Lebanese Spirit is Unshakable

I landed at Rafik Hariri International Airport just before dawn on Good Friday. It was the day after the 31st anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War.
From the same tarmac where Hezbollah shot and killed an American sailor during the 1985 hijacking of TWA 847, I looked up at the glittering hills hanging over Beirut and believed all the things I had told friends and family to convince them that it was safe to come here.
That afternoon, I picked up The Daily Star, Lebanon’s English language newspaper that I had been reading online for months in preparation for my trip. I finally held its print version in my hands and read stories about the previous day’s memorial events around the country. There were old file photos of wounded children, draped corpses, bombed buses and little girls armed with AK-47's. Above the layout was a headline- in hindsight, a painfully ironic one-, borrowed from the words of an unnamed national figure remembering the devastation of those years: "‘Don’t do it again- ever.’"
I went to Lebanon to learn more about a trip my late mother took in 1965 to visit family in Beirut. By choice, I went alone, and while I have no contact with any Lebanese family, I skipped registering with the U.S. Embassy, as the State Department’s travel warnings for Lebanon hadn’t really changed much since a car bomb killed Rafik Hariri over a year earlier. Besides, a nun I met months before departing had told me that my mother’s spirit would accompany me on this journey.
To be honest, I took the nun’s offering as something her calling required her to say. That is, until strange things began to happen. It seemed that whenever my two semesters of Arabic didn’t work, whenever I was as lost as the street cats that wander Beirut in search of their mothers, someone would swoop in to help.
Strange, at least, to an American.
There was Nala, the business student who questioned a cab driver when he tried to rip me off for an extra two dollars.
There was Mohamed, a more noble cab driver whose ring tone played "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and who bought me a Turkish coffee and shook my hand to wish me a Happy Easter.
There was Anthony, the apple farmer who brought me into his home on Easter for homemade ma’muul.
There was Jan, the registered nurse who saw that I was lost and insisted I cram into the back of her tiny car with her two brothers. In the front seat, her mother was concerned about my plan to travel alone to Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold in the east.
Three months later, Baalbek has been bombed. So have several other cities I visited, including Jbeil, Tripoli, Zahle, and of course, Beirut. There are eery similarities in my twelve week-old issue of The Daily Star and current newspapers’ photos of dead children, hastily constructed caskets and weeping evacuees.
Maybe I was a fool that peaceful morning at Beirut’s airport. Or maybe I was right on mark when I told my wife that "Now is as good a time as any." Because it did, in fact, turn out to be a final window of opportunity, framed by the Cedar Revolution of 2005 and this new war of 2006, a last chance to learn about that trip taken ten years before I was even born.
But something occurred to me just this week while reflecting on the 400 dead Lebanese apple farmers, nurses, cab drivers, students and children: the nun was wrong. It wasn’t necessarily the spirit of my mother that accompanied me, but the spirit of the Lebanese that accompanied my mother and made her the person I’ve missed all these years, and whom I found in Lebanon.