Advertisement
Published: April 19th 2007
Edit Blog Post
They say that to know Lebanon you have to know the south, but they should add that to know the south, your best bet is to hitch a ride on the back of a UN convoy. Even in the best of times, southern Lebanon is as fraught with peril as a Jerry Bruckheimer flick. Hizbollah’s staunchest support is in the south’s tiny villages, while the areas that surround the border on all sides - Shebaa Farms, the Golan Heights, the Palestinian Territories - do a good job of answering the question, “Where do hope and diplomacy go to suffer a slow, agonizing death?”
In the wake of last summer’s war, which reduced much of the south to rubble, the UN all but set up the General Assembly in the winding souqs of Tyre. You see white SUVs barreling down the road, bright blue UN flags snapping from the back. There are checkpoints on every road into town, listless soldiers waving through car after car in a manner that suggests that if you’re funneling weapons through on the way from Damascus, it’s nobody’s business but your own.
I’ve arrived in Tyre on a warm, hazy afternoon, the sea
a gray shimmer carved by a few narrow prows. The city’s old town is clustered on a narrow peninsula: a little thumbprint jutting out from the mainland into the Mediterranean. Around the port, gruff men are hauling in nets and chipping the paint off of flaking hulls; a few salty old dogs are sitting outside the cafés, drinking tiny cups of coffee and staring at the masts bobbing in the water. “I, too, have known good fortunes and great sorrows,” their wrinkled, sun-beaten faces suggest. “I’ve caught a few tuna like you wouldn’t believe.” An old man hammers and drills at the skeleton of a new boat, its planks like a rib cage exposed to the sea air. He has a thin horseshoe of graying hair around his head, a nose that I’m tempted to call “seaworthy.” There’s a long, even crease in his navy blue slacks; they taper off just above his ankles, where you can see the gray ribbed socks he must’ve picked out that morning with care.
I’m renting a room from an old couple near the waterfront. I’d met one of their tenants, Jihad, through
CouchSurfing, and he negotiated a deal with them for
five nights at a hundred bucks: half the price of the popular Al-Fanar Resort, just ten steps down the road. The husband shakes my hand warmly at the door and shows me around. He’s a kindly old man with a neat, trimmed moustache and avuncular eyes. He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a blue cardigan and a scarf tightly knotted around his neck, as if it’s the only thing keeping his head on his shoulders. His manner is careful and precise.
“There’s hot water and cold water in the shower,” says Jihad, slowly translating as the landlord taps on each valve. “There are three speeds on the fan.” The landlord shuffles across the room and tugs three times on the ceiling cord. “High. Medium. Low.”
The wife - her massive, pendulous breasts swaying as she walks - gives me a frank stare from the doorway. “I’ve lived through civil war and seen Israeli bombs carpeting the hillside,” her eyes hint. “Don’t even think about breaking my chops.”
There’s an easy pace in this port town. The neighbors leave their doors open to let in the evening breeze; families sit on plastic lawn chairs in the alleyways, chattering
into the night. In the morning I’m woken by the stout men who hawk vegetables from their rickety carts, wheeling up and down the streets at half-past six. They’re a sight to see: their breasts puffed out like thrushes, their voices booming a sing-song chorus that would do Pavarotti proud. Their carts are piled with eggplants and tomatoes and onions and oranges, though I’m struggling to figure out why these batches of admittedly fine-looking produce couldn’t sell just as well at half-past ten.
It’s hard to reconcile these flashes of village life - the roosters crowing, the gray-haired woman calling to her husband from the balcony - with the grade-A shitstorm that’s chosen Tyre as its eye. The UN teams and multi-national NGOs here to deal with the war’s fall-out keep a conspicuous presence around town. SUVs emblazoned with their bold logos - the UN, the International Red Cross, Handicap International - cruise along the corniche and idle outside the convenience stores. Foreign aid workers belly up to the bars, where Arabic and French take a backseat to Norwegian, Italian and Spanish. It might make Tyre the most cosmopolitan city in the Middle East, a sort of NGO
Olympics for the world to flex its humanitarian muscle.
Raised in LA, Jihad’s been living in Tyre for five years, working with the UN’s Mine Action Coordination Center (MACC) to clear landmines in the south. He’s a serious, eloquent kid with penetrating eyes and a neat goatee, an air about him suggesting the immense toll of living in a war-weary nation. By MACC’s estimates, there were half a million mines in the south before last year’s war - some of them dating back to the days of Vichy France. But the disastrous bombing campaign launched by Israel left more than a million cluster bombs unexploded across the region. Some are innocuous duds that you could punt around with your friends; others are set to go off if you look at them funny. More than 30 villagers have been killed by mines and munitions since the war ended, and close to 200 more have been injured.
The Daily Star ran an article last week about the war’s lingering toll, beside a splashy pic of prosthetic feet being donated by a firm in Delhi.
Last summer, Jihad’s job was put on hold - “You can’t clear mines in
the middle of a war” - so he busied himself evacuating villagers from the south. He’s full of heartbreaking stories of the old and infirm, trapped in their homes without food or water, watching the walls rattle with each fresh round of bombings. He coordinated convoys and, at times, carried old men out of their living rooms in his arms. He lost an uncle who had just retired the year before, returning to the village of his childhood after a lifetime of government work in the States. “He came back to his village and rebuilt his home,” Jihad tells me. “A bomb killed him in his living room.”
We have a few beers on his rooftop, watching the laundry flap below us and the fishing boats puttering out to sea: two Americans living these strange, American lives. In the morning there are cries for radishes and cabbages in the alley, and the sound of a few young kids whizzing by on scooters, their mothers calling after them from the upstairs windows.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.351s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 26; qc: 132; dbt: 0.1732s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb