the morning. Opening my computer to see that I had no new email and that there was no new news coming out of Lebanon, I crawled back into bed for some more shut eye.
When I got out of bed an hour later, I flicked on CNN, a common trick for helping me come to my senses. I turned it on just in time to see the broadcast's opening segmet. "Twin blasts kill a dozen north of Beirut," the caption at the bottom of the page read. Startled, I hustled through showering and getting dressed before running out the door. As I walked down the street, it seemed just perfect to me that a day like this would be cold and rainy. It wasn't that the rain was that hard, it was that the cloud cover was so thick that the city was eerily dark.
When I bustled into work minutes later, I conferred with the other journalists to get the news. In the middle of my questioning, two other reporters brushed by me towards the door. One of them was in tears because her family was from the mountain town where the bombing had occurred. Hardly saying a word, I grabbed my camera and rushed after them. We were soaked by the time we reached our car just a block away.
What was so terrible about this bombing, we all agreed in the car, was that this was really the first time since the civil war ended that terrorists had targeted civilians at random. Unlike many other terror-prone Middle Eastern countries, terrorism in Lebanon targets important politicians and journalists almost exclusively.
Our route took us about twenty minutes straight up the coastal highway. The clouds kept us from seeing much of the sea. We then made an abrupt turn off the highway and started up the tiny mountain road that would take us to our destination. Small town piled upon small town all rolled out in front of us as we tackled a seemingly endless set of switchbacks that traversed the steep mountainside. Watching the clouds wind their way through the mountains, I could not help but feel some sort of dread for having tagged along.
At last, we saw a poncho-wearing policeman up ahead on the road, diverting all cars off to the left. We drove up to him and showed our press credentials and he immediately, and almost apologetically, waved us through. We drove another fifty yards up the road and parked. As we headed up the rest of the way on foot, we began to see an assembled crowd ahead. There were too many cars, journalists, and policemen to make immediate sense of my surroundings.
As I approached, however, it all laid itself out for me in nightmarish reality. I think what initially surprised me most was, ironically, my momentary lack of shock. For a moment it seemed to me as though I had seen something like this a hundred times before. Then I realized that it was television and movies that were paving that lie, and at that moment I flinched in the understanding that this was the first real act of terrorism I had laid eyes on.
The first bus was only about twenty feet behind the police barricade. I was facing the bus head-on and the damage done to it was frightening. The windows were all either blown out or broken into shards. The back of the bus, where the bomb had been planted, was squeezed like an accordion. I was fortunate that, having arrived exactly three hours after the bombing, all the victims had been taken to hospitals and all blood had been washed away by the rain.
I turned to my left and saw the CNN reporter who had first brought the gruesome images straight from the rainy mountains into my apartment. In front of me was a barrage of policemen and several bomb sniffing dogs. Soaked to the bone with their backs to the buses, the policemen looked something between scared and helpless.
Dignitaries streamed to the site. Members of Parliament, flanked by body guards and led by aides with umbrellas, would duck under the police line and walk right up to the buses, head bowed as they prayed for a moment or two before being hustled back to their cars by concerned guards.
The second bus, about thirty meters behind the first, was even more chilling. Its roof and walls were entirely ripped off. Where they had landed, I have no idea. Soaked and burned, the brownish-orange seats sat in a mangled mess. Devistatingly, local store-keeps told us, the bomb in the second bus went off between five to ten minutes after the first one. By the time the second one went off, people had swarmed the first bus, trying to help the injured. After the second explosion, locals were too afraid to approach the buses and help people for fear of further bombs. This was truly the classic definition of terrorism.
Standing where I was, twenty feet from the first bus, I looked out left of the road into a steep drop-off between mountains. On the right side of the road was a tall wall that had been erected when the road was carved out of the mountain. The distance between the wall and the drop off must have been fifteen yards. As I stood there taking in the scene, the most devastating thing happened. A group of about a dozen ten year-old students came walking up from behind. Ushered by several teachers, they were on their way home after school had been cancelled early. Because of the limited number of roads on the mountain, the kids were forced to walk down this one.
When they arrived at the police barricade, one of the teachers conferred with the head policeman and explained the issue. The policeman looked reluctant since almost nobody, barring dignitaries, were gaining access to the site itself. But he relented. As the students, short enough to not have to duck under the police tape, started heading down the road, their teachers called to them urgently and repeatedly to face the wall. "Look at the wall," they yelled. "Don't look over here." But as ten year olds tend to, several of them stole looks at the buses which lay no more than fifteen feet away. The looks on their faces will be unforgettable to me. They were clearly bewildered and pained and even the curious ten year-olds voluntarily snapped their heads back towards the wall.
I couldn't believe that this is how these kids were growing up—walking through bomb sites on the way home from an early school closure. I could not comprehend this kind of childhood.
As I stood there contemplating all this, one of the other reporters called to me to start heading back to the car. As I turned, I realized that I had been standing right next to something large on the ground. I had never bothered to look down and see what it was. But as I turned to head back, I almost fell over the bumper of the first bus, blown well down the road by the blast. I just shook my head and put up my hood to hide from the rain. Hopeless, I thought.

