[Peace-discuss] more life in wartime

[Ricky Baldwin]

Hi folks-

This is my friend again who has been living in
Lebanon, reporting on Iraq.  I forward it for the
horrifying picture it paints of life there at the
moment.  Recently she wrote a line to the effect that
you know you're in trouble when people are calling
from Baghdad to see if you're ok.

Ricky

> Dear friends:
> 
> Personally, I'm not all that happy with this piece,
> but I'm sending it 
> so that you can get a sense of what's going on here.
> I'll send you a 
> more thorough, less heavily edited version as soon
> as I'm out from under 
> my next deadline.
> 
> For those of you who asked about donating for the
> refugees, many thanks. 
> Here are a few places to start:
> 
> http://sanayehreliefcenter.blogspot.com/
> 
> http://www.savebeirut.org/
> 
> http://www.saveleb.org/
> 
> be seeing you,
> 
> annia
> 
>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101370.html?sub=AR
> 
> Beirut Diary: So Much for the Postwar
> 
> By Annia Ciezadlo
> Sunday, July 23, 2006; B01
> 
> MONDAY
> 
> My friend Paula and I sat up drinking vodka with
> lemon juice and smoking 
> her cigarettes into the night, after another day of
> insanity. We talked 
> about a story her mother had told me:
> 
> A woman was cooking six stones on a traditional
> stove. A man passing by 
> asked her why she was cooking stones. "It's for my
> children," the woman 
> replied. "We have nothing to eat, but I don't want
> them to know that. 
> When they see the stones, they will think that
> dinner is coming, and 
> they won't be hungry."
> 
> Paula and I called our friend Nelly, who lives in a
> village south of 
> Beirut, right down by the Israeli border, where the
> bombing is intense. 
> "We made it just in time," she said breathlessly.
> "We crossed the 
> Zahrani bridge, and two minutes later, they hit."
> She seemed distracted, 
> like everyone does these days. When you're close to
> a bombing, it takes 
> a day or two to feel right again.
> 
> Until five days ago, Nelly ran a business training
> villagers to produce 
> supermarket-quality organic food in south Lebanon.
> She'd just gotten a 
> sample request from a big European company that she
> was hoping would 
> help her expand her business. So much for that.
> 
> Lebanon's economy is shot, 15 years of postwar
> reconstruction reduced to 
> rubble in less than five days. A supper of stones.
> 
> We chain-smoked in silence -- cigarette companies
> must love wars -- 
> until Paula suddenly laughed. "I have to write my
> master's thesis!" she 
> exclaimed, laughing some more, and then I started
> laughing, too, in that 
> way that you have to laugh when you don't know what
> else to do. Paula's 
> thesis topic: Women Entrepreneurs in Postwar
> Lebanon. Postwar Lebanon! 
> We laughed and laughed. "It's not postwar anymore!"
> she gasped. "It's war!"
> 
> TUESDAY
> 
> Thousands of Americans are waiting to leave Beirut.
> 
> Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are coming to
> replace them, filling 
> schools and hospitals and Beirut's only public park.
> I'm an American, 
> married to a Lebanese, who is also an American. Do
> we stay or do we go?
> 
> We stay. And so does everybody else we know. Naji,
> whose house was 
> destroyed, is staying with Nada; Nahla, who lives in
> the south, is 
> staying with Fuad; Hussein, who has an 8-month-old
> baby, leaves to join 
> his wife and baby, who are staying in the mountains,
> leaving behind 
> Mohammed, who has nowhere to stay. Today, the U.N.
> reported that an 
> estimated 500,000 have been displaced. That's
> one-eighth of Lebanon's 
> population, and you see them everywhere -- even in
> abandoned buildings 
> -- when you walk around Beirut.
> 
> It's a game -- musical people -- and all of Lebanon
> is playing it right now.
> 
> Half of Beirut is fleeing up north to the mountains,
> all of the south is 
> trying to get to Beirut, and anyone who has money
> and connections or a 
> U.S. passport is trying to escape from Lebanon
> altogether. Stay in 
> motion, keep circulating, and you just might stay
> safe.
> 
> WEDNESDAY
> 
> 7:30 a.m.: The bombs always seem to come in the
> middle of the night, 2 
> or 3 or even 4 a.m. But no matter how late they keep
> you up, you always 
