North Coast on the Air!

As I mentioned in one of my last posts, I spent a couple days last week up on the north coast on assignment with ABC News. We put together a piece for World News with Charlie Gibson about how Egyptians spend their summer vacations, which aired last night. It's part of a Small World segment that World News is doing each Monday in July. In each installment, reporters from around the globe file pieces on how different people celebrate weddings, summer vacations, etc. 

I served as assistant producer on the piece, which you can see here. Scroll down to the Small World tab and click on "Watch Vacations around the Globe."

All Things Music

This post is a hodge-podge of all things music in the Middle East. 

Dueling musical trends, as best I can tell, rule in Egypt. The first, I'm not so fond of. 

There is a thriving pop music industry here that has successfully penetrated deep into the culture. Walk into a cafe, any cafe, and you'll find at least one flat screen blasting the latest music videos. At the bottom of each screen is a rotating list of phone numbers, depending on your Middle East country, through which you can send in messages that scroll at the very bottom of the screen (a la breaking news ticker on any cable news channel). "Samir hearts Ranya," "Doha International School," etc. seem to be the norm. 

For my ears, the music is kept far too loud. It makes conversation tough and reading a book even worse. Yeah, I'm in a cafe now, conveniently with my back to the tv, but the volume is near-suffocating. The Egyptians, though, love it. And I'm not really in a position to complain since these "music video cafes" are so much a part of the culture.

The other track, and the far more appealing one, is the deep and pervasive love of the old singers, revered by all age groups. Take singer Umm Kalthoum, for example. She was once dubbed the unofficial First Lady of Egypt, using her star power to ease diplomatic tensions between Egypt and Libya. She's long since dead, but her music is everywhere but Egyptians still speak of her with tremendous affection. In modern terms, she's a lounge singer, crooning about love lost and found. She heads a list of old-timers that even the teeny-bopper generation here appreciates in a way that our own Britney-loving kids in the States don't express admiration for our bygone singers. It's this affection for the past that makes me love this group of singers and their enduring legacy.

The music scene in Beirut, by contrast, is far more rock-based. The hot bands there, for the most part, tear through songs with a sort of reckless abandon that has come to represent the country as a whole. They've got a classic rock sound with a 21st-century Lebanese message. That type of music also works well in a country that loves its live music and loves to party.

I'll never forget my first trip to Beirut's Music Hall. It's an old cinema that was transformed by a young guy with a passion for music into one of Beirut's hippest clubs. I had made a reservation with friends weeks ahead and walked to the Hall with a great deal of anticipation. Arriving at midnight (early by Music Hall and Beirut standards), I walked past tanks and barbed wire on my way. Hezbollah had been protesting in the city on and off for weeks and the government had put the capital on lockdown. Sitting at the table inside, my friends and I ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker and a round of cigars. The height of sophistication. And then, with an uneasy truce holding on the streets, the program in the Music Hall began. Though this would be my first of many evenings at the Music Hall, the first, for all its novelty, was the best. 

The routine there was twenty minutes of live music on the stage, followed by twenty minutes of DJ music, followed by twenty more minutes of live music, etc. The evening started slowly. A couple of lounge singers, belting Sinatra and the like, while the DJ led things off with slow rock. But the well-coordinated production began to take off, with performers and DJ alike building an arc of intensity. At one point, a Queen cover singer came on and rocked through the requisite greatest hits before closing with "We are the champions." This song elicited the requisite eye-roll from this American who had long grown tired with the over-played number. But my attitude quickly changed as everyone in the audience rose from their seats, some with tears in their eyes (no kidding), threw their arms around each other, and sang every word.

As the evening progressed, the tempo of the music and, no doubt, the booze turned the place into an full-out dance club — a mass of people jumping and dancing in unison.