As bad as things get here, as bleak and as dark as times can seem, the Lebanese have a way of shocking you with their ability to turn the page. My trip up the mountain had really shaken me pretty hard, and it was with a great deal of suspicion and sadness that I rolled out of bed this morning. Just a day after the bombings, today had all the trappings of a damning day in the history of Lebanon since hundreds of thousands of Sunnis and Christians, hurting from Tuesday's bombings, would be descending on Martyr's Square to commemorate the second anniversary of the assassination of beloved Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In the very same square, Hezbollah has its tent city, created two and a half months ago, where it has been protesting the government. It seemed as though many ominous stars had aligned themselves to bring ruin to any semblance of peace in the country. Indeed, in the past it had taken far less than today's conditions to bring about violence.
To make matters worse in my own head, I was charged with writing the article on any casualties that came from today's rallies. I positioned myself in Martyr's Square early so as to be on hand if anyone got hurt. I periodically talked to the Red Cross who said that nothing had yet happened. In light of the previous day, I felt miserable as I stood there waiting for the fighting to break out.
But what transpired in Martyr's Square was inspiring. Hundreds of people set themselves up around the square, selling sandwiches and sodas and handing out flags and scarves and hats. On top of that, today was a family affair. Thousands of families—men, women, and children—came together in a carnival-like atmosphere to remember the leader they loved. Wearing everything from western dress to full-fledged hijabs and galabayas, they came. Some were dressed in work clothes and others in celebratory outfits. Kids played and laughed and sang. Periodically from one corner or another from the square I could hear the ring of drums as a small group of children had gotten together to do a chant.
About three and a half hours after I arrived, the speeches began. Gibran, Edde, Geagea, Jumblatt, Hariri Jr.—they all came and tried to rouse the crowd. Filled with energy, the crowd responded enthusiastically, hollering in approval, thousands of Lebanese flags fluttering.
In a time of so much despair, the Lebanese really give reason to hope. On a day where all the seeds for violence had been planted, the people rejected that in favor of celebration. Despite so much cause for a fight, the Lebanese people en masse put civil strife on hold to give Hariri the celebration he deserved. It also gives hope for the future. If there ever was a day for the fragile and tentative peace in this country to spiral out of control, this was it. After today, Lebanon looks, just maybe, like a country unwilling to enter the period of violence that looks so imminent.
The speakers throughout the day continually referred to the capital city as Beirutikum, meaning Your Beirut. Today, the people of the Lebanon really took that to heart, embracing the city as their own rather than looking like a group wanting to destroying it. For this reason, getting up in the morning tomorrow will bring a little more hope.

The Stage

I write this on a rainy winter Tuesday in Beirut. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day for much of the rest of the world, but not for Lebanon. For the Lebanese tomorrow will mark the two year anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and a day of incredible passion and activism across the country.
I look out the windows behind me and the mountains to the north and east are shrouded in low, dark clouds revealing only occasional glimpses of steep slopes plunging into the sea that give Beirut so much of its allure. It is probably a good thing that the mountains are hidden for just inside of them two bombs tore through commuter buses, killing several about three hours ago.
Just down the block, Martyr’s Square is a land divided. Just south of Hariri’s great blue-domed mosque, members of Hezbollah pass the days in their camp talking, drinking tea, and playing soccer as part of their two and a half month long sit-in strike against the government. Next to them is the fence. It is a new fence that runs right into the heart of Hariri’s beloved mosque. Built just last week, this fence is a tool to insure peace tomorrow. It is funny how a tall steel wall and two rows of razor wire can be used as tools of peace.
On the other side of the wall is an empty plaza, stretching almost to the sea. In twenty-four hours time hundreds of thousands are expected to flood it to remember their great slain Prime Minister.
So the stage is set. One plaza with two sides, a Hezbollah camp filled with life, a Hariri camp empty but expectant, an ominous wall down the middle, and now, today, the emotional charge that will set the tone.