> snap awake in the morning. The longer it goes on,
> the less sleep you 
> get, until sooner or later you've crossed the border
> between sleep and 
> so-called real life.
> 
> "Do you know, I feel like I'm dreaming this," says a
> friend over the 
> phone. "The world can't be this nonsensical. You've
> got all these 
> extremes -- a failed state, the army crumbling. When
> I talk about the 
> politics, I realize how bad a situation we're in.
> The rest of the time, 
> I'm just a scared mother, hoping this is all just a
> nightmare."
> 
> You watch TV constantly, even in your sleep. Turn it
> off, even for a 
> minute, and something bad is bound to happen. Keep
> checking your e-mail, 
> keep calling your friends; keep the lines of
> communication open, and you 
> feel safe, even if you aren't.
> 
> 2:30 a.m.: I open up my computer one last time to
> check the latest 
> drawings on Mazen's blog,
> http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/ . Ever since 
> a friend sent me the link, it's been my bedtime
> ritual to look at it. 
> When I look at his drawings, I feel connected,
> protected, like a little 
> kid whose mom is reading "Where the Wild Things Are"
> for bedtime. As 
> though the insomniac dreams of others can somehow
> keep us safe at night. 
> I don't know Mazen -- who he is, what he does for a
> living, what 
> passports he holds -- but I know the important
> things about him: He 
> likes music, he doesn't like politics and, like the
> rest of us, he has a 
> hard time sleeping through the bombs.
> 
> THURSDAY
> 
> We went for a walk in our abandoned neighborhood,
> Hamra, close to the 
> American University of Beirut. It was evening, the
> electricity was out, 
> and the darkening streets were full of people.
> 
> We stopped to look at a poster: an advertisement for
> a workshop, 
> ironically enough, on conflict resolution. Canceled.
> A little farther 
> down the street, we stopped to visit the staff at
> the hotel where we 
> used to stay. The air was thick and hot, so I
> grabbed a brochure from a 
> rack on the counter and started fanning myself. It
> was a flier for the 
> Beiteddine Festival, outdoor summer concerts at an
> Ottoman-era palace. 
> Scheduled for this week: Liza Minnelli and Stomp.
> Canceled.
> 
> The hotel, usually packed with students and European
> backpackers, is now 
> overflowing with Lebanese people who have lost their
> homes. The staff 
> invites us in for coffee; most of them, afraid to
> risk the roads to work 
> and back, are staying at the hotel now, too. They
> had a record number of 
> reservations this year; it was going to be their
> best year ever. Canceled.
> 
> FRIDAY
> 
> Abu Hassan, our favorite restaurant, is the only one
> still open in our 
> neighborhood. We went there for a lunch of chicken
> kabobs today. At the 
> table next to us sat a couple with a baby, head
> wobbling a bit, staring 
> around in bafflement. The television was playing
> Marcel Khalife concert 
> footage from the 1980s. "We're going back 20 years,"
> one of the cooks 
> said in disgust. I asked what the song's title was,
> and the man from the 
> next table answered: "I Chose You, My Country, With
> Love and Respect."
> 
> They were refugees. The first night of bombing, they
> fled without 
> bringing anything. The next night, realizing the
> bombings probably 
> weren't going to stop, the man went back home to get
> a few things. "I'll 
> be honest with you," he said, with a fragile smile,
> as though he might 
> start to cry. "I went back for one thing: to get my
> bird." Later that 
> night, their house was destroyed.
> 
> Are we American, he asked. We are. "We don't hate
> any American people," 
> he said, choking back tears. I'd heard it before,
> but never from someone 
> who had just lost his home.
> 
> He shrugged. "This is our destiny," he said in
> English. "Life goes on."
> 
> Annia Ciezadlo lives with her Lebanese American
> husband in Hamra, a 
> mixed Muslim-Christian neighborhood not far from the
> American University 
> of Beirut.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Annia Ciezadlo
> PO Box 113-5498
> Beirut, Lebanon
> 
> +961 1 750 982 (land)
> +961 3 274 360 (mobile)
> 
> 
> 


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