Planes, precision guided bombs, beirut, Ahmed, evacuation, propaganda
We stepped out of the long terminal tube that connects airplane with the Visa stations set up like many movie ticket counters all in a row, our first breaths of Beirut air just as stifling as the first time. I'm telling you, if anyone decides to come and see us plan for any season but summer.
We went through the Visa line in 5 minutes, no problems, out to the baggage claim area where we were greeted by a man already pushing a luggage cart for our now reduced number of check-in pieces, still nothing felt weird about being back. We got in a cab, paid the foreigner price of 20 dollars for a ride out to Caracas, my new neighborhood on the sea with the Corniche just across the street. During the drive I looked at the signs that once held advertisements for grocery stores and face wash, jeans on sale and Pepsi, now replaced by epic photos from the war. One such photo had a baby curled up bleeding from it's abdomen that read, in english, "precision guided bombs." Every hundred meters or so there were more variations on the same grisly theme, a photo of Hezbollah troops loading a mid-range rocket launcher apparently capable of shooting as many as 5 rockets at once (their uniforms much less rag-tag than any shot I've seen in american media), a picture of an apartment building in Dahiye completely pancaked by Israeli launched missiles that read, "Made in the USA," and the most puzzling of them all: the photo of Mother Theresa with a hand caressing her face emerging just out of range of the camera with something in arabic written below her face. And still nothing felt weird about being back in Beirut, sure time has passed, a war has happened, but all the talk about how things would be "soooo different" is turning out to be pretty much untrue.
Immersed in the smog and quiet of the cab ride I wondered if on the other side of the border Israel had such signs up and down their highways. I doubted it, as with the US, the propaganda is best handled on the television in the form of news, commercial sound bytes, and made-for-TV movies yet to be released. Remember the classic US hit put out around the time of the first Iraq war "Not Without My Daughter," with Sally Field as the american female hero hell bent on getting her baby daughter back from the hordes of muslim kidnappers, fighting her way through sinister looking customs officials and a society that makes going to a christian church look like an orgy compared to the way ol' Sally was treated by the grubby hands of mens in long shirts with curly mustaches.
Nope, Lebanon is still using the old fashioned approach to shaping it's population's opinion, signs and slogans. If the actual air isn't a fresh breath, that sure is.
The next morning I woke up with raw memories of days past, the going away BBQ (thanks by the way to everyone who made it to the Golden Bull, where I was too-pooped-too-party, and especially Ryan who hung around til the very end), the Habanero Burger Extravaganza, and the Bayporter guy who had that condition where it seemed that both legs had been knocked in towards each other. He had permanent sea legs. I'll never forget Barbara (my pop's across the driveway neighbor) standing out on her front porch, fist shaking and brow furled behind her glasses, as the Bayporter guy tried to make a 23 point turn in the worst possible place between my dad's hedge and her Cadillac. Seriously, this is just a little reminder to all. Shaking your fist has now crossed the line from being intimidating to kinda funny, actually quite hilarious if used as a serious threat, especially at a Bayporter full of people about to leave the country. Just a reminder.
After a little waiting and reminiscing I left the house to meet Marina at the entrance to her school. She was running a little late, but standing around the dome of a saaj breakfast was our new roommate Andre, muscley military dude having a bit of a problem getting used to the not so staunch rigidness of arab university bureacracy. I told him my story of shit exploding out the back of the toilet as it also rose through the drain of the shower that I was standing in at our very first apartment a year ago. I hope he felt a little better. Or maybe it made him want to leave. I dunno', probably not though with the way he looked at every thick Lebanese chick that walked by. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell him that he might be having an extra tough time because he's black.
The rest of the day was spent with people who now seem like old friends even though I've known them no more than a year. At our friend Sunni's house we heard her story of evacuation during the war told only the way she can tell it, full of hilarity and exaggeration. As she was tired of waiting for the US to do something about her position she decided to take a bus with some other folks out to Jordan through the Bekaa Valley that was in the midst of one of the worst stages of a war that seemed to be mostly about the "bomb 'til they drop" strategy. The way she told it, her fiance Bassam was all of a sudden very interested in something on the floor of the bus and was adamant that she look at it, the whole time the other passengers were glued to the windows as Israeli bombers and battle helicopters blew the shit out of the town of Zahedi a few miles to their left with "precision guided bombs." About a year ago, Marina and I were taken on a little school excursion up to the same hilly town, half delicious food, half amusement park with a go-cart race track and video game arcade and a stream that ran through the main part of town besides the walkway that led to all the restaurants set up like patios beside the calm lull of the water, to the best of my knowledge, now blown up in a series of loud concrete and rock shattering splashes.