More photos

Top to Bottom: Wine barrels in the caves at Ksara winery; a warehouse in Il Marj that was bombed out in the summer war against Israel; me in front of a temple in Baalbek; all that remains of a different temple in Baalbek; a castle in Sidon.

Fire-- Six photos from Beirut

This is the first of three postings I'm doing all at once. To begin, scroll down to the post "Three Stories" and work your way up from there. I keep working on posts and then new things come up, so I get a major backlog. The two posts below this one really combine most of my stories and clear my backlog of things I want to write about.

This post is for photos since my blog has been light on photos so far. I have a bunch of others I've been trying to post of my weekend adventures, but technical difficulties are preventing me. Enjoy these for now.

Smoke rising up from burning tires in Martyr's Square in Central Beirut.

Tires on fire in Central Beirut.

Members of Hezbollah with a container of gasoline.

Bombed out buildings from the summer war with Israel in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

More rubble.

Rubble in the southern suburbs from the summer war with Israel.

First Adventures out of Beirut

This past weekend, I decided to take my first steps outside the city to explore the rest of Lebanon. I know I will have to go everywhere twice—once now to assuage my curiosity and again in the spring when the weather is warm and the towns are all open. A lot of places, I've learned, really go into hibernation for the winter. Saturday marked the first of four straight days of intense days we'd have. Undeterred, Steve (Groton class of '04, spending the semester traveling throughout the Middle East, in case you missed it from an earlier post) and I made our way down to the Cola bus station to head out to the Bekka Valley for the day.
The Bekka has always been number one on my list of places to go in Lebanon, and rather than wait and build up to it, I just decided to go straight away. The transport system in Lebanon is incredible. When I arrived at the bus terminal in Beirut, several men asked me where I wanted to go. I said I wanted to go to the village of Ksara in the Bekka. I was then shuttled to one of the many, many microbuses waiting at the terminal. Unlike any place I've been, there was no haggling over my business. There was order and reason to it all. I made it to Ksara, roughly an hour and a half ride, for three dollars only. To get to the Bekka Valley, which runs north to south on the eastern edge of Lebanon, we had to drive through the impressive Chouf mountains that made for really steep roads and some pretty intense snow.
By the time we got to Ksara, the snow had turned back to rain, and we were ready for the first stop on our daylong tour. We stopped in Ksara to go to the oldest and most famous winery in Lebanon, which is, surprisingly, supposed to make quite good wine. Of course, we were the only idiots to be visiting the winery on a rainy Saturday in the middle of winter at 9am, but we were excited nonetheless. A smart young Lebanese woman gave us a tour of the winery. The winery, back fifty years ago, had been owned by monks who made and sold wine, the profits form which would benefit the church. It is now owned by four private families. Our guide showed us the natural caves which are two miles in length, and because of their constant year-round temperature, are where the wine is aged. Barrels upon barrels of wine lined the corridors of the caves. Little alcoves on the right and left were used to keep wines from each year for the sake of history.
The tour concluded with a wine tasting in which our guide gave us all the information on the different wines and gave us different kinds of things, including Lebanon's national drink, Arak. When all was said and done, we went to the store in the winery and I bought a bottle of cognac, something I don't even drink, because production of it was stopped when the families bought the winery from the monks. The thought of owning fifty year old cognac made by monks in the heart of Lebanon was too much. Plus, it didn't cost a lot.
From west-central Bekka, we moved on to the south Bekka. The day before, while on assignment, I had met the mayor, named Kamal Harb, of a small city called il-Marjj. He invited me to come visit him anytime, and when I told him I was going to be in the Bekka the next day, he insisted I come by for coffee. To get down to his town, we took a taxi driven by a Palestinian who, when I asked him about his desire to return to the West Bank, got the most glazed over look in his eyes that I have ever seen. It was one of the purest moments of nostalgia I think I'll ever see. I bring it up only because at the mention of Palestine, it was startling how much he was transported to a different time and place.
We ended up staying and chatting with Kamal for almost two hours. We talked only politics, but of a scope that ranged from local to international. One thing we talked a lot about was a meeting he had just come from. He had been meeting with the director of the military in the Bekka region to express his displeasure on the previous week's events. His town, il-Marjj, is a bastion of Sunni authority in a region that is heavily, heavily Shi'a. When the Hezbollah protestors took over the country for a day two weeks ago, they also blocked the main street of his town with tires. He was furious because his town was Sunni and wanted nothing to do with these protests. His message to the military was that they had better take action if Hezbollah takes to the streets again because the alternative would be a violent uprising by the townsmen.
