Lebanese lies

One of the most annoying things of living in Lebanon as a foreigner is that when you meet people for the first time, they will either try to convince you that you are crazy for wanting to live here, of they will try to ‘sell’ their country to you (neither of which has worked with me, just yet). Being crazy refers to the fact that, according to many Lebanese people, living here means you have to put up with Lebanese people, which can be a bit of a challenge. It also means you can be hit by a car at any moment or die because a passing politician is blown up right next to you. Those who try the positive approach usually come up with lame stereotypes such as ‘It’s a great place to live because we all speak 3 languages; English, French and Arabic. For example, we say ‘hi, kifak, ça va?’ To be honest, in more than 12 months in Lebanon, I’ve heard this phrase exactly once. Other than that, mixing words from 3 languages doesn’t mean you speak 3 languages, as far as I know – unless we would consider Dutch people tri-lingual because they use words like ‘shit’, ‘sorry’, and ‘überhaupt’ in their everyday speech. But I digress.

The other thing people like to boast about is the fact that one can ‘ski in the mountains and swim in the sea’ in the same day. Again, I have only heard once of people who did this (and they only did it to prove this claim is true). Usually, it is either too cold to swim, or there is not enough snow to ski. Yesterday it may have been possible though – judging from Sietske’s pictures, the weather was quite warm in Beirut, whereas we were up in the Cedars (around 2000m. above sea level), and this was our view:

For me, the temperatures up there felt like practicing for tomorrow: return to The Netherlands, for a few weeks. What's left for me now is to wish everyone Adha Karim, Merry Christmas, and a wonderful 2008. Until then!

Reflections on an assassination

Saturday. My dad calls and asks: ‘So how is Beirut today?’ I feel the oh-so-familiar knot tying itself in my stomach – I’ve been out all morning and haven’t checked the news yet, so who knows what has happened. ‘Why, did they blow up someone else?’ ‘Well, the guy from three days ago…’ Ah yes. The guy from three days ago (now almost a week). François el Hajj, a general in the Lebanese Army, mentioned as a possible successor to Michel Sleiman (the current commander of the army), if Sleiman indeed becomes the next president of the Lebanese Republic. He came from a poor family in the South, el Hajj, and as one of 10 children this job represented a rare chance for someone of his background to make it to the top. In Rmeish, his village in the South, there was even talk of him becoming president, eventually – for a commander of the Army, necessarily a Maronite Christian, not a strange career-move in Lebanon.

I arrived to work Wednesday last week to find one of my colleagues crying. ‘The explosion this morning, it was her uncle’, whispered another colleague to inform me. Other than her red, teary eyes, there was nothing that day that reminded me of the awfulness of what had happened that morning. Nothing on the streets, nothing in the conversations – not even the loud accusations of Syria, the country that gets blamed first (and exclusively) for every assassination, by members of the current government.

One of my colleagues thought it was because he was from the army, and the army is supposedly ‘neutral’ in Lebanon – neither with the government, nor with the opposition – so if you have no political party to stage the mourning for your martyrdom, your death hardly receives any public grief.

Yet the silence over el Hajj’s murder, the absence of government-members blaming Syria, might have another source: apparently, el Hajj refused to join the ‘Southern Lebanese Army’, an armed group that helped the Israeli army, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Being from a village on the border with Israel, he has seen the destruction and aggression from Lebanon’s Southern neighbor, and his moral stance against Israel hasn’t changed over the years. This means that having him as the leader of the Lebanese Army (which is deployed in South Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from re-arming, or even disarm them) might be disadvantageous to countries other than Syria, to put it mildly.

Question remains: who blew him up? Maybe this time, we shouldn’t look to the East for an answer…

Broodnodig (even iets heel anders)

Het was zomer 2005, mijn eerste bezoek aan Libanon, en Reina en ik reden door een achterafstraatje in Beirut toen ze plotseling stopte naast een mannetje op een fiets. Over zijn stuur hingen doorschijnende plastic zakken met wat leek op bruine lappen. Reina gaf de man 1000 lira (€0.50) en kreeg een zak aangereikt, die ze achteloos op de achterbank gooide. “Dit is mijn favoriete brood", zei ze, "dit vind je nergens buiten Libanon.”

