White Baboon

8:00 Consider getting up, but switch positions and ignore the springs digging into my hipbone. Notice wall-heater is still functioning, which means electricity is on. Which means it could very well go off at 9:00. Good thing I juiced the oranges last night.

8:35: Get dressed and try to put water on for tea. Realize the faucet is only a trickle, which means in a bout five minutes, there will be no water at all. Have a tough time lighting the burner, so kitchen smells of sulfur. Use water from the cooler for eggs and tea.

8:40: Hear Michael messing with the toilet, realizing there is no water. He comes into the kitchen with quite a look. I nod in acknowledgment. Last time this happened, the Palestinian plumbing student at Inma center, who had fixed the water twice before, said that he could help us today, but didn’t want to. He wanted to teach us a lesson about wasting water. This was translated to us from Arabic by American volunteers who were rather aghast at his audacity. But despite the fact that we were at that time showering every few days, we didn’t say much. Since he didn’t fix our water, we were instructed to move across the hall. To the apartment three times as big.

So now, we REALLY didn’t want to come to this guy about the water. I decided to think about it later.

8:50: Retrieve Middle East book from living room to see when we can catch a bus to Jordan, our next destination. Michael is heating water to shave. We eat hard boiled eggs with soy and hot sauce and drink fresh orange juice on the terrace. Sometimes we read Economist articles to each other. Not today.

9:25: We say hello to Adel, the mechanic and the Syrian guy, Faisal, who serves coffee in the empty parking lot, then get a service taxi to Bourj el Barajne, the Palestinian Refugee Camp. A service taxi is basically a carpool. Most trips are $1/person. When we tell him our destination from the roadside, he grunts an affirmative and we get in. I think service taxis are the best way to see Beirut.You never know how long the ride could be, which route the driver will take, who might squeeze into the backseat with you. One morning, as I sat alone in the back of an unusually filthy car, my driver stopped, flashed five fingers and big smile my way, then got out and jacked the car up and down multiple times over a twenty-five minute period. During the rest of my ride, the guttural sounds coming from the car were matched only by the driver’s spit-spewing hack. On another day, during a 45-minute ride, the driver and three passengers smoked cigarettes, stopped for coffee-to-go and chatted as if they were all old friends, while I huddled reading in the corner, wondering if I’d accidentally crashed their road trip. But everyone is always nice. Helpful. Friendly. And you never have to worry about the driver taking the long way around. Because you KNOW he’s taking the long way around.

9:45: We see the KFC, our landmark and ask to get out amidst piles of dirt and two by fours, then cross the road, walk through the car wash and up four flights to the Inma Office. Hoda is making sandwiches (pitas rolled up with cheese) in the kitchen. Everyone is huddled in one room, sharing a joke. Apparently, Fadi’s father died last night. Which of course, is not funny at all. But Fadi had been asked to pick up the coffin and he was feeling a bit spooked about the task, which was embarrassing. And somehow, this became hilarious.

10:07: Suher, a Palestinian employee and Jamie, an American employee who came with her church last fall and will stay for a few years while her husband gets his masters at American University of Beirut, are going into the camp to sign up new kids for the pre-school. We tag along. We’ve seen the strange mix of colorful murals, unprotected cables and abandoned plastic dolls of this ghetto before, but our skin still pops as we walk.

I know the way, but we cannot walk too far ahead. Foreigners are not allowed unaccompanied through the camp. We reach the pre-school’s office. Ramadan greeting cards, rose-colored walls, Arabic scripture plaques and silk flowers attempt to decorate the cold, dark and drafty room. We sit in plastic deck chairs—the folding chair of the developing country. High-pitched child screams echo nearby. Jamie and Suher complete child profiles with meek mothers.

Eventually, we take a tour through the pre-school, which is more like a high-ceilinged courtyard with tiny rooms for teaching. We are given sweet steaming tea in brown mugs as we snap pictures of toddlers in blue-checked uniforms upon the blurry mirror of the steel slide.

Primary-colored murals are everywhere. Along the top surface of the wall separating the kitchen from the hallway are ever-shining shards of sharp glass, permanently glued in place. This is to keep away the thieves, since the kitchen has no door.

12:30: I have been asked by Louise, a British woman living in Beirut and working for Inma, to help out with the adult English class in the Vocational Training Center in the camp. They’re working on informal and formal greetings and their levels vary from beginner to intermediate, but they’re all headscarfed women and all inclined to giggle. They are giddily happy about learning English. This is pretty nice.

When I return to the center, Suzanne tells me Michael went to the Fadi’s father’s funeral.

2:00: I take a service taxi back to the Hamra area, look for the bookstore where I found $8 paperbacks a few weeks ago and then settle in at our restaurant with free internet and delicious tuna wraps. I order by leaning over the balcony from the second floor.

6:30: Michael arrives at the restaurant after a day of mourning.