We chatted on and on at length over rotating cups of espressos, lattes, and teas. The trays of drinks kept coming, and I kept taking them as long as my host did. After a couple of hours, Kamal's brother, a dentist, arrived to take us on a driving tour of the town. He showed us everything from the town center to the agricultural fields. We saw farmland owned by the church, an unfinished library that was supposed to be built by the Syrians, and a factory that had been bombed out by the Israelis.
Kamal's brother then dropped us off at the Microbus hub and we caught one heading up to the town of Baalbek in north-central Bekka. Despite its major reputation, the town of Baalbek is actually quite small. It really has one major road with a side road that houses the souqs, or markets. The residential area expands modestly from this center, but it isn't much. What makes Baalbek so incredible are its expansive Roman ruins. When I entered the ruin complex, right next to the town, I saw some free standing wall structures with acres and acres of fallen columns and other giant pieces of marble and granite strewn across yard. The bits of wall still standing have varying degrees of carving and detail left on them.
The site only got really incredible towards the back. Near the end of the walk through the site I saw a giant temple on my left. Showing its age and soaked with rain, the temple now looks like a hollow remnant of its former self, but it still has the ability to amaze. Standing across from it is part of what must once have been a temple—five, or so, columns, standing lonely against the sky, supporting nothing, guarding nothing. Plus, they're on top of a major rise in the earth, so they really stand out in an unnaturally lonely way.
Drenched and tired, Steve and I headed back to Beirut to rest up for the next day. We were supposed to go skiing on Sunday, but I got an email from my friend Alex at 7:30am telling me that the snow had closed the mountain roads so we wouldn't be able to go that day. We slept in instead and got going closer to noon. Steve and I headed back to the bus station because I wanted to fulfill a serious desire I have to visit the Shebba Farms. Very briefly, the Shebba Farms are a group of farms right on the tri-border region between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. These farms have geo-strategic benefits and are currently occupied by the Israelis. The controversy is that by UN decree, Israel is allowed to occupy parts of Syria, namely the Golan Heights, but it is unable to occupy any territory in Lebanon. Unfortunately, the ownership of the Shebba is in question. The Syrians and Lebanese say its Lebanese territory, therefore forbidden to the Israelis, while Israel claims that it's Syarian territory. Anyways, it's a really important issue in Lebanon right now and I wanted to go see it with my own two eyes.
When we got to the bus terminal, however, we learned that we'd need permission from the Lebanese army to go near the farms. Since it was Sunday, such permission was impossible to come by. Shelving my Shebba ambitions for a day, we decided to go to the port town of Sidon about an hour south of Beirut. The city itself is not much to brag about. It's a dirty collection of shops and markets in the middle of a greater residential area. The seafront is more interesting, though, lined with seafood restaurants and also with a Medieval castle that sits practically in the sea. The best parts of the city, though, are the covered markets. The old city is a collection of ratty old three story buildings. Within them, however, at ground level, are what can best be described as an endless series of tunnels, housing hundreds of small shops. From clothing to sweets to trinkets, this market had it all. Endless covered passageways that twisted and turned and forked held an immense amount of life in what otherwise would have been considered dingy and forgettable. Shopping is difficult for me because, right or wrong, I avoid giving business to any store that sells Hezbollah memorabilia. Because stores selling Nasrallah key chains or Hezbollah flags were so prevalent, my options were quite limited. I did walk out of one store, though, with a little bronze cedar tree on a wood stand that says "Lebanon" on it.
After wandering the tunnels for a while and grabbing a seaside seafood lunch, we boarded a bus and headed back to Beirut.
All the traveling this past weekend was extraordinary and has my mind wandering wildly as I begin to consider this weekend's possibilities. So stay tuned for the next installment.

Three Stories

I've just finished week three of this five month adventure at The Daily Star. I've just had my seventh article published, and just at the end of last week I got a permanent desk in the office. So things are looking good here on the east coast of the Mediterranean. On top of that, a week of very measured speeches given by the country's top politicians has made for a quiet week here on the civil-strife front. All in all, a pretty damn good week.
In light of the lack of drama around here, let me tell you about the three stories I wrote this week, and the three interesting lessons I learned from writing them. I'll go in reverse chronological order.

