This Country Is Too Small And I Have Proof

Incriminating Evidence #1:I was doing research for my master’s thesis on the Lebanese Upper Class. To avoid the notorious snowball-effect (asking only my friends and their friends and the friends of their friends), I decided to approach random customers of upper-class venues. Based on the first conversation I overheard in a coffee / lunchroom, I asked a young man if I could interview him, and he agreed. Turned out? He had gone to primary school with one of my friends, was the former class-mate of a girl I interviewed, and had graduated same university, same major, same year as the sister of another friend.

Incriminating Evidence #2: I had just started working for an NGO in South Lebanon when I accompanied a colleague to a meeting with some other NGOs. A woman with curly hair, one of the participants in the program, was introduced to me as the cousin of another colleague. I know this woman, I thought, and kept thinking this until 30 minutes later she suddenly turned to me and said wait, are you from the Netherlands? At which moment it dawned on me: she was my boyfriend’s aunt, the wife of his uncle.

Incriminating Evidence #3: This past weekend we went to Hermel, all the way up in North Lebanon. The road there is bad, very bad, and it was no surprise that one of our tires deflated to the point where we thought we needed to replace it. So we chose a random car-mechanic out of an endless number of them along the road into the city of Baalbeck (at least an hour and a half away from Beirut). A minute later, another car stopped; also had a problem with the tire. While waiting for the mechanic to look at the wheels, Walid and the driver made small talk, and it wasn’t long before one said I’ve seen you before, I think and the other replied yes, you do look very familiar as well. You can see where this is going: what else than they both frequent Barometre, a tiny pub in our neighborhood in Beirut.

Incriminating Evidence #4: Just before returning to the Netherlands at the end of my research period in 2006, a friend gave me the name and phone number of his cousin, Bilal A., because he lives in Holland. Which city he was living in, he didn’t know. I wasn’t looking for random Lebanese friends everywhere, so I never called the guy. Then, one day, I gave a talk on young Lebanese on the ‘Libanon-Day’ in a café in Utrecht, a city in the middle of the Netherlands. As I was packing up my stuff at the end of the afternoon, a young man approached me, telling me he had been on his way to the city center when he passed by the café and since he was from Lebanon, he couldn’t but walk in. He asked to know my name. I asked his. I laughed as he started saying Bilal A…. When I told him I already had his phone number, he wasn’t even surprised. He knew how small this country is.

Have you heard the plane?

Today, I was reminded of this story: It was the summer of 2001 in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Yoweri Museveni had just been re-elected president of the republic, for the 4th time, and I was lucky enough to be present for the inaugural festivities. On an old airstrip, a rectangular empty space somewhere in the city, a stage was set up for the dignitaries: many leaders of African states, European ambassadors, several princes from Zimbabwe – even Muammar al Qadhafi came to present his well-wishes. On the rest of the field the ordinary Ugandans had gathered to watch the show, and I had joined them. I might very well have been the only white person among them. First there were speeches. Then more speeches. From where I was on the field, the stage was hardly visible, and most people were busier eating, drinking, making music and dancing than they were listening to the VIPs blabbering on stage. They had come for one thing, and one thing only: the air-show. It had been announced that the Ugandan air force would give acte de présence with the fastest machines of their fleet. And indeed, when the speeches were finally done and the formalities concluded, the sky began to rumble.

First there was one jet. Then another. They flew in opposite directions, leaving streaks of white clouds against the blue sky. They turned, quickly, roaring and thundering low over the people’s heads… An old man next to me was staring with his mouth opened wide. After a grand total of 6 rounds over the audience, the planes took off. The old man turned, took my hand and shook it wildly. With a look of pride in his eyes he said: 'now THAT’S technology!'

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This Saturday, November 22nd, it is Independence Day in Lebanon. This means that Downtown is already partly blocked off in order to clean it of bombs because many politicians eligible for explosion will be gathered there for the military parade. It also means that the entire air fleet of the Lebanese military has been flying over Beirut the past few days: all 14 helicopters (8 big ones, 6 small ones) and no less than two Hawker Hunters.

Those Hawker Hunters are no joke. They were produced in the 1950s and purchased by the Lebanese president in 1958, only to be used a few times before rusting away or being sold to a museum. However, it seems that two of them have had a thorough check up and will be performing on Independence Day, for which they are currently practicing. The noise is unmistakable, rumbling like a coughing old man. My friends keep asking ‘have you heard the plane?’, proud like the old man in Uganda, because normally we hear nothing but the thundering noise of Israeli jets – usually the only jets in the Lebanese airspace. However, they often follow the question with ‘I hope it won’t try to break the sound-barrier, because it will probably break down into a thousand pieces if it does’. Apparently they don’t quite share the old man’s faith in technology. Either way, I wish everyone a happy Independence Day!

