Tyr and other travels

There is a falafel shop for every mosquito bite on my body.

Yesterday I woke up at the sound of morning adhan (morning call to prayer) and immediately sprang up from bed. Morning adhan is recited around 4 AM. I have no idea what spurred me do that, but I was up and about by 4:30 AM. By 5:15, I was walking around in my pajamas down to the olive tree plantations snapping really beautiful pictures of the sunrise and the village agriculture. They turned out amazing.

My dad and I decided to head to Tyr (Sour) early that morning to beat the heat and to meet with Mr. Rabih, a contact of mine that works for UN Habitat. We did all the Tyr sight-seeing and then met with him. I met a couple of his co-workers and learned more about his project, which is mainly putting his engineering and architecture skills to work in rebuilding Lebanon in a sustainable way. They don’t work much with human development, but they’re looking to start that up soon. His organization is called Beit Bil Jnoub, which means “House in the South” in Arabic.

We spent the rest of the afternoon being beach bums at the Tyr Resthouse.

The next day, I went down to Beirut with my dad at 6:30 in the morning to catch a 9:30 AM meeting at AUB between different NGOs who are working on social and physical development in South Lebanon. It was basically a day-long workshop/dialogue between the different NGOs. I met a ton of really fascinating, important people. Lebanon really has some very intelligent minds, it’s just a matter of carrying out all the great ideas they have. The interesting thing I noticed is that they would all sadly be tempted to talk politics…while I want to say that politics has nothing to do with their plans, I understand that it’s so difficult to carry out all the things they want to do without the support of the government. They all agreed on only one political fact: that their government is simply incompetent.

As the mayor of Bint Jbeil put it bluntly, “Every country that has had to rebuild after a devastating war did not do it with just NGOs…the government rebuilds a country. We cannot do this if our government is in this shape.”

That was bad news, but the good news was that their motivation was something unparalleled. I have never seen anything like it before. It was also really cool meeting a variety of Lebanese—Druze, Catholic, Sunni Muslim, Orthodox Christian—with the same interest of rebuilding South Lebanon, a predominantly Shia Muslim area. It made me happy to see that there was unity in this aspect, but if gave me great grief that regular people could do this but not their so-admired representatives in the Lebanese parliament.

My dad met up with me at the gates of the AUB campus and we grabbed lunch from Al Marrouche, one of my mom’s favorite restaurants in The Hamra district, just a couple of blocks from AUB. We spent the afternoon paying visits to relatives in Beirut, then we headed back to my grandparents’ house in the mountains for the rest of the evening.

We took a different route this time to get to Majdal Selm, thevillage my grandparents’ house is in. This one took us through Al Nabatiye, one of the biggest cities in the South, and through the valley and across the Litani River. It was far more beautiful than any other route I’ve been on so far on this trip. It was then when I realized just how gorgeous Lebanon is.

Peace,
Asil