We were rolling on a smooth highway. Mercedes’—some asphalt scraping and others probably purchased outright—wove past. Rob, the Dutch director of Inma Foundation, a group which helps disadvantaged communities of Lebanon, including Palestinian refugees, was at the wheel of this Land Rover, positive energy sprouting from his expression. Eagles sang We Are the Sultans. . .The Monday before, we’d had dinner with Suzanne, a friend of my friend Kelly Korak, a talented graphic designer in Denver. Suzanne volunteers for Inma. In a whirlwind discovery of matched skills and needs, cooperation naturally came about. In exchange for a free flat, a loaned laptop and a small stipend, Michael would design a website and create mini documentaries on their projects. I would organize and compose their content and stories.

Today, we were on the way home from South Lebanon, where Michael had filmed and photographed Inma’s renovation project of a village impacted by the Lebanon-Israel Summer War of 06.

Now, from the west, cypress, stone and sea glared at me, powerful with sunshine. You see, it all screamed, you’ll never figure out this country. Not even if you stayed a lifetime.

Seasonal canvas signs reached out from the medians. First a row of red McDonald’s ads in Arabic. Then a soft beige variety, announcing the Shiite Muslim holiday of Ashouraa, a ten-day period of memorial and prayer for Hussein, grandson of Mohammed, a martyr slain by the Sunni Muslim sect aver 1400 years ago.

As we entered greater Beirut, the cars slowed, forced to make their own decisions (which included parking and ramming) at four-way intersections void of stoplights or traffic cops. Meanwhile, tanks guarded embassy walls. Trendy, black-and-white, Von Dutch fatigue’d troops, youthful and shouldering assault rifles, patrolled the empty, sepia-toned house of parliament, where elections had been delayed for the 12th time since November. The government was choosing their battles. Literally. And when they couldn’t elect a president, vehicular misdemeanors hadn’t even made the spreadsheet. Of course, neither had electricity–outages were daily, frequent and for hours at a time. Mass transit was non-existent. Saltwater ran from our tap. DSL was a joke. While yellow cranes and bulldozers swung to life by 7 AM, clicking together a lego-land of investment from Lebanese who’d fled abroad in the last quarter century, state-owned skyscrapers stared out to sea with dark empty sockets, skeletons with no closet.

In Hamra, Lebanon could be described as chaos driving a Lexus, confusion carrying a Prada pocketbook, conflict ordering a grand latte. It was the inverse paradigm of the traditional developing country. Rather than shirt-off-their-back hospitality wrapped in a corrugated-tin-topped shack, we found this neighborhood in shades and shopping at Mango, attempting to hide the heartache of war, ignore the instability and ride the melo-dramatic rollercoaster of a power struggle which goes up and down and around again.

In our middle class Muslim neighborhood, coiffed men sold magazines, pasta, shampoo and tahini from tidy grocery stores on narrow streets lined with barricades, each striped in red and stenciled with a green tree, the Lebanese flag. Nearby, lavish home interior boutiques sold velour throw pillows and hallmark cards. Sweet shops boasted 47 different kinds of nuts. Riots about bread prices recently occurred–so we heard. If you wanted food fast, Pizza Hut delivered.

Not far away, ten-year olds used plywood for guns as they played in a field of trash. Unscrubbed potatoes rolled around a corner wagon. Under Saeb Salem Boulevardskirted women sold spinach. Out near the airport, what started as a Palestinian Refugee Camp in 1947 had become more like a Palestinian Quarter of poverty.And a few miles from there was Spinneys, an extra-strength shopping plaza full of high-priced, imported cottage cheese, Campbells Tomato Soup, and all that crap you buy at Target, too. Attached was a McDonalds, a Starbucks and a Claires in case you needed some cubic zirconia with your Coke.

But our flat, where we eat, sleep and watch Carnivale, (because, you know, we need something dark and brooding in our life) , is the biggest oxymoron of them all. Here, the drapes are more like DRRRRAPES, ideal for a drawing room in Versailles, or maybe playclothes if, say, I happened to be a governess for English-speaking children in 1940’s Austria. Our bed is so big that if Michael farts, I can lie on the opposite side, unaffected. Nearby is a love seat–obviously the one Kate Winslet posed upon before the ship went down. Chandeliers with cherubs–some winged, some wincing–bounce from the ceiling of all seven areas. Around every corner are white-washed women in stone, each trying out for the part of the “bare-breasted nymph #2″. There are four televisions, multiple luxury appliances, two stereo systems, one piano, three scary giraffe CD holders, around twenty-five lamps and a lot of shit that has been marinated in liquid gold.Yet the walls sprout far too few outlets to support such extravagance. We found just a handful of lightbulbs in the entire place. The televisions display four fuzzy channels. Our stainless steel oven simply doesn’t function. The microwave sprouts sparks. The water cooler leaks. There is no shower curtain. The heat is confined to areas that have a door.I am certainly not complaining. But this was, this is, Beirut–schizophrenic and sure of themselves all in the same Altoid-flavored breath.