GROUND TRUTH
Beirut Diary: So Much for the Postwar
BEIRUT
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:
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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
It's a game of musical people.
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.