I know some of you think I'm weird for wanting to come back here, think it even more strange that in my heart of hearts I wished that I was here as everything was happening. Well, I guess it's kinda' the same as when people watch their house burn to the ground, or the way elephant's parade around their dead. Maybe there's some miracle that can come out of it all, or maybe it's just the desire to see as much of something or someone before it's gone, changed forever.
We hadn't eaten much, my belly still swollen from the habanero burger I had eaten the day before the flight, the restaurant made me sign a release form so that they couldn't be sued for too much spice. My belly still itches internally, so water and other liquids have been the way to go, what with the mattress of humidity on our backs and all. So when we called Ahmed and he invited us to the camp for Iftar (the feast after fasting during the 40 days of Ramadan) we were more than happy to have a meal on his roof as Beirut cooled and the sun set.
It was so good to see him. He seemed tired at first, but once he got on a tear we just listened for a minute as he regaled us with his stories of the war. He lives in South Beirut in the Bourj Al-Barajne Palestinian Refugee camp, and to give an idea of how close he was to some of the heaviest parts of the bombing, let's just say that standing on his roof we could see some of the same flattened apartment buildings and freeways that we saw on CNN, and his stories weren't the stories of escape, but those that reminded me of interviews that I saw with British who survived the Nazi's bombing campaign during WWII.
Ahmed's position in the camp is an odd one. He's a boyscout leader for the Fateh party, but on the side he is known to have many connections with people from all over the city, foreigner's especially. Apparently he was asked by a film crew to retrieve their equipment from Hezbollah who had seized it, probably in fear that they were spies. He made arrangements to be picked up by Hezbollah after they had determined that the footage was harmless. They got him and drove him to their part of town, but just as they were getting out of the car the building they were about to enter, about 500 meters away, was blown to shit, a strong man who had been riding with him grabbed Ahmed around the neck and swung him away from the blast. It was funny to hear him praise the courage and fearlessness of Hezbollah soldiers, as he is in the PLO, not exactly a bunch of pussies.
I'll post some more of his stories and get back to the habanero hamburger ordeal in future blogs, but I'm happy to be here and just to let everyone know, things do seem to be back to normal in most parts of the city. This morning Marina and I passed this lebanese dude in a cowboy hat, brown skin-tight lycra shirt, and cowboy boots. Things are definitely back to normal in our part of town.
We went through the Visa line in 5 minutes, no problems, out to the baggage claim area where we were greeted by a man already pushing a luggage cart for our now reduced number of check-in pieces, still nothing felt weird about being back. We got in a cab, paid the foreigner price of 20 dollars for a ride out to Caracas, my new neighborhood on the sea with the Corniche just across the street. During the drive I looked at the signs that once held advertisements for grocery stores and face wash, jeans on sale and Pepsi, now replaced by epic photos from the war. One such photo had a baby curled up bleeding from it's abdomen that read, in english, "precision guided bombs." Every hundred meters or so there were more variations on the same grisly theme, a photo of Hezbollah troops loading a mid-range rocket launcher apparently capable of shooting as many as 5 rockets at once (their uniforms much less rag-tag than any shot I've seen in american media), a picture of an apartment building in Dahiye completely pancaked by Israeli launched missiles that read, "Made in the USA," and the most puzzling of them all: the photo of Mother Theresa with a hand caressing her face emerging just out of range of the camera with something in arabic written below her face. And still nothing felt weird about being back in Beirut, sure time has passed, a war has happened, but all the talk about how things would be "soooo different" is turning out to be pretty much untrue.
Immersed in the smog and quiet of the cab ride I wondered if on the other side of the border Israel had such signs up and down their highways. I doubted it, as with the US, the propaganda is best handled on the television in the form of news, commercial sound bytes, and made-for-TV movies yet to be released. Remember the classic US hit put out around the time of the first Iraq war "Not Without My Daughter," with Sally Field as the american female hero hell bent on getting her baby daughter back from the hordes of muslim kidnappers, fighting her way through sinister looking customs officials and a society that makes going to a christian church look like an orgy compared to the way ol' Sally was treated by the grubby hands of mens in long shirts with curly mustaches.
Nope, Lebanon is still using the old fashioned approach to shaping it's population's opinion, signs and slogans. If the actual air isn't a fresh breath, that sure is.
