For some reason, the car honking outside my hotel window is louder than ever this morning. It's like people are digging their elbows into their steering wheels and gritting their teeth, just long incessant honking followed by short bursts of spastic beeping. I promise I won't miss this part of living in Beirut, at all. If you travel 30 minutes south of Beirut, the annoying car talk ceases to exist and if you continue to drive, diesel fumes are no longer the only thing you smell when you take a "breath of fresh air."
Lebanon is an incredibly beautiful country. Yesterday my translator, driver and I went to a tiny southern village called Ainata right on the border with Israel. It took us over 3 hours to get there because in many places the roads were severely damaged from July's war, so we jerked and bumped along, trying to avoid enormous potholes and piles of rubble. Oh, but what an amazing drive! We traveled along the sea for the first third of it on a clear spring day, riding past miles of waves crashing against the rocky shore. On the trip my driver would slow down and point to famous markets where you can by the best goat meat, the cheapest vegetables, villages famous for their olives and oil. Edwin is a handsome man in his mid-40s who used to be a soldier in the Lebanese Army, he's never stepped outside of Lebanon's borders (well except to go to Syria, which he says is basically Lebanon, so it doesn't count) but he knows every corner of Lebanon and prides himself on navigating the back roads
, not just the highways. Edwin took me to an ancient fortress that people say dates back to Roman times, in Arabic it's called Qala'at Ash Shqif or Beufort Castle, and it stands, partially crumbled, atop a mountain 2,100 feet above sea level. The view is otherworldly, you can sea a ribbon of water, the Litani River, at the very bottom and past the deep green hills, you can make out Israel's Northern villages.
We were on our way to visit Ali Fadlallah, a 21 year old Hezbollah supporter who lost a majority of his family in the July War. I met Ali in Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah-run enclave in southern Beirut, I've been interviewing young supporters of different political parties/movements and he was my Hezbollah contact. Ali works at a telecommunications company in Dahiyeh and he attends a technical college there. He's not much taller than I am, handsome, with a slight build and sad, sad brown eyes. When he talks about his life in Lebanon and the way it changed after July's war, you can tell he's fighting back tears. In his family's 5th floor apartment in the heart of Dahiyeh, underneath a poster of his dead family members, in the dark, because the power was out (the power's often off in Dahiyeh), Ali told me about his recent history and his dreams for the future.
Half a year ago, Ali dug through the rubble of a bombed house in his village of Ainata hoping to find pieces of his mother and sister who had been dead for 15 days, crushed beyond recognition. His older brother, a Hezbollah fighter, was found shot in the chest, clutching his M-16 in front of one of the Ainata village mosques. When I asked him if he's been back to the village since burying his family, he looked at me curiously, and said, "of course, my father's still living in our house with my older sister, I love my village and I go and visit every weekend." Ali told me he just proposed to his girlfriend, who he met at a ceremony commemorating his "martyred" family members; she was there with her family paying their respects. Ali told me that he liked her because she wore the veil and was respectable girl. He wants to marry her, have a family, and run a cell phone story in Ainata. I said, “something must be very special about this village to make you want to rebuild a life where there are so many horrific memories around every corner,” and he said, “Why don’t you come visit and see for yourself.”
As Edwin drove us closer to Ainata, the scenery changed…hills, lush with vegetation gave way to burned out cars and houses pock marked with from shrapnel. Neon yellow Hezbollah flags flew high on electricity poles and the eyes of “martyred” Hezbollah fighters, Hassan Nasrallah and Ayatollah Khomeini stared down at us from their posters plastered on the sides of bombed out buildings and make-shift mosques. Edwin pointed to either side of the road where businesses or houses once stood, replaced by piles of concrete and twisted metal. Construction crews were rebuilding, the car honking of Beirut, replaced with hammering. Men sat on plastic lawn chairs in front of mini-marts, flanked by empty shops, with glass store fronts shattered. Women, wearing floor length black dresses, their veils pinned tightly beneath their chins looked like spirits floating with plastic grocery bags over the rubble. No one was smiling, everyone we passed had a scowl on their face, even the children.
