The Ever-Evolving World Through Her Eyes

This video is so powerful. Please sign the letter today. Show support for courage and youth empowerment. Let them lead the way.

To hear Bono’s words:

My favorite of the line-up:

And One for the Youth

The morgues of Gaza’s hospitals are over-flowing. The bodies in their
blood-soaked white shrouds cover the entire floor space of the Shifa
hospital morgue. Some are intact, most horribly deformed, limbs twisted
into unnatural positions, chest cavities exposed, heads blown off, skulls
crushed in. Family members wait outside to identify and claim a brother,
husband, father, mother, wife, child. Many of those who wait their turn
have lost numerous family members and loved ones.

Blood is everywhere. Hospital orderlies hose down the floors of operating
rooms, bloodied bandages lie discarded in corners, and the injured
continue to pour in: bodies lacerated by shrapnel, burns, bullet wounds.
Medical workers, exhausted and under siege, work day and night and each
life saved is seen as a victory over the predominance of death.

The streets of Gaza are eerily silent- the pulsing life and rhythm of
markets, children, fishermen walking down to the sea at dawn brutally
stilled and replaced by an atmosphere of uncertainty, isolation and fear.
The ever-present sounds of surveillance drones, F16s, tanks and apaches
are listened to acutely as residents try to guess where the next deadly
strike will be- which house, school, clinic, mosque, governmental building
or community centre will be hit next and how to move before it does. That
there are no safe places- no refuge for vulnerable human bodies- is felt
acutely. It is a devastating awareness for parents- that there is no way
to keep their children safe. (more…)

So it has been just over a week and it seems Lebanon, for now, can rest.  The stress and tension will fade a bit into the background until the next time something happens.  But when does it really stop? What will have to happen before Lebanon can truly know peace?

Just yesterday, the government revoked it’s initial decision to impose a resolution on Hezbollah’s telecommunications.

What is the permanent change that will ensure Lebanon’s peaceful internal stability?

March 31st 2008 9:45am

All the Ani songs on my ipod are best listened to when it’s raining. Good thing it’s raining. The drops smash into concrete breaking into a thousand pieces of glass; someone always ends up bloody.

In Lebanon, there are no gutters so the streets become rivers, almost reminiscent of when flooding meant life and food. Except now there are cars beeping and yelling at one another, organized chaos.

Your pants get soaked with all that is Beirut because the ground has seen it all. Not in some romantic fierce way that we attribute to walls of old buildings or a desk of someone revolutionary- something that just breaths the history into your being, but rather the it’s the ground, full of dirt, cats, trash, and sewage, memories of all the wars and all the struggles personal and political. And the makeshift river rushes it all away from our memories so that our mind  won’t think of what is to come. Although our eyes and ears take all that is around us, documenting each instance and filing it away in the depths of our minds to be forgotten and remembered later in hindsight

This blog is here to let you know that I have 3 blog drafts all getting ready for the press but also letting you know that internet is slow and that life is complicated.

Yala visit the photos on flickr and let me know what you think.  More to come in two days… I promise.

So it is the eve of my one month anniversary with Lebanon. Oh Libnan what we have experienced in the past 30 days. Beautiful, sunny days, that warm more than the body, harsh, chilly days, that seep in your skin with the rain. O Lebnan with your complicating things and your never resolving anything, with your normalizing gun-shots and explosions. I’m in constant negotiations and analyzation- which apparently isn’t even a word- of who I am. I was ‘going home,’ I was finding what it was to be me among ‘my people.’ But discouragement settles in deep with disillusion. Moving forward is muddied with the complications of Lebanon’s realities.

I am home in a sense, as I have never really felt this at home in this skin. Although, my tongue feels a little out of the loop, when I’m expected to respond. I guess it’s the ideal of my homeland that has been removed from it’s pedestal, as it should. Lebanon isn’t everything, and at the same time she is. She is a paradox, at once unified and sorely divided. She is in psychological terms, a world of individualism and collectivism, focusing on the individual and at the same time the group. She is a contradiction as all truths are. She would be the personification of real beauty, with expensive shoes, if she were a person. She is returning and she is leaving. She is home.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been constantly running somewhere, anywhere, to make sure that this school endeavor could be a success. Run here, run there, and then come back here, sign this paper, and this one too but with your eyes closed this time, pay for this piece of paper so that you can get your loan to pay for school, talk to your family doctor, “you don’t have one in Lebanon?” The interesting part is that, just like the US, the American University of Beirut, is just a reflection of the disorganization on a national level. The United States for example, is a business, and thus their institutions of higher learning are businesses that happen to give you an education at the same time. A damn good one, no doubt. And while the country, runs on processes that are rarely broken or changed, save the current administration, thus their schools run on strict processes and guidance that one can come to count on. In Lebanon, the country at large is having trouble even electing their president on time, AUB has similar problems of a lesser magnitude that leaves no room for any type of handholding. There is no guiding, yet the processes are unknown and unfamiliar to most students. Which then leaves the students in frantic disarray, running around the campus, searching for signatures and other stitches left undone. The orientation program does a great job of trying to fill the gaps for the new arrivals, but like all successful change, it has to be a joint effort between the grassroots and the top down.

Otherwise, AUB has been amazing. Unlike large Universities in the US, each class is no more than 25-30 people, so the learning is a rich experience combined with the atmosphere of a large University filled with variety, yet it’s classrooms have the feel of a small liberal arts college. In my Art Appreciation class, which is basically an analysis of different cultural art in different time periods, the classroom is packed with my classmates, intrigue bubbling, everyone has something interesting to add. Of course I do as well, but sometimes when distraction creeps over me I look at the bulletin board which has Kurt Cobain written in chalk on it. My mind brings me back to eight years old and ripped jeans and flannel, the epitome of cool, even to me now. Which I guess is a good lead to my Psych 102 class. We’ve been studying the different perspectives of what it is that influences us, why we are, the way we are. Each view so specific to a certain aspect of life- our upbringing, our environment, our genetics, our culture. It seems the psychologists have deemed each of their studies the most true but the interesting part is, they’re all true. You can’t have one without the other, and for the most part it seems we have had little control over why we are these certain ways, but we can and must take an active part in who we will become.

Most days you can find me with a coffee in hand at the green oval, with many different characters in my life. But mainly three people Hocine, Zalfa, and Doua. Hocine and Zalfa are professors at AUB and are friends of my brother Radney when he lived in Lebanon. They have become a constant in my life, helping me with any sort of problem and are often there laughing loudly and analyzing most things to finite detail. It’s been a wonderful transition with them as most of my friends back home have been at least four years older than me, and as a twenty year old freshman most of my classmates are three years younger. Doua is a freshman as well, a New Yorker from Staten Island and a Palestinian from Jordan. She grew up in both places constantly moving. It’s been great to find a New Yorker who has a similar love for the region in which we reside.

Ok now for small details-

• Nine bulbs of garlic is less than a dollar
• A veggie cheese sandwhich or in Arabic – Sage (Saj) Gibne w khoura is also $1.30
• My classes are all on MWF
• My brothers are coming to see me in a couple weeks
• I had my hair professionally done and it cost about $10
• I have straight hair for a little while – weird