Lesson 1: Never Underestimate a Topic
Thursday night my boss told me to attend a press conference in the morning and write an article about it. The press conference was being held to formalize the donation by the European Union of seventeen "waste management trucks" to the Lebanese government. At first, I thought this article was going to be a total snooze-fest—the kind of thing I'd do to make the bosses happy, but one with no real substance that was only getting attention because it was a slow news day.
On Friday morning, I sleepily made my way over to the Starco building in downtown where the government has many of its offices. After asking around a bit, I found the room with the press conference. To my amazement, the room was far bigger, had far more people, and had far more cameras set up than any press conference I had yet been to. Within minutes, one of the cabinet ministers and the representative from the EU strolled in. They began talking in Arabic as I began reviewing the press material, and it was then that I learned my lesson.
While waste management may not be the most fascinating topic, the story turned out to have far deeper roots. You should read the article, but I'll summarize by saying that in 1999, a commission from Europe traveled Lebanon to see how it could help Lebanon recover from the civil war, and it found that one of the most important civil elements that town leader after town leader said was lacking was the ability to manage solid waste. So, the EU gave Lebanon a multi-million dollar grant, of which an important part was set to handle waste management. Essentially, this story was, on the surface, about seventeen garbage trucks. It was, in reality, about a deep and meaningful partnership between Lebanon and a strong ally that is committed to helping Lebanon overcome setbacks from the civil war and avoid future conflict.

Lesson 2: Don't Forget about the "Lebanese Twist"
In the middle of last week, I was told to attend a press conference held by the American University of Beirut Alumni Association where they would be discussing proposed amendments to their constitution. Lesson two is not so dissimilar from the first lesson because this one too began with an assignment that did not look interesting.
After an opening word and the singing of the AUB school hymn, the press conference began with everyone looking over their copies of the new constitution. Everything was going as I'd expected. And then I began to ask questions of the people sitting next to me. With that, what I call the "Lebanese Twist" came into sharp focus. What should have been no more than a typical annual Constitutional review was actually more of a battle to stay alive. What I learned at the press conference was that the Alumni Association had always prided itself on being independent of the university because it gave the group more freedom to do as it pleased. And then, reasonably, the university decided it wanted a group to represent alumni globally, not just in Lebanon as the Alumni Association was doing. So the Alumni Association, determined to stay the only alumni group began to go ahead with a plan to globalize its operations. The university was unsatisfied with the Alumni Association's new effort and it therefore created its own group called something like the Worldwide Alumni Association. Something like that.
By the time I entered the scene—at the press conference—the Alumni Association was pushing to ratify its globalizing propositions so that it could stay relevant, prove its dominance, and eventually return to its position as the only group representing the university's alumni.
The Lebanese Twist, to me, is that no matter what the story, no matter how seemingly mundane or ordinary, there is almost always a dark political twist to it. If you search a story, top to bottom, you'll likely find a little corner of darkness in there somewhere. That's part of what gives Lebanon its appeal, but it's also what makes the country such a sad case.

Lesson 3: You Have to Deal with the War Angle All the Time
By this, I mean that in every single story I've been assigned, war is always a major player. It makes writing an article tough. You can't have a newspaper that everyday that brings war into every story, into every pore of Lebanese life. Sure, war's important, but it isn't everything. Some examples….
My first story involved covering a press conference by the head of a small Christian party who was calling for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the Palestinian Territories. If you study Lebanese history, you would know that the Palestinians played a very tragic and very destructive role during the civil war. But for the past seventeen years, since the end of the war, they have been a faction relegated to one of Lebanon's twelve refugee camps. To say they are second class citizens would be generous. They are an impoverished people with no political rights, no political rights, and no homeland. But still that press conference seeped with implication that ousting Palestinians from their territories and forcing an exodus of almost a half million people was the natural reaction to what their militia did to Lebanon during the civil war. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the Palestinians, as they've told me many times, would like to return to Palestine too, and the party leader at the press conference could have spun it that way, but instead he brings it back to a reaction of the civil war.
I have a few other examples, but I think I'll skip those and go right to the most potent one. Last week, I was writing a story on the VAT tax which was first implemented in 2002 in Lebanon and will now be raised to fifteen percent over the next three years. I went down to the southern suburbs, Shiite Hezbollah stronghold, to cover the impact of the tax on small business owners. I went south because it is one of the poorest places in the country, and my angle was to see just how much this tax was hurting those in greatest poverty.
I was not prepared in the least for what I was about to encounter. What I saw really knocked me back on my heels and put me into a pretty good funk for about a day. As I approached the neighborhood, I began to notice posters on each lamppost on the road's center divide. After I asked about them, my cabbie told me that on each poster was the face of one of the "martyrs" who'd died this summer in the war against Israel.
The taxi dropped me off right in the middle of the neighborhood called Haret il-Hreik, and I went to work. As I made my way down the street, stopping in stores right and left to chat with workers, I noticed that about two blocks down, the buildings just stopped on the left side of the street. While they began again a little ways later, there was more than a block with no buildings. Curious, I thought. It just seemed very out of place for the most bustling street in the southern suburbs. Since this was my first trip down there, I didn't make the mental leap I should have. Unfortunately, mental leaps were unnecessary. My eyes would take care of everything for me.
When I made my way down the street, I stopped in awe of what stood before me. Lot upon lot of mangled rubble: concrete mixed with wires mixed with lots of assorted debris. The occasional forgotten shoe gave the site its eerie humanity. Some buildings hadn't fallen, they were just gutted. This was ground zero for the summer war against Israel. I was stunned.
My interview subjects, too, seethed over the summer war. When I'd ask how the VAT tax had affected business, people would often reply sharply by saying something like, "Israel has killed my business." It took two full days of intense interviewing to get enough non-war related material to proceed with my story.
That is maybe the starkest example of the way in which war tried to push its way into my story, but it comes up again and again in almost every story I work on. This really is a country that knows war, that is prepared to fight, and that knows how to rebound from a war like no other society.