Veel Libanese gerechten worden met brood geserveerd; de bekendste daarvan ongetwijfeld de hommus en moutabbal (aubergine-dip, ook bekend als baba ganousj) waarbij het brood niet weg te denken is. Maar een echte Libanees laat het daar niet bij: die eet ook de salade met een stuk brood in de hand, en de kip, en dient de gegrilde stukjes lamsvlees op gewikkeld in brood. En de broodconsumptie neemt alleen maar toe naarmate men verder richting het Zuiden gaat: tegen de Israelische grens aan wordt zelfs de spaghetti met brood in plaats van een vork gegeten.

Dat het hier niet om bruine boterhammen gaat moge duidelijk zijn. Over het algemeen gebruikt men groot uitgevallen pita-achtig brood, platter en van pizzaformaat, maar elke streek kent haar eigen variatie. Zo eet men in het Noorden brood dat heerlijk smaakt, maar de textuur heeft van een zeem, en is het Zuiden gespecialiseerd in mar’ou’, een soort flinterdunne lap die op plaatsen doorschijnend is. Het wordt gebakken op een saj, een ronde, bolle ijzeren plaat die van onderen verhit wordt, en het eindproduct heeft qua doorsnee de afmeting van een vierpits gasfornuis. Da’s natuurlijk lastig transporteren, vandaar de foto’s van origami met mar’ou’ op deze pagina: een snelcursus in ‘van saj naar diepvries-formaat in 5 stappen’.

Zie? Blijft bijna niks van over!

If I could choose…

For today, the homework for English class was to write a few lines on ‘if I could live in any country in the world, I would choose…’. I present you with a random sample of the choices of the 9-year old students of Rawdah HS Elementary school in Southern Beirut:

“…I would choose Spain, because my parents studied there and lived there for 15 years and they speak very good Spanish.”

“…I would choose Denmark, because I have the Danish nationality, and it is a very green and peaceful country.”

“…I would choose Dubai, because my father and my uncles work there, and they cannot travel to Lebanon often.”

“…I would choose London, because the schools are free, there is no pollution because of smart actions of the government, and because the roads are good and very far from the houses so you can have calmness in your living room.”

While the first three choices point mercilessly at the rather saddening exodus of Lebanese people that is going on and has been going on for decades, the last one just makes me nod my head in agreement. I can’t wait to spend some time in a city that does not have honking cars everywhere, all the time…

It's a brain thing

Similar to many people I know here in Lebanon, I don’t follow the news. I don’t read newspapers (the few available sources in English, like Daily Star and Naharnet, being of abominable quality), I don’t watch the news or listen to the radio (I still don’t understand much of the classical Arabic in which the news is broadcast), and political discussions among friends tend to go from English to Arabic in 2 seconds, making it very easy for me to tune out. Generally, my attitude is one of: if something really bad happens, I am bound to notice (wars tend to be very noisy); otherwise there is no need to get scared by the fear-inducing way of reporting that is going on. For my friends it is less easy to completely disregard the political situation: they understand the discussions and because opinions are so polarized, so black and white, so completely one-way or the other, it is hard not to join them. And so, before you know it, you are vigorously defending a political standpoint that is only remotely connected to what you really believe in, just because the politician who defends your cause said this or that. What’s worse, this politician may very well change his mind entirely, retrace his steps and seek alliance with his former ‘enemies’. As one of my colleagues said: ‘Sometimes you lose a friend because you spend a whole night fighting about a political issue, only to hear the next day that your politicians have suddenly agreed on the issue.’

To preserve friendships, it would of course be possible not to discuss politics at all. For example, I never knew the political conviction of one of my friends here, I thought he was neutral – until his girlfriend let slip that the only fights they had were over politics, she being with the government, he with the opposition. I guess that when you get this close, there is no way to hide your convictions. Or, as Rayan said: ‘You know, even when you don’t talk about politics, it is hard to be friends, because if they are on the other side, politically, and you know that, you will always wonder if there is something wrong with their brain.’