(A memorial to slain AUB president Malcolm Kerr; bombed out buildings a block from me, including one with laundry hung out by Syrian refugees.)
War has been very much on my mind this week. I’ve been reading a book that spans the years from the civil war here up to 1990 and even without the Israeli invasion of 2006 I am reeling from what the Lebanese have been through in the last two generations.
Now as I walk through this neighborhood, I see more acutely the imprint of these wars and invasions. Nearly every street has a bombed out or derelict apartment building, many of which are now home to Syrian refugees. I see one right from my balcony. When I go to the AUB campus, one block away, I see the memorial to its president, Malcolm Kerr, assassinated in 1984. Kerr’s predecessor had been kidnapped, later released. There are plaques thanking donors who helped rebuild the campus after it had received 30 direct hits in 1989.
In 1982 this neighborhood was under siege from the Israelis who turned off the electricity and water hoping to isolate the Palestinians. They failed – the inhabitants themselves refused to leave. Did I mention the Israelis were also bombing the neighborhood? A member of my morning church, a nurse, told me people’s gums were bleeding and hair falling out from malnutrition. Bread lines lasted hours at a time and one left one’s apartment in fear that armed men would commandeer the place or its contents for their own use. War is a field day for sociopaths – what government exists to stop them?
My yoga teacher said she permanently injured her back carrying water from a well that the Israelis didn’t know about. A woman from my morning church told me a missile punctured her building and came into her dining room. A woman in the afternoon church told me she would watch from her balcony as her children went half a block to their classes at AUB and then would spend the morning on her knees praying that they would survive and come home. I hope you are noting that these people are Christians, because outsiders like to say that this neighborhood is Sunni Muslim. The formal political structure of this country may be divided along confessional lines, thanks to a dysfunctional constitution gifted to them by the French (and duplicated by the Americans for Iraq and Afghanistan) but the social patterns of this city are far more fluid.
It’s not just sociological accuracy that requires us to stop using the expression of this neighborhood as “Muslim West Beirut”. It’s also because to call it that is to confirm the perspective of the Christian Phalange and the Israeli government who were busying assaulting it together. In their view, largely picked up in the American press, the recent wars and invasions here have been Israelis and Christians fighting Muslims. In fact, it was only members of this sect who had joined the movement explicitly inspired by the Nazis, not other Maronites or Christians, with whom the Israelis made common cause.
This week the United Nations counted the one millionth Syrian refugee to register in Lebanon. Only the most desperate would bother as there is little the UN can do for them here apart from food, water, and tents. The Lebanese government refuses to let the UN build camps. Syrians with relatives here or with sufficient money haven’t bothered with the UN’s services. On Saturday I counted five beggars on my three block walk to class. A few weeks ago I asked my morning church to have a clothes and household utensil drive for the Syrian refugees and today congregation responded generously. A Finnish nurse for Save the Children is taking the stuff back with her to Kubayat, a town near the border whose normal size is 12,000 souls but which is now dealing with 30,000 Syrian refugee families.
But what of the Palestinians here? They are the ones living in the camps, the ones whose homeland is even further out of reach than that of the Syrians. The director of an NGO helping Palestinian women told me today that funding for programs such as hers is being diverted to the Syrian crisis. Funders like the next big thing.
This week it struck me how much praying is going on here. If I go into my classroom early after lunch, there are Muslims bowing towards Mecca. (I promised I wouldn’t tell the administration – there is no chapel at the university, so what can they do?) My morning church has added a prayer meeting between Bible study and morning worship and it’s well attended, with much prayer for Lebanon and Syria. My afternoon church has a weekly prayer meeting that lasts an hour and a half on Friday evenings. I caught the last of it when I went to pick up my friend Diana. I was moved by how tenderly the Arab women were praying for the world. It occurs to me that maybe it’s prayer, not just partying, that is key to Lebanese resilience.
goingfortheguttural 