As the curtain went up for the final act, I groaned. On stage was a band of traditional Palestinian musicians, dressed in traditional clothes, sporting beards turbans, and mandolins to boot. This, I complained to myself, was how the night was slated to end? But little did I know. Moments later, the band launched into a rousing rendition of the Pulp Fiction theme song, their signature, and the place went ballistic. As they raced through songs in both English and Arabic, they played like a rock band on a mission. It was a fitting, and thrilling, end to a terrific evening that encompassed the full spectrum of the Lebanese music scene — a scene, I'd argue, unmatched in its passion anywhere in the world.

On the Road

Serving as a journalist in quiet Cairo is a far cry from working in conflict-prone Lebanon. I don't anticipate moving apartments, as I had to in Beirut, because road blockages and burning tires hindered my morning commute. I don't feel the urgency to spring out of bed in the morning to check the headlines wondering whether a bomb or a shooting will put my long-term story assignments on hold.

Still, though, life as a journalist in Egypt presents its share of the unexpected. Late last week, for example, I had to pound out a story for the Daily News on the construction projects springing up around Egypt (see the link in my last post). The story coincided with a trip I had to up to Egypt's north coast for ABC News. I'll stay mum on the ABC story so as not to cross any lines, but needless to say it was a fantastic two-day learning/working adventure. I conducted my interviews in the car en route to the north, and each pothole and car swerve is memorialized in the practically illegible notes I took.

After a stopover well west of Alexandria, we decided to head to the north coast's biggest city around 11pm. I knew I needed to get my story in that night so that my editors to spend the next day reviewing it, and my only window was the hour and a half long jog east to Alexandria. I sat in the backseat, passenger-side, with my MacBook propped open on my lap ready to write. I could only open the computer a little ways since our 6-foot 5-inch camera man sat in front of me had decided to put his seat back, practically in my lap. The car's windows were wide-open for the two smokers in the front, so little flecks of debris from the road kept irritating my contact lenses. So knees in my face, computer screen mostly shut, all sorts of crap flying in the window, potholes knocking my fingers off the keys, Springsteen blaring in my headphones, I wrote. With the Mediterranean in full view to my left, sites like the library of Alexandria to my right, I wrote.

It's a modest story, I know, but it's moments like those that put a smile on my face and make me love this profession.

Egyptian Construction — More than you wanted to know

Interested in learning about the latest construction trends in Egypt? Read my article here.

Another post coming this pm. It's been a hectic few days....

24 Hour Cairo

My conundrum: how to lead both a professional lifestyle and an Egyptian one, too. Side note: doesn't it say something that leading a professional lifestyle in Egypt is practically mutually exclusive from following an Egyptian way of life?

This thought came to me today on the way home from work during a triumphant cab ride where I found myself, for once, galloping a breakneck speeds down the thoroughfare on the way home from work, the car's five hundred nuts and bolts rattling violently. As we hit 30mph and I thought the 20 year-old cab might literally fall apart right there on the road (similar feeling to when I flew Yemenia Airlines), I achieved a moment of clarity. I was straddling two lifestyles, which together are wholly unsustainable. First, the professional way of life. It's not too dissimilar to the way a working person in New York might behave. I wake up at 8:30, throw a pot of water on the stove, and hop in the shower. After showering, and with water on the stove at a boil, I make myself a cup of instant 3-in-1 Egyptian coffee (yeah, that's right, one packet contains coffee, powdered milk, and sugar), and gulp it down as I pick through my clothes to find the least sweaty, least gritty button-down in my closet. A quick read of the overnight headlines and a brief check of my email, and I'm ready to go.

I hop a cab, paying 5 pounds (roughly 90 cents) for the fifteen minute hop across the river to my office in Dokki, not far from where I lived when I first moved to Egypt two years ago. The office is a quiet one on the fourth floor of a modern-ish building, and I set my MacBook up and get to work on my latest assignment. I spend woefully little time reporting and writing, and am instead obliged to pass the balance of my time bouncing around from person to person on the phone, trying, sometimes in vain, to find someone at a given government ministry or private firm to talk with me. Such is life for a reporter who has yet to establish a thick Rolodex of contacts. Yesterday, for example, I spoke with four people at the Foreign ministry, two at the Ministry of Trade, one at the Libyan Embassy, and six at the ministry of Petroleum before finding one person who'd give me an interview. I then supplement my interviews with as much research as I can muster (yesterday it was on Libyan-Egyptian trade relations) and get to writing. When the writing process starts, I throw a little Springsteen on the iPod and get at it. Some hours later, I wrap up the story, email it to my editor, wait to see if she has any comments, and hit the road. 

Once back home, I spend the balance of the afternoon and evening plugging away at various ABC assignments and freelance aspirations. A quick dinner (I've learned to cook pasta) and beer (Saqqara, named after a pyramid south of Cairo, is the best local stuff), and I'm all done.

It's only then, though, that my determination to lead the Egyptian lifestyle kicks in. The shisha cafes, a ritual stop for me, don't get hopping until midnight, at best. Say I'm feeling lazy and unwilling to go far afield, I'll cobble together a group of friends and head down the block to Goal, a cafe on the Nile with acceptable peach flavored shisha and an apathetic wait staff. Lingering over my shisha and a glass of water (note: broke reporter on a budget), I usually play a game of backgammon or two, pay the check, and leave. If I have any interest in heading to see the downtown scene, where thousands of Egyptians nightly hit the streets on the prowl for a bargain on a pair of pants, sunglasses, etc., 1am is usually a good time. On any given work night, the downtown social scene stretches deep into the night as people adjust their schedules to beat the heat. I visited one of Egypt's slums, called Imbaba, the other night at 2am with a taxi driver from the area, and the markets were hitting their peak just as I was leaving an hour later. 

Basic services also stretch late into the night. Imagine my frustration when, with a 10am interview, I searched unsuccessfully for one of the clothes ironing stands. 9:30am, and not a one to be found. Instead, I caught up with my local ironer at 1:30 that night and he worked on my clothes for an hour afterward and was still open for me to pick them up. Last night, I picked up my dry cleaning just after midnight and then poked my head into Osama's barbershop to find out his hours but didn't return for a trim since he planned to close at 1, and I had another engagement until then.

With these two worlds in Cairo, that collectively stretch practically around the clock, I find it difficult to squeeze in a few hours for sleep. Unwilling to sacrifice either my job or the world of Cairo that I've come to love, I live in perpetually sleep-deprived haze. At this point, I'm starting to get used to the way of life, and lack of sleep has become more of an annoyance than a problem. I can't complain, though, because it's the life that I've chosen and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Food Prices

Here's my latest story on food prices in Egypt. Not terribly exciting to those outside the country since it was meant to be a narrow news story instead of a broader profile of food prices. Hope you enjoy it anyways.

What North Coast?

I admit, though I try to do all things Egyptian, there's one trend I haven't gotten caught up in: the ritual summer pilgrimage to the North Coast. Egyptians are blessed in having two waterfronts, and Cairenes are quite stubborn about the seasonality of each. As a rule, Egyptians spend their summers up on the Mediterranean in the north and their free time in the winter on the Sinai or along the east coast at the Red Sea. 

Every summer, like clockwork, the city's wealthy flock to a string of high-end resort towns, mostly to the west of Alexandria. Here's one you can check out; it's called Marina. They turn down the Red Sea cost mostly due to the scorching temperatures and social duties up in the north. 

I've never been able to bring myself to spend much time up there, though. I'm still enraptured with the authentic Egyptian culture, and going to these places seems like a cop-out. Don't get me wrong, I've tried it all out, but sitting on even the most elite of beaches, drinking beer with five-thousand of my most high-end Egyptian friends does not add up to a good time for me. Instead, I elicit eye-rolls from every Egyptian I tell this to and head to the Sinai on a regular basis for 115 degree low-key weekends. I usually go either to a hippie town called Dahab or a quiet little Bedouin camp called Ras Shaitan.

