War Wounds

We arrived in Lebanon yesterday, with a plan to spend several weeks working on public health projects directed by the American University of Beirut. We had stopped in Paris on our way from New York, and had spent one cold, wet afternoon walking the city before proceeding to Lebanon. The chill of Paris still hadn't left us when we landed, so we wore winter jackets as we passed through immigration and even as we stepped outside of Rafic Hariri International Airport and faced, for the first time, Beirut. The airport sits beside the Mediterranean, and the driveway that greeted us was scattered with palms, cedars, and sunlight; we were happy to shed our jackets as we waited for a taxi in the warm air. Our taxi driver alternated between French, Arabic, and English, and the highway that took us into the center of the city was lined with billboards in all three languages. We are being hosted by the family of one of our group, and our hosts greeted us with a lunch of kibbeh and laban bi khyar. The sun had already begun setting when we finished eating, but we pressed out into the city to see more of where we will be working for the next month.

Past the gated campus of American University of Beirut, we descended to La Corniche, a ring road that runs along the Mediterranean. There families were finishing the picnics that had occupied their Sunday afternoons, and teenagers gathered beside blaring boomboxes. It was, on first impression, a tranquil evening in a city beside the sea -- a city that might have been any city except for the diversity of languages spoken beside us as we walked. But, on closer inspection, the grafiti scrawled on walls and the billboards overhead (many announcing a march to be held next week, on the anniversary of Rafic Hariri's assasination) suggested a different city -- a city recently ravaged by war and violence. As we wound our way downtown, we passed the St. George Hotel, where the firebomb that killed Hariri was detonated, and which now stands vacant. The Holiday Inn just a few blocks further along also stood vacant, its broadside pockmarked with shell blasts.

The monuments to Lebanon's violent past are not so much statues as billboards and buildings. The past is not far past. Nothing is safe yet. But the streets of Beirut are still lively. The restaurants that Sunday night were full. And we will find out as we work how the wounds of Lebanon's wars mark the people of Beirut as well as their buildings.

BK