The next morning I woke up with raw memories of days past, the going away BBQ (thanks by the way to everyone who made it to the Golden Bull, where I was too-pooped-too-party, and especially Ryan who hung around til the very end), the Habanero Burger Extravaganza, and the Bayporter guy who had that condition where it seemed that both legs had been knocked in towards each other. He had permanent sea legs. I'll never forget Barbara (my pop's across the driveway neighbor) standing out on her front porch, fist shaking and brow furled behind her glasses, as the Bayporter guy tried to make a 23 point turn in the worst possible place between my dad's hedge and her Cadillac. Seriously, this is just a little reminder to all. Shaking your fist has now crossed the line from being intimidating to kinda funny, actually quite hilarious if used as a serious threat, especially at a Bayporter full of people about to leave the country. Just a reminder.
After a little waiting and reminiscing I left the house to meet Marina at the entrance to her school. She was running a little late, but standing around the dome of a saaj breakfast was our new roommate Andre, muscley military dude having a bit of a problem getting used to the not so staunch rigidness of arab university bureacracy. I told him my story of shit exploding out the back of the toilet as it also rose through the drain of the shower that I was standing in at our very first apartment a year ago. I hope he felt a little better. Or maybe it made him want to leave. I dunno', probably not though with the way he looked at every thick Lebanese chick that walked by. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell him that he might be having an extra tough time because he's black.
The rest of the day was spent with people who now seem like old friends even though I've known them no more than a year. At our friend Sunni's house we heard her story of evacuation during the war told only the way she can tell it, full of hilarity and exaggeration. As she was tired of waiting for the US to do something about her position she decided to take a bus with some other folks out to Jordan through the Bekaa Valley that was in the midst of one of the worst stages of a war that seemed to be mostly about the "bomb 'til they drop" strategy. The way she told it, her fiance Bassam was all of a sudden very interested in something on the floor of the bus and was adamant that she look at it, the whole time the other passengers were glued to the windows as Israeli bombers and battle helicopters blew the shit out of the town of Zahedi a few miles to their left with "precision guided bombs." About a year ago, Marina and I were taken on a little school excursion up to the same hilly town, half delicious food, half amusement park with a go-cart race track and video game arcade and a stream that ran through the main part of town besides the walkway that led to all the restaurants set up like patios beside the calm lull of the water, to the best of my knowledge, now blown up in a series of loud concrete and rock shattering splashes.
I know some of you think I'm weird for wanting to come back here, think it even more strange that in my heart of hearts I wished that I was here as everything was happening. Well, I guess it's kinda' the same as when people watch their house burn to the ground, or the way elephant's parade around their dead. Maybe there's some miracle that can come out of it all, or maybe it's just the desire to see as much of something or someone before it's gone, changed forever.
We hadn't eaten much, my belly still swollen from the habanero burger I had eaten the day before the flight, the restaurant made me sign a release form so that they couldn't be sued for too much spice. My belly still itches internally, so water and other liquids have been the way to go, what with the mattress of humidity on our backs and all. So when we called Ahmed and he invited us to the camp for Iftar (the feast after fasting during the 40 days of Ramadan) we were more than happy to have a meal on his roof as Beirut cooled and the sun set.
It was so good to see him. He seemed tired at first, but once he got on a tear we just listened for a minute as he regaled us with his stories of the war. He lives in South Beirut in the Bourj Al-Barajne Palestinian Refugee camp, and to give an idea of how close he was to some of the heaviest parts of the bombing, let's just say that standing on his roof we could see some of the same flattened apartment buildings and freeways that we saw on CNN, and his stories weren't the stories of escape, but those that reminded me of interviews that I saw with British who survived the Nazi's bombing campaign during WWII.
Ahmed's position in the camp is an odd one. He's a boyscout leader for the Fateh party, but on the side he is known to have many connections with people from all over the city, foreigner's especially. Apparently he was asked by a film crew to retrieve their equipment from Hezbollah who had seized it, probably in fear that they were spies. He made arrangements to be picked up by Hezbollah after they had determined that the footage was harmless. They got him and drove him to their part of town, but just as they were getting out of the car the building they were about to enter, about 500 meters away, was blown to shit, a strong man who had been riding with him grabbed Ahmed around the neck and swung him away from the blast. It was funny to hear him praise the courage and fearlessness of Hezbollah soldiers, as he is in the PLO, not exactly a bunch of pussies.
I'll post some more of his stories and get back to the habanero hamburger ordeal in future blogs, but I'm happy to be here and just to let everyone know, things do seem to be back to normal in most parts of the city. This morning Marina and I passed this lebanese dude in a cowboy hat, brown skin-tight lycra shirt, and cowboy boots. Things are definitely back to normal in our part of town.
posted by miguella guerilla at 6:12 PM
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