Ras Shaitan (meaning, literally, "Devil's Head") is the best because it sits empty most of the year, and we arrive to a beach all our own, great meals, and personal cabins....all for $10 per night! It turns out that the place is practically devoid of tourists except for about five holiday weekends per year when Israelis (yes, Israelis!) seep over the border for a little r&r by the seaside. Ras Shaitan is at its best once the sun goes down. By tradition, I, along with whatever friends I've brought along, pull lounge chairs to the seaside, drink beers, and enjoy the unobstructed view of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. There is little better in life.

Each time we go to the Sinai, we make a trip up to the north end, mere miles from the heavily fortified Israeli border, for dinner at a place called Castle Zaman. It's a re-created castle, where they pride themselves on their method of slow cooking (meaning three hours) their meals. We typically get a tremendous platter of seafood or an entire leg of lamb. Not bad.

I'll move on, though, for risk of sounding like a travel writer. 

There's another summer phenomenon, though, that drives Egyptians away from Cairo for the summer: the arrival of the dreaded "Gulfies." Many upper-middle class Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Emiratis, descend on Cairo for the summer. In oil rich countries, these people may be fairly middle of the road, but they come to Cairo where they're suddenly some of the country's wealthiest. I dare you to find me an Egyptian that does not bristle at the term "Khaligi," which is Arabic for Gulfie. They're rude, obnoxious, Egyptians would tell me. At first, I thought this was all a little over the top, but I've had a few run-ins myself ... and not one has been pleasant. I'm still waiting to see the huge influx that I saw two summers ago, but I'm assured by many Egyptians, that it's coming.

So maybe I ought to get with it, join the ranks of Egyptians, and head north. In the meantime, though, I'll do my part to avoid the Gulfies ... but I'll do so with a massive sun-burn, staring out over the sea, keeping an eye on Saudi Arabia.

(Note to the technologically impaired: any word that appears in a lighter shade is a link. You can click on it and it'll take you to the homepage of whatever it is I'm talking about).

Whitehouse '08: A View from Abroad

I came over to the Middle East at the height of the '08 elections with mixed emotions. There I was, nestled in the belly of a British Airways jumbo jet, somewhere near south Greenland when the panic struck. How on earth would I get my daily fill of Matthews, Olbermann, and O'Reilly (yeah I'm a Factor junkie) from halfway around the world. Even if I did manage to get my hands on a TV that played MSNBC and FoxNews, would I really be able to stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning to catch my favorite shows? I'm a guy who needs to know every time Obama mentions arugula and McCain reminds us that he only deals in Straight Talk. I immediately threw on my headphones in an effort to let a little Margaritaville numb the pain, but the seeds of doubt had been planted. As Jimmy's chorus rang for a third and a fourth time in my ear, I tried to reassure myself that following the '08 election from the Middle East would be a unique opportunity.

Now, four weeks into my Cairo adventure, and with the help of my political blogs (which today told me that Obama attended a neighborhood barbeque near his house in Chicago over the weekend!), I've been able to begin to look at how Egyptians are viewing this historic election.

It all started about a week into my trip. I needed a trim and, lacking a favorite barber, found a little spot nestled in a back street in my neighborhood. About ten minutes after my barber offered me a joint of hash, which, through muffled laughter (and shock), I declined, he switched Looney Tunes on the TV and began riffing about the election. Despite my concerns that I had a stoner cutting my hair, I listened. "Obama is a very good man. A Muslim. Did you know?" My first instinct was to set the record straight, but I figured there'd be time for that, so I kept my mouth shut and listened. Switching to broken English, my scissor-wielding friend went on to tell me how having a Muslim president would be good for my country, which had so royally screwed up in his region over the past years. As he went on, essentially repeating his main thesis, I got began to grow excited about looking into how Egyptians viewed the Obama/McCain matchup. Here, issues of home foreclosures and tax cuts seem a distant reality and Middle East policy is king. 

