First Impressions

I was right about the slums.

We arrived in Beirut around 7 Sunday evening and my uncle and cousin surprised us at the airport (my dad swore he didn’t tell anyone he was coming…he wanted to make it a surprise for everyone. But I’m confident that Arabs can never keep their mouths shut anyways). My dad was planning on driving straight to my grandparents’ house in the mountains but my uncle insisted that we spend the night in Beirut getting some shut-eye before we tackle the slopes. So we ended up sleeping at his house that night and I saw a couple of cousins, including a new addition to the family! My dad’s cousin, the one that works for Al Mobarrat, the organization I’m going to be working for, came by after dinner to greet us and to talk to me about what I’ll be doing. It was a really good conversation and I found out that I’m officially written down to teach English to orphans three times a week, starting next Monday. I was ecstatic! He also told me they do a summer camp for the orphans in two of the most beautiful places in Lebanon. It’s a 2-day camp and they just busy themselves with a lot of activities and such. That’s happening towards the end of July. He also brought up the microfinance that Al Mobarrat is involved in…except it’s not really microfinance. They don’t expect their clients to ever pay them back. So it’s more of some goodwill donations. All of their clients are needy women from small villages, and they have an extensive list of many more women who are interested in getting money to start their own small business. I was really interested to hear about this but I really want to help them develop the program as much as I can this summer.

We headed out early to the mountains the next day, a mere 2 hour drive from Beirut…except my dad had never driven the road by himself. Haha, so we definitely off-roaded it a couple of times. That’s when I remembered that the last time we drove this path I threw up. It’s a beautiful drive…we drive for a good hour parallel to the Mediterranean shore and then we head east towards the foothills and finally to the mountains.

I did not recognize my dad’s village at all until we got to the cemetery and we got out and read a prayer at my grandfather’s grave. It was especially emotional for my dad, but I was just perplexed that I didn’t recognize the town at all. We kept on driving for about a minute until we got the road that my grandparents’ house is on…and even then everything looked so different. The village got hit during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel harder than I had ever imagined. Virtually every house on that road, including my grandparents’, had been completely demolished by airstrikes. The good news is that almost all of it is rebuilt…it just looks completely different. A lot more grey and a lot less color. It’s depressing. The first person that we saw (but I unfortunately didn’t recognize her) was my dad’s good neighbor…she was at the gate of my grandparents’ house when she waved us in. We excitedly walked into the house (another thing I didn’t recognize at all) and found my aunt Hala and my grandmother.

My grandmother developed Parkinson’s recently. I haven’t seen her in four years but I’m glad to saw that appearance-wise, she hasn’t changed much. And of course she’s the same cute grandmother that I always knew! But she has developed a nervous quiver in her left hand and she’s much, much quieter than before. That just kills me. She was so excited to see us though and started crying when we walked into the room (from joy of course!).

Word definitely goes around quickly. Within half an hour people started coming in and the tea started boiling and the baklava was passed around. The house was as lively as I had always remembered it and we spent the entire day talking to people and catching up and I definitely spent some time trying to remember who’s who.


A Few Hours Later…

I just finished my evening prayer. I prayed for a lot this time. For my grandma’s Parkinson’s disease to not progress any further, for God to forgive me for the sins I’ve committed, for Him to give me strength to put all my potential into these next five weeks. Today, I got so much criticism and just as much support. I forgot how narrow-minded some villages are. People who don’t really have exposure to a variety of cultures and peoples and circumstances can’t seem to grasp that I’ll be working with orphans and the disabled and those with psychological problems from the war. My cousin’s aunt gave me a lot of support today and told me of her own experience of working with an Italian-based NGO after the 2006 war helping kids step out of the psychological horrors of what they saw. But a mere 20 minutes later I saw an old friend of mine who I used to spend a lot of time with last time I was here and she gave me nothing but skepticism about what my plans are in Lebanon. It’s really, really sad because it’s virtually out of my control. I don’t take it personally and yes, I was a bit upset to hear that kind of thinking, but it’s something inevitable and something I can’t fix single-handedly. I’m not here to prove them wrong, I’m here to do what I want to do.

In other news, my brother is really, really sick still. He has diarrhea now and not a single doctor can diagnose him with the same thing as the previous doctor. I’m completely disenchanted with the medical system now. I hope he gets a lot better but things aren’t looking too well right now.
I haven’t been drinking enough water and the altitude is getting to me. I should really watch that. I forgot how bad my asthma has progressed in the last four years. So I’ve been completely out of it all day. I did devote a lot of time today to photographing the landscape. I think I’ll go upstairs to the balconies tomorrow and take pictures from there too.

So far so good! I just wish people really understood my true intentions and weren’t so critical of everything. Yes, it’s definitely untraditional, but who ever said untraditional was bad? Some of the greatest things have been accomplished by stepping out of the box…


Peace,
Asil