How did I become so accustomed to this scene?

I laughed today as I took the minibus to Shatila. I laughed because I opened my eyes and tried to view this place as a first-timer, a foreigner, a western child or even—most dramatic of all—an Israeli in disguise. I laughed because I shocked myself; how have I become so accustomed to this scene?

 

It’s sticky. One ear attached to my iPod, the other tuned into the rowdy drums and trumpets of the Arabic tune on the radio. My driver has dirty hair and a long pinky nail. His cigarette ash threatens to fall on my lap as he reaches back to collect the 1,000 LL payment that I’ve offered. Sometimes I have to get a “servees” taxi, which is 2,000 LL and just a regular car. But today I was lucky enough to get into the van that the Syrian workers and poorer Beiruti residents rely on. It’s not as nice a smell, but I’ve started to prefer it for a myriad of reasons too imperialist to explain on paper. The other passengers probably think I don’t belong here. Little do they realize how unmoved I am by the scene unfolding around us.

 

Cars don’t follow lanes. We all weave in and around each other in an utterly disorganized dance of near-death screeches and honks. It’s the center of the city, but the 55 mile an hour pace is only interrupted by speed bump, pot-holes, and screeching halts to pick up additional passengers. Exhaust mixes with the smell of heat coming off the cement, peppered by the hint of garbage from the mounds that we pass by periodically.

 

 

Stopped in traffic (there are no lights), the little girl in the huge black SUV next to me is bouncing around in the backseat. She isn’t in a seatbelt, and she would probably be up in the driver’s seat on her father’s lap if it weren’t for the baby brother that is already occupying that spot. She wrinkles her nose and slits her eyes as she stares at me, then cackles at herself. She is proud of her pigtails. I wink, and she is suddenly brought back to reality.

 

 

On the other side of the car there is a high wall that used to be part of a 7-storey building. The skeleton of the building still remains more or less, with large holes on the 3^rd and top floors, remnants of Israeli bombs that rained down in this Hezbollah-dominated area in the 2006 Summer War. On the side of the wall closest to the street, someone has spray painted a giant swastika.

 

 

Along the boulevard, which widens as we go further away from central Beirut and closer to the refugee camp, the median is lined with posters honoring dead fighters: martyrs who were killed in the war or during suicide campaigns, or perhaps as casualties of training mishaps that ended in prematurely detonated explosives. Their faces are all young; some are broadly grinning and smooth whereas others are bearded and somber. Images in the background range from pictures of the Dome of the Rock in Occupied Jerusalem to AK-47s to beautiful calligraphy of Quranic phrases.

 

 

One block down, there is a shwarma stand in what appears to be an old garage. Lamb on a vertical spit is turning as a fat-bellied Arab shaves slices off to be deposited into a warm pita wrap filled with pickles and French fries, hommous and garlic. Four men in long white robes stand outside chatting about the weather and impending war. A 7 year old in a head scarf runs by, chased by her older brother carrying a toy handgun.

 

 

The driver changes the radio station, because Hassan Nasrallah, the infamous Hezbollah leader,  is making a statement. His elaborate way of speaking—in the formal Arabic “FusHa” rather than the colloquial Lebanese accent—captures the attention of even a non-Arabic speaker. Charismatic ally he encourages the resistance and threatens his enemies, cleverly employing the media outlet as his communication/negotiation tool. I understand only enough to catch phrases like “Allah” and “Israel” and “American President.” He is a beautiful speaker, hateful epitaphs notwithstanding.

 

 

Yellow “Party of God” (Hezbollah) flags dominate the area we are now in. This is the heart of terrorist land. The tame Kuwaiti Embassy seems out of place here. There is a medium-sized mosque in the center of the road ahead, whose enormous Iranian flag makes clear which sect of Islam its worshippers are. The bright green and now-familiar white design of the Iranian Revolution waves over the mosque and  casts a shadow as we drive under the overpass. Fruit vendors with their wagons stand along the side of the road, protecting their strawberries and snow peas from the flies. Old women in burkas and leathery hands bargain for radishes.

 

 

We are quickly approaching the entrance to the camp, so I exit the van. This is a part of town that the Lebanese residents themselves will not think to enter. Its Palestinian territory, and it shrouded in a blanket of generalizations—both true and false—about crime and hostility and fighters who are outside the control of the Hezbollah governors of this place. Walking into the camp is indeed like entering another country, but once I get to the Youth Center that serves as the heart of the community, once I see my dear little students and we hug and kiss our hellos, every other care—whether traffic or laundry or work or armored humvees—melt away instantaneously. It’s just another Saturday, the highlight of my week.

 

This area that I just described—which I have to drive through every day that I go to the Refugee Camp—is known as Dahiye. The name, which literally means “suburbs” is the densely populated southern area of Beirut, infamous (i.e. Google-able) for being the stronghold of Hezbollah, the dearly beloved and deeply resented “terrorist” / political party in Lebanon. I had to laugh at myself when I finally took a moment to look at this place through the eyes of an outsider, because—damn—it’s scary as hell.

 

I love these realest of people. I know them as deeply as I know myself, while simultaneously not understanding them at all.