I must apologize for having left so much time between posts. Once settled into a lifestyle, it seems like it should be easier to write every day, but sadly it's not the case. While traveling, a bullrush of images and ideas and feelings enter the mind which fills like a bladder and soon enough needs literary expulsion. But once settled, new concerns arise (doing homework, going on long aimless walks with friends, debating the correct pronunciation of the letter Z with a Brit, a Canadian, and an Australian, etc.) But here I am. I spent last weekend relaxing in the south with Zach and Soumaya at the Hourani family estate. Off the balcony, we could see Israel and we took a driving tour so as to get at a vantage point where the border was only a few hundred feet away. On one side of the massive electrified fence was the overflowing lushness of Israeli farms: new buildings with fresh paint, orchards, billowing greenery, and state of the art infrastructure. Across the fence on the Lebanon side was a bony valley of brownish dust and scattered weeds. Where we were was the toppish portion of the Great Rift Valley which eventually follows the Nile down to Kenya, starting up in the previously contested Bakaa Valley near the Lebanese border with Syria. It is one of the great water sources of the region and the basis of most economic and physical battles that have taken place over the centuries.
We made mulberry juice under the hot sun wearing swimsuits and orange hats. We hand picked giant bowls of berries then squeezed them through netting, boiled off the worms, and bottled some of the most exemplary juice I've ever tasted. Otherwise we read and chatted in hammocks, had meals with the family and old war-worn family friends throughout the area formerly occupied by Israel and only accessible with special permission and passports at the ready. The mosquitos ate me alive the first night, but after that I tried sleeping with a mosquito net for the first time.
On Monday I went out partying with kids from the program and woke up the next morning with a phone number in my pocket. On Wednesday, I called it and ended up having a wonderful time with a Palestinian girl with a wild wood-polish fro and songs and stories from cultures and countries abound. She's a writer.
I've now finished my second to last week of the program and am beginning to depress over leaving Lebanon. The plan is to continue back into Syria, down to Jordan, Egypt, and Israel - hopefully with Zach by my side, but he is still meandering an absurd bureaucracy with the American embassy. They wont allow him to apply for a replacement passport without a police report from Lebanon, but he couldn't get that unless he was Lebanese. Otherwise he had to go to a different police station, no a different one, and then he couldn't get permission to ask for one without a translator and a note from the justice center which they wouldn't let him into because he wasn't dressed expensively enough and then the person he needed to talk to wasn't there and another guy send him to a different office to buy stamps which enabled him to fill out another form and request the ability to buy more stamps for a new form, and now 5 weeks later, he has his police report (in Arabic), but which needs to be translated with a certificate in order for the embassy to allow him to apply for a new passport. When he explained his situation to the Brits in Majaoun, they were appalled that the Americans would treat their own citizens like this.
We heard when the 2006 war broke out, the British embassy called all of their citizens and escorted them and all of their family members to boats waiting near Beirut to evacuate them. All the other embassies did the same except the American one that was charging $1000 for aid in evacuation. Eventually international pressure made them remove the fee, but they made their citizens wade through the ocean to get to the boats. And now they refuse to help one of their own citizens until he navigates an absurd 3rd world bureaucracy on his own. And when he gets everything in order, he has 9 hours per WEEK in which he can visit the embassy. Call me old fashion but it seems that consular services for American citizens has so few responsibilities, and those who work there get paid so extraordinarily much that what he has been through and the policies of our own embassy are something akin to a massive hawked loogie in the face. Zach's been considering the option of having his dad contact the New York Times and explain to them how our own embassies deal with their own citizens - whereby he imagines he'll have his new passport by Tuesday. Maybe posting on this blog will make the tiniest splash in helping our government understand that it's time to drop the arrogance and actually be helpful and humain for once. Of course the story of his losing his passport is quite interesting, because it was stolen along with his clothes while he was swimming. All the administrators at LAU and the SINARC program and the officers and officials have explained to Zach that it was his own fault that it was stolen. They've all even gone so far as to seriously berate him for it, try to make him feel like a jackass for having his property stolen. This absolutely blows my mind. Am I completely crazy, or was I raised by savages, for believing that if something gets stolen in this world it's...you know...the THIEF'S fault? When Nivine, one of the assistants here at SINARC finished explaining to him how stupid he was for letting his passport get stolen, he turned to her and said, "you know what, tomorrow, I'm gonna walk into your office and rob you blind, then we'll see exactly who you think is to blame here."
So I'm hoping he can get everything figured out so we can travel together. But then again, the Tao says that hope and fear are the two emptiest emotions because neither of them really have anything to do with reality and are a massive waste of energy. So I will do neither and simply see how it goes.
This weekend the school is touring the south, in the real strongholds of Hezbollah. We'll see Tyre and Sidon, two of the oldest cities in the world.
all my love
tcm
No comments:
Post a Comment