My daughter Sonya lived and worked in Lebanon for 15 years. Now she's raising money to help that country recover from a disaster that killed many and left thousands homeless. If you can't go to her meeting, there's a place here to leave a donation. Please help if you can.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1286644688333624/
Pictures of Beirut
In my earliest photos of Lebanon, taken on film, not the tiny ‘card’ I coax out of my camera these days with aging fingers,
the sky is so blue the technician in the shop that developed them questioned me on my use of a blue filter. No, the only blue filter was the sky of that dry
and sunny climate in a country, where the French poet called his home in the valley of the Bekaa region the most beautiful place in the world.
That sky was October. We never visited in the thicker skies of summer.
We stayed, that first time, in the English hotel, ate yogurt and fruit for breakfast, grabbed fries and shwarma from fast-food restaurants, encouraged coffee houses to try making ‘iced coffee’ – ‘it’s big back in Boston,’ we assured the shopkeepers.
We dined on rooftops long after dark, on ‘room temperature’ evenings,
perspired in the ‘interior’ hills of Balbec among monuments the Romans made bigger there than anywhere else outside their own land,
as explained by a Lebanese guide who knew eleven tongues, including Russian,
and left exposed to the casual inspections of early 21st century wanderers such as ourselves.
And, on at least one occasion, talked politics in the streets of the Christian neighborhood.
“Tell Bush,” a man told me, “to make the Syrians leave.”
The Lebanese knew the names of American Senators better than we did. They knew who, at least in that decade, held the cards.
One tough neighborhood, I wrote afterward,
After Syria pulled their troops from Beiruti checkpoints --
and before that tragic land suffered its own implosion --
before the Israelis, once again, bombed Beirut and were driven back to their own borders by Hezbollah.
Later in Boston, while being treated
for prostate, my doctor’s resident, a Lebanese, told us Israel’s bombs had turned
the stones where Christ walked into dust .
There were no beggars in Beirut. When a woman on a minibus, the country’s informal public transport, showed us her baby and opened her palm, our daughter, defender of her adopted country, dismissed her as a ‘gypsy.’
After the Arab Spring faded into the Syrian disaster, things changed. We gave a few Lebanese lira to sidewalk Madonnas, wearing black in the sunlight, holding children.
One day I yelled at a man who insisted he could polish my sneakers. On another Anne and I ran from the streets of Hamra, pursued with demonic persistence by a poor imp,orphan of her country’s devastation,
demanding more money than we had already given her.
Still, the enduring picture is a beautiful country, with a rare history, and a strong and varied people, savvy, with a clear sense of the ravages they had borne, who knew more about the world than most of the world knew about itself.
Now bearing the new catastrophes of a political system that has never really worked, a century-long path of too many compromises with the greed, and the sectarian and doctrinal rigidity of a few,
And the warning signs blazoned in the towers of uncollected trash,too long ignored
Which other lands, including our own, appear likely to discover in the ruins of our own social explosions, exploited by the greed of a few, and the privileges of a favored caste,
The signs of our dissolution,
All about us,
Littering the roadside.
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