High School

I opened my eyes Tuesday morning, wary of what the day would hold. Named by Hezbollah as the day of the nation strike, I was frightened and excited by what the day might bring. "Snow Day," I chuckled as I started to get dressed. In the northeast United States, we all stay home when it snows too hard to get on the road, but in Lebanon, I was quickly learning, we all stay in when Hezbollah decides to hit the streets.
I turned on the news to see what the latest was, but the reporting on BBC was too general for somebody who lives in the city. I got quickly changed and headed out to the street to get to work. I opened the front door to my building to find an almost abandoned city. There were some people walking along the streets, but there were no cars to be found. I headed on my way from Hamra, where I live, to Gemmayze, where I work, along a route that I had picked out on a map with help from my doorman. I set out with my friend Steve Walker from Groton, who is visiting Beirut for a month as part of a Middle East tour he's making, and we nervously anticipated what each turn in the road might hold.
Most of the businesses were closed, some because they were run by Shiites but most because their employees could not reach their shops. Another significant difference between this and any other day was that that the typically extraordinary view of the mountains and the sea was obscured by a dark gray haze that hung low over the city. I'd have typically taken a cab to work, but since there were none on the roads it was almost half an hour before I arrived in downtown. A part of the city that's almost unnaturally modern and clean due to Rafiq Hariri's rebuilding plan, downtown was a virtual fortress of troops, barbed wire, and tanks. We twisted and turned through downtown, passing the Prime Minister's offices and the Parliament Building before coming to the last leg of our walk.
In order to get to Rue Gouraud, where my office is, I had to cross Martyr's Sqaure, a giant oblong plaza, and a favorite spot for activist movements. Sure enough, as I entered the square, I spotted a group of about fifty or so men burning tires in the road. The amazing thing about Lebanon is that because it's such a small country, it only takes blocking a handful of roads to effectively shut down the country. Martyr's square is a confluence of important roads, and if shutting down the country was their aim, then these protestors were well placed. I passed them by quietly, drawing not more than a passing glance. I knew that hurting westerners was not their aim; plus, these men were not Hezbollah but rather members of a Hezbollah-allied Christian party called the Free Patriotic Movement (the FPM) who harbor considerably less resentment to the western countries. I could tell they were FPM because many of them were dressed in orange, the party's color. The air, as I passed these protestors, was thick with the awful smoke of burning rubber.
I made it to the office and spent the day watching the news and calling the hospitals for casualty reports. For those of you worried about me, you'll be happy to know that the staff would not send me out into the field on this day because as an intern, I was not under contract with the newspaper, and I therefore posed a higher level of liability to them. Throughout the day, I watched the western news on the television and grimaced in the knowledge of what everyone would be seeing back in the States. While what you all saw on television actually was happening here, it was not representative of the Lebanon I was witnessing. In northern Beirut, where I live and work, there were some peaceful demonstrations, like the one I saw, but by and large the city was just in a quiet waiting mode. Most of the violence was in the south of the city or in the north of the country.
I walked home without incident, picking up a couple beers on my way celebrate with Steve our first encounter with major civil strife. I went to bed that night after watching the news in which all of the many political leaders were taking to the airwaves in a flurry angry rhetoric which seemed to me to be killing more people than the day's gun battles.
I woke up the next morning, Wednesday, and wondered what the streets would be like since Hezbollah had decided against a second day of strikes. I've always been told that the greatest danger in Lebanon is that once you come, you'll never want to leave. I didn't know what to expect on Wednesday as I stepped out of the building, but I was amazed to see a city bustling defiantly with life. Suddenly I saw the other maxim I'd always heard about Lebanon fuse with the first. The second one says that the country can be besieged by war and violence one day, but that with the strength of its people, it rebounds immediately the next. I realized at that first moment I hit the street on Wednesday that so much of Lebanon's allure, so much of the reason that I'm quickly falling in love with it has to do with the resilience of its people.
Wednesday was a peaceful day in Beirut, but a hectic one in the office. I was charged with my most difficult story yet. I had to write a report on the previous day's casualties and arrests. This was challenging because the information was still coming in all day Wednesday and would continue to right up to the point I had to submit my story. The difficulty here was that I had to begin the story and continually add and edit as the details shifted. On top of that, I had sources who, for much of the day, gave me conflicting information on how many dead and wounded. So I had to continually try to widen my number of sources to achieve consensus numbers that most reflected the general thinking among the authorities. Ultimately, I ended up noting the conflicting sources in the article as well.
Then there was today. Today was the first day that made me anxious. Tuesday's violence felt somehow controlled, and I felt less at risk in the city. Today was a little more difficult. The day began with a note of optimism as I sat in the office watching the proceedings at Paris aid conference. I saw each delegation give encouraging words to Lebanon and then announce its dollar pledge. The United States and Saudi Arabia each offered generous sums, and as much as I hate to say it, I have to give the French a tip of the cap for their sizeable donation too. But then violence once again stole the headlines. Sunni-Shiite fighting broke out around the Arab University in south Beirut. In the camera shots I recognized the stadium that I had driven past many times on the airport road. I was a little rattled by this spontaneous outburst of violence because I could handle conflict that was announced days in advance, like Tuesday's, but unexpectedness of this new round really stunned me.
To make matters worse, I heard of outbursts around a university in Hamra, where I live. Furthermore, we could hear spirts of machine gun fire as we sat in our office. The whole thing made me a little uneasy.
And now I come back to the title I've assigned to this post. High School. I left the office at about 6:30, getting home around 7. When I went out to go to the internet café at 8, my doorman warned me that the government had just instated a curfew that would go into effect in half an hour. I ran down to the café to find it closed. So was the other one on my street. Considering the late hour that the curfew was announced, I saw people hustling down the street and rushing to their cars, heading home. And now here I sit, unable to leave, wondering what the coming days will hold. This amazing three day stretch began with a Lebanese snow day and ended with a Lebanese curfew. I somehow feel like I'm back in high school.