I left my barber a little while later, having barely dodged a run-in with two handfuls of hair-gel, unable to persuade him that Obama was, in fact, a Bible-carrying Christian. From that moment, I began asking around about the election, mostly among the ranks of the lower and lower-middle classes – taxi drivers, waiters, doormen, etc. — and the reactions have been surprisingly diverse. In fact, very few of the people I ask hold many illusions about Obama's religion. First and foremost, the prevailing attitude here is that people are ready to move past Bush. It's an attitude not dissimilar to the one in the US at the end of any eight-year president. Even with high approval ratings, people were ready to move on from Clinton in 2000, and I bet the same held true with Reagan in 1988. I've also been surprised by how many people simply haven't heard of Obama; I get a number of blank stares when I mention his name. Many, though, who know Obama and know his true religious affiliation, approach the election with a healthy dose of enthusiasm. There's something intangible, non policy-driven, that excites them about him. It bears mentioning that I don't have much to say about McCain since he rarely registers on the radar of your standard-issue cab driver.

While I can draw no over-arching conclusions from this initial assessment of how Egypt's poor view the presidential election, since opinions and levels of understanding are so varied, this mini sociological experiment has reinforced my belief in the importance of soft power as a critical tool in America's arsenal. Put, for a moment, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest of the extremist groups aside. While they have come to represent the face of the Middle East to the West, the real face of this region is the tens of millions of under-payed, under-represented Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, etc. They grow the food, build the houses, etc. They are critical in setting a tone for the region. And it was through these conversations I had with people on the street that I began to realize how open they are to moving back into the American camp. There is this deep, and somewhat amusing, affection among many in the region for Jimmy Carter. No kidding. He comes up often in conversation because they remember him as the last earnest American peace-broker in the region. As much as this may horrify many back home, people here are waiting for their next Jimmy Carter. It is a powerful sentiment, backed by millions, and forms the root of soft-power; and I think the next American President, whoever he may be, will stand a strong chance of reconstituting it. As the Egyptians grow to learn about both candidates, the door will open to begin a new chapter with them. I think, for example, Newt Gingrich's idea that the next President-elect ought to embark on a round-the-world listening tour, would be a powerful gesture to Egyptians up and down the ranks. The next President ignores the masses of the Middle East at their own peril.

Welcome Back

Well, I've been in Cairo for almost a month, and I figured it was about time to get this blog re-started. This time I'm going to do things a little differently, though. When I was last in the Middle East, I registered thirty-five posts over eleven months. Not bad, but going forward I plan to cut down on the length of my posts and instead focus on posting shorter posts far more frequently. Needless to say, when I have one of those groundbreaking epiphanies that suddenly allow me to see the Middle East in a new and fascinating light, I won't hold back. In the meantime, this blog will serve as a means of constantly updating you, the faithful reader, on a day-to-day basis. Count on many stories — the funny, the peculiar, the tragic — and some (I hope not too pretentious) thoughts on Egypt and the region. Some posts will be personal, some analytical. In the end, though, I hope that through these posts and the comment section at the bottom, we might be able to all share a little bit of knowledge in the study of this fascinating region.

Now let me tell you about my first month here. I spent my first days living with my friends Tom and Whitney at their place here in Zamalek, which is the neighborhood on the island in the middle of the Nile. I've since moved and found myself a nice little place just down the street from Tom and Whitney, across from where I used to live.

I've started work as a part-time business reporter for a local paper called Daily News Egypt, and you can check out my latest article here. Hey, whoever knew that natural gas could be such a blast. I'm also getting started right now with some work I'll be doing for ABC News over the course of the coming year. I'd tell you what I'm working on for them, but Charlie (you know, Gibson) told me to keep it under wraps. Just kidding.

My friends from Middlebury, Rowan and Justin came to visit near the end of June and we had a great time visiting the sites around Cairo, including the pyramids, the camel market, the Friday market (where monkeys come cheap!), etc. We also ventured to the Sinai for a few days of rest Bedouin style.

I suppose I'll leave it there for now. Nothing too exciting in this post, but I wanted to give you the full update in short order. Many more stories to come in the coming days and weeks.

In the meantime, I've put a few photos in the post below to whet your appetite. You should be able to click on each image to enlarge it.

The First Installment of Photos

If this doesn't get you coming back, nothing will!

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.