We drove through quite a few checkpoints, Edwin told my translator to move to the front seat and he told me to hide my equipment bag as we inched up to each checkpoint guarded by Lebanese soldiers. Even though these soldiers were in the countryside, they were wearing urban camouflage and of course, they all had their m-16 slung over their shoulders. The soldiers asked Edwin a few questions, looked in the car and waved us on, every time, we were waved forward with a “tFadl,” which is Arabic for go for it, or take it. Edwin would wink at me in the rearview mirror and we would high five each other when we were out of the soldier’s view. You need Hezbollah’s permission to travel through the South, and if you’re an American you’re automatically stopped and questioned, but Edwin just said we were Lebanese tourists, interested in seeing the War’s destruction and reconstruction. And because I look TOTALLY LEBANESE, it worked every time.
Once in Ainata, we parked and while we were waiting for Ali, I took out my camera (a bulky, plastic, monstrosity I was forced to buy off the road because the battery on my digital camera lasts for about 10 pictures) and started shooting the devastation. The camera uses 36mm film and makes the loudest noise, which ricochets off the buildings and echoes throughout the village, I started to draw a small, hostile looking crowd of men who began pointing and shouting things at me in Arabic. Ali walked up and told me to stop taking pictures immediately and calmed the men down, telling them I was an American reporter, but I was safe because my background was Iranian (this helps me a lot in the South where they love all things Ira nian.)
Ali started the tour of his village, right where I was taking pictures. We were standing beside an empty lot with a white tent erected in the middle of it. Ali pointed to a spot on the edge of the lot and said that’s where his older was brother was found, shot dead, while protecting his house and a newly built mosque. There was no evidence of a mosque, just the tent where the villagers pray until they can rebuild the mosque destroyed in the War.
We walked down a dirt path and a long driveway to Ali’s house. The entry way was covered with a flowering bougainvillea. Ali’s sister met us at the door, dressed in black, her clean face, free from any sign of make-up, showed the deep lines of hard living. We entered Ali’s humble home and sat in this living room to talk about life after the war. Framed photos of Ali’s dead relatives sat on little round tables and in the corner of the room, his brother’s Kalashnikov balanced on an unexploded Israeli shell. “I took that from my brother’s dead hands,” he told me, pointing at the rifle, “it was broken and covered in blood, but I cleaned it and put it back together.”
The family meeting was awkward, listening to stories of War and death in a stranger’s home through and interpreter is an indescribable experience, it’s strange and uncomfortable and I wanted nothing more than to leave. I didn’t know what to say or what questions were appropriate or inappropriate. The air was thick with sadness.
When we said goodbye, after a tiny cup of thick Turkish coffee and sweet biscuit filled with date paste, I was relieved. Ali walked us back down the driveway and stopped to show me the roosters in the yard, “my mother loved to work in this garden,” he said, his eyes starting to water, ”it was beautiful and full of flowers, now no one takes care of it. When I come back, I’m going to replant the garden in her honor.” He stopped for a moment, and then turned to me and abruptly said, “Are you ready to see where she died?”
A block away from Ali’s family home in Ainata, a pile of concrete marks the place where his family was crushed, along with 16 other villagers. His mom was sheltering two wounded Hezbollah fighters in the hiding place and he said that’s why it was targeted by the Israelis. Ali stood on the side of the rubble and said that after the cease fire he hurried back to the village, hoping his mom would be there to greet him when he arrived. He finished that day digging through the broken concrete that was once a three story building. Ali told me he found a scrap of clothing he thought was his mothers, saying it was the worst day of his life, a day that changed him, forever. He looked to the right and said, “I used to play soccer with my friends 3 meters that way,” and then he turned to the left, stared at the pile of concrete, and added,“my happiest memories will forever be mixed with my saddest.”
On the road back to Beirut, I tried to understand why Ali wanted to return to a village that’s now a virtual graveyard. A graveyard filled with dear relatives, hopes and dreams. There is no happiness in Ainata…zero. And everyone in the village is convinced that another War with Israel is months away. Young men are always training, preparing to defend their homes. Destroy and rebuild, destroy and rebuild, destroy and rebuild…it’s crazy making.
Fifteen minutes from Ali’s village, we parked off the side of the road and I sat on a wall staring through a chain link fence that divides Lebanon and Israel. Edwin pointed down to a group of children walking through an orchard on the Israeli side, “can you believe how close it is, Shereen? We can actually see each other through the fence. But don’t get too close” he warned, “you’ll be electrocuted.”
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