Honey, We Leave in Two Hours. Saturday, 15 July 2006. I greet the cab driver at the entrance of the Cedar Land hotel, our home in Beirut for the past two weeks. He is on time and obviously in a hurry; there is a war going on, after all. I had spoken with Mahmoud earlier that day to ask him whether he would be making the Beirut to Damascus run in the coming days. Due to the escalating violence, he told me that he was making the trip in two hours—for the last time. I asked him to pick us up.
My wife and I had arrived in Beirut expecting to spend the summer working and exploring Lebanon and the neighboring countries. I was conducting research for a local non-governmental organization, the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, on various civil society and political issues ranging from human rights to judicial reform. This was an especially important trip for me both personally and professionally: having been born and raised in Syria, returning to the Middle East after eighteen years of absence was something special. Little did my wife and I know that what had begun as an ordinary two-month internship would turn into a roller-coaster ride through a major war. During our adventure, we would see firsthand the opportunities and disappointments of a region full of contradictions. |