Welcome (Officially) to Part 2: Beirut

So now as the haze of the jet lag finally wears off and my lost bags have been found, I feel as though I can begin to let you all know what I'm doing here and what I've been up to so far.
I arrived Thursday at 4:45am after having flown British Airways through London. When I got to my apartment building, I thought I was going to have to go find a hotel for the night, but enough banging on the door persuaded the doorman in the next room to get up and let me in. My apartment in actually on the first level of the basement, but because the building is built into a hill, I am three floors up with a great view of the Mediterranean and the mountains. It's a small studio apartment with a bathroom by the entrance, a living room, and a bedroom separated from the rest of the apartment by a sort of half wall. Additionally, I have a full, nice kitchen on an enclosed balcony. Next to that, I have a great open balcony that gives good views.
I live in a neighborhood called Hamra, which is a Muslim neighborhood in West Beirut. I am only a stone's throw from the American University and from the main drag called Rue Bliss. I can't stop chuckling about the fact that even though I try to immerse myself in the culture as much as possible, at the end of the day I have to tell the taxi drivers to take me home to Rue John Kennedy.
As for what I'm doing here….. I have somehow managed to muster enough credit from Middlebury (to still graduate in four years) that I am taking this semester off. I have come to Beirut with a fulltime internship with The Daily Star newspaper. The Daily Star is the large English newspaper based in Beirut. I won't dwell on it for long since I haven't actually started working yet, but what I will tell you is that I am working for their Lebanon section, where I'll be helping out with stories, doing some copy editing, and writing my own articles. I begin work on Monday. Check out their website at www.dailystar.com.lb. If I get anything published on the website, I'll try to post the link here on the blog, but you should check out the website anyways because even by reading the headlines, you'll get an idea of what's happening in the country.
While there is a thrill to being new in a country and discovering everything for the first time, the one thing I really don't like, that I've had to do in the past couple days, is nail down the essentials. Finding the supermarket, bank, laundromat, pharmacy, etc., etc., is both necessary and tedious. I'm looking forward to finishing all that up today or tomorrow. More interesting has been the apartment search. While I like my apartment now, I need to move by the end of the month into a place that is both cheaper and closer to where I will be working. Unlike in Cairo where there are real estate agencies on every block, in Beirut you have to go door to door. Thursday was like a treasure hunt in that I'd go into a café or store and ask about apartments at which point I'd be given directions to somewhere else. By the end of the day, having wandered the length of Rue Gouraud about a dozen times, I had several contacts and decent housing possibilities.
The other thing that bears mentioning are the protests in the center of town. I'll go into more detail in my next post about why they're there, but since December 1, Hezbollah has run a sit-in protest in the center square of town until the Siniora government resigns. Because there is one big road that connects east Beirut to West Beirut, I've driven by the protests several times. What you see when you look out over them is thousands of tents of varying shapes and sizes with people wandering through them. I have not, thank goodness, seen an actual protest yet, just the tent city where the Hezbollah supporters sleep and hold their protests when called to do so. All around the camp also are hundreds of posters of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.
The tent city forms a sort of semi-circle around the Grand Serail, the Prime Minister's office building. The Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, has hardly left the building since the protests began, and many of his cabinet ministers, fearing violence, have moved into the building too. Considering the proximity of the tents to the building, and considering the supposed size and volume of the protests that take place there, one can only imagine the stress felt by those holed up in the building. Between the protests and the Grand Serail, however, is an intense wall of barbed wire, tanks, and troops. Driving by it, I cannot help but get goose bumps as I watch the scene.
In general, the feel of Beirut is very different from that of Cairo. A much more liberal city, I rarely see women in veils here, and there are noisy and conspicuous bars all over the place. The relative affluence is apparent here too as evident through all the Mercedes, BMW's, and SUV's that prowl the streets. The city feels more like Paris than it does Cairo (a statement that I will permit myself to amend as I see more of the city). All in all, this is a fantastic city that seems as sexy as it does dangerous. And whether the latter contributes the former, I'm not sure yet. All I know is that I'm in for a hell of a semester, an I look forward to many more posts on the blog as my life here begins to take shape.

10 Ways You Know You're Back in the Middle East/Beirut

(In sequential order)

1) When the Che-Guevara-biography-toting Lebanese guy sitting next to you on the airplane tells the flight attendant he's "a fucking idiot" for offering wine to a veiled woman.

2) When you expect your bags to get lost en route to Beirut and when you find out they are, you know there is still order in the universe.

3) When the taxi that was supposed to be waiting for you upon your 4am arrival is nowhere to be found.

4) When the Prime Minister's office building looks more Alcatraz than the White House, with miles and miles of barbed wire and dozens of tanks and hundreds of soldiers protecting it.

5) When you begin your apartment search by asking in a restaurant for the location of a real estate agency and a waiter comes over to you and swears he's a professional real estate agent.

6) When, after seeing rain clouds on the horizon and asking somebody whether they think it will rain tonight, you get an annoyed glare and they say to you, "How should I know? Only God knows this!"

7) When you chuckle at the irony when a man in a café tells you, "You don't want to live in Hamra. That's a Muslim neighborhood. You want to live here in Gemayze because only Christians live here," which he follows up with "Alhamdulilah!" ("Thanks to Allah!").

8) When you're already able to string three languages together in the same sentence.

9) When, typical of the 'life goes on' Lebanese mentality, you get more than a half dozen "Who knows" and "I'm not even sure" comments when you ask about the Hezbollah protests that are taking place in the middle of town.

10) When you swell with pride after getting asked if you're Egyptian when you say a few quick words in Arabic.

So, yes, I am now here in Lebanon. I arrived at 4am on Thursday morning and still feel crazy with jet-lag and too tired to write a more detailed post. Tomorrow I'll put up a more thorough explanation of what I'm actually doing here as well as some initial observations from the city. After that, I'll try to do Lebanese history/current Lebanese political situation 101 so that further posts make more sense. So, bottom lines: I'm safe and sound, I'm wearing the same clothes three days running since the airport lost my bags (I'm supposed to get them back today), I'm unable to think straight due to jet lag, and I promise there'll be more soon!