Archaic?

My friend visiting me from the Netherlands and I were sitting in the back of the minivan going around Beirut. It was dark and raining outside, and we were the only ones left on the bus – we were getting close to the final destination. The van stopped to pick up another passenger. It was a young woman opening the sliding door, folding her umbrella and taking a seat on the first bench. The bus continued its way, the door still open. She’s not closing the door! my friend whispered to me. No of course not, I replied no longer surprised at the scene in front of us, women here don’t close the door. They wait for the men to do that. As we were the only other passengers on the van, there were clearly no men to close the door for her. So who’s going to close the door now? my friend asked, while the girl turned to close the small window next to her, still looking where those annoying gusts of wind and rain came from. No one, it will eventually close when we go downhill and the bus hits the brakes, I said. The door indeed remained open until a few minutes later we stopped at a crossroad.

It is something I can’t get used to, this weak attitude of many Lebanese women, and my Dutch friend’s astonished reaction was a nice reassurance that I am not alone in my disdain for the dependency it displays. Why would any girl need to pass the water bottle to her male friend to open it, when she has proven she can easily do so herself when he is not around? Why does he need to carry her bags, when she is the one who wants to take the stuff with her? I simply don’t understand what’s nice about seeing other people carrying my groceries to the car, or having to stand aside while some men are struggling to load my cupboard onto a truck – clearly in need of an extra hand, but unable to accept help from a woman.

Sietske seems surprised that the bank offers her a credit card and then requires her to bring her husband to sign with her. I say: in a country where women refuse to open or close their own doors, it only makes sense that they are not allowed to open or close their own accounts either.

Why, really?

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So why do you like living in Lebanon? My friend, visiting from the Netherlands, asked me after a day of being harassed on the Corniche and having been overcharged with every single purchase just because we are both foreign.

I couldn’t quite think of anything, just then.

But two days later I knew full well why I like living in Lebanon. Because I can sit on the beach on a Monday night, enjoying the colors of the sunset and throwing pebbles in the water, I said.

In November! she added.

In November, indeed. It’s easy to forget one cannot wear flip-flops this time of year everywhere in the world...

The Great Competition

“It’s the oil, stupid!”No, I am not talking about the USA and their wars here in the Middle East. Nor am I talking about their nerve-wrecking elections. (I mean, I don’t even know if I will dare to go to sleep tomorrow, for fear of what we might wake up to on Wednesday! Which reminds me of the election-results in 2004, which I accidentally witnessed with the Democratic crowd in an upscale club in New York City. I remember the speech of Barack Obama, broadcasted on the big screen, and someone whispering in my ear ‘watch closely, that there is our next president!’ – I didn’t dare to believe him then, and I can only hope to believe him now.) But that’s not what this post is about. I am talking about olive oil.

Olive oil might very well be as important for countries around the Mediterranean and inwards toward Iran as black oil is for the Gulf States. Back in the Netherlands, I used to work in a Persian restaurant, and the sweet chef would start every recipe with ‘oil olive, lots of oil olive!’ before adding any other ingredient. (This same sweet chef had learned to cook when his political intellectual activities had landed him in prison for a few years. Once his request for asylum in the Netherlands was approved, he set out to find a job, and the overly-helpful placement center thought a kitchen restaurant would be the most appropriate considering his skills. Glad we made use of his intellectual abilities, right? But I digress again.)

So, olive oil. In two years in Lebanon, I have only had to buy a bottle of oil once, and not after all my friends apologized that the harvest had been so meager that year that even they had to get it from the stores. Every other time one of my friends would discover a nearly empty olive oil bottle in my kitchen, he or she would immediately exclaim ‘your next bottle will be from our oil! You have to taste it, it’s the best!’

I have been offered spoons of olive oil when coming to people’s houses for a cup of tea, ‘just to taste’. I have been laughed at when suggesting that someone (usually on their way back to job or studies in Europe or the USA) could lighten their luggage by removing those two-liter bottles of uncle’s olive oil from their suitcases. Good olive oil is a source of pride, and an almost essential part of someone’s identity – even if they had no hand in growth, harvest or preparation of the olives and the oil.

Now that I am living with Walid, I have automatically become part of the sharing of olive oil of his family, much to the chagrin of many friends who have proudly supplied me with olive oil before. Walid’s mother’s family has some olive-groves in the South, and for her and her brothers and sisters there is no question as to which oil will be used in their households – their husbands and wives have no say in the matter. But the pride never really goes away, and when one uncle-in-law had a chance, he offered me olive oil from his family’s village. ‘You know,’ he said with a wink, ‘they may think their olive oil is the best, but we are not from their village, we can eat much better!’

I’m looking forward to the competition. May the best man - uh, oil win.

Don’t forget to check Qussa: The Visuals every once in a while!