Beirut

Summer Review

Many people have been asking me recently "What the war experience like." How does one respond to such a question? It is as if they are asking about a theme-park ride called "The War Experience."

This post, however, is not going to relate a play-by-play of what it was like to live in Lebanon during July and August of 2006. There were a few things that we personally had to suffer through, but no hardships really compared to what was happening a few miles to the south.

Rather, I want to share a few things that I learned through being here, and through some thoughts on the state of things here, conversations with some Lebanese, and even some personal reflections on what has been happening in me.

As I think about my past two months here in Lebanon I am struck by the "everyday life" I have been experiencing. I spent the summer living with various Christian families, two Maronite, one Roman Catholic, and one Greek Orthodox. When the war started, anyone who had a home in their ancestral village moved to it, and as it happened to be, all four of the families I nomadically visited where living in their village homes.

Yet, to a very large extent, we didn't feel the effects of the war, nor did the locals want to be involved in it at all. They wanted to stay as far from the war as possible, including not making any effort to bring relief to those who were suffering. I realized that these people have had enough of war, and they want to ignore it as much as they can, pretend it isn't there, try to live around it. On one surreal occasion the children in the family I was staying with decided to go to the Mtayleb Country Club where their family has a membership (it costs $15000 initially and $1000 per year for said membership). While I was playing tennis an American Apache helicopter flew very low overhead. It was in the process of evacuating the very last of the American citizens that wanted to leave, and here I was playing tennis right below. I imagined one of the people in the chopper, thankful to be flying out of Beirut towards Cyprus, looking down and saying loudly to the person next to them, "Look at those crazy guys playing tennis, there is a war on and they are relaxing at that posh country club."

I didn't feel guilty at the time, but I realized something very important that day: that after 20 years of civil war, where you were implicitly involved just by being a Christian or a Druze or a Shiite or a Sunni, most of the Lebanese want to avoid getting mixed up again in the messy business.

I thought of myself, how badly I wanted to go to the south and try to help. I asked World Vision if I could volunteer with them. They said that since I was an American, they wouldn't advise it. "What," I thought, "I just want to try to help some people who are really suffering." Unfortunately the unpopularity of my motherland eventually stalled all my best wishes and I passed a better part of the summer reading, writing, eating, and swimming.

Yet at the beginning of August the University Christian Outreach group here in Beirut had scheduled a Mission Trip (long before the war started) and the destination was Yaroun: now an Israeli occupied village of the southern border. We were thus thwarted again by the situation around us and we eventually found another place to do some practical service together. The theme for the trip was Hope, and our goal was simple and two-fold: to pray every day for peace and for a ceasefire, and to put our energy into building something, while all around us people were tearing down. For a semi-accurate article on this mission trip see: http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?vm_id=1&art_id=34205

Who knows how I will look back on a summer like this when I am old? I don't even know how to look back on it from 1 month past. Oh well, you live and you learn. Sometimes you live in crazy situations, and you learn things you never could have imagined.