A new e-mail from my brother in Lebanon

. . . When everything started, I was having my internship at a designer’s office near the National Museum, and I had to stop because commuting was dangerous. I was nonetheless accepted in a designer’s office in Dubai, and shall leave Lebanon in a week or so. I therefore had to visit my house in the Southern Suburb in order to bring my passport from it, and did so yesterday with my mother.

I was surprised at the fact that my house was still intact. Fortunately, the nearest bombings to my house were a street away, and my mother had opened all the windows of our house before evacuating. She had learnt from the previous war that that prevents their glass from bursting from the pressure created by the bomb, and it worked. Where I live is a very noisy area, and so it was strange to see it as empty as a ghosts’ village. I brought my passport along with a travelling bag and some clothes, bade my favourite cat farewell, and returned with my mother to our mountain house. It was important that we leave the place as soon as possible.

This is not to say that I am depressed. In fact, my first ten days here were rather calm; stuck between two mountain towns, all I did for ten days was sleep, play cards with my cousins, and read. Where I am you can hear and see the bombings on the Southern Suburb, but not so loudly that it scares you, and so with binoculars you can survey where the missiles are going with relative accuracy (that actually was yet another activity that my cousins and I did). The last couple of days I finally went to the village’s plaza, where there is an internet cafÈ, and sent a couple of mails that I had been typing on my laptop since the war started (that was when I read your e-mail). I also began my calls for an internship and a VISA, and designed a new logo for my aunt’s husband’s architectural firm.

Yesterday, my sister told me that England, the feller that the United Nations sent to Lebanon, announced that he was surprised to know that the Southern Suburb was a residential area of 920,000 citizens and not a top secret military zone. I wondered to myself; if someone at such a key position in the UN did not know something as simple and key to understanding what is really going on in the region, then who would? . . .
(read more)

(Ahmoudeh, look what Katy did for you...)