Beauty and poverty

I had the opportunity to take a short trip into Lebanon a few days ago, just overnight, collecting samples for a research project. The drive took about 4 hours, crossing the border extended that time by about an hour. American passports are unusual here. However, while time consuming, it wasn't scary or stressful. The border system was simple, but recognizable; men in camo or green military dress, sitting at desks filling out forms and asking questions. We pulled up to the border buildings on the northern Lebanese border, and Ziad, my companion, explained that the border isn't well marked and that it causes problems with farmers who have land crossing the undefined borderlands. I could see what he meant when we crossed through Syrian customs, then drove about ten kilometers further to reach the Lebanese side. That stretch of no-man's land inbetween was covered in fields of pestaschio and olive trees, open farmland and huts made from burlap sacks and bits of plastic that housed the farm workers. Yet in the distance on either side the road is flanked by beautiful gentle mountain ranges forming the valley we drove through, topped with snow to the west and fading out into to fog in the east.

It cost me about 10 USD to get out of Syria, but my short term stamp for Lebanon was free. After filling out the form with my passport information, birth place/date, parents names and my profession (still seems weird to have a profession...), I recieved yet another stamp on my passport. I think my passport will end up being my ultimate travel souviner. The rest of the drive through Lebanon to the research station alternated between farmland and small towns. The towns were not much different than in Syria, that eclectic combination of modern and old, cell phone and computer advertisements next to streetside vegetable vendors and 40 year old cars. There were multiple checkpoints, but they consisted of someone checking the logo on the car for the research center, and waving us through.

We stayed the night in a nice hotel in a place called Zahle, overlooking the rest of the city from a cliff and I spent most of the evening learning Arabic with Ziad while smoking a nargile much to the delight of the hotel staff who aren't used to seeing a western woman smoking a nargile. Its only recently becoming common for even local women to do so. They also joined in on my education ocassionally, correcting my pronounciation and checking my writing while they changed the coals on the nargile.

It wasn't until the drive back the next day, while I took pictures through the windows, that it really hit me how different this life was, how desolate for some people. Seeing children herding sheep while their mother carries water in plastic buckets back to the makeshift houses, I realized how quickly I'd come to accept the life in the region as normal here, and how drastically different it is from the life I know back home. And even the worst that I've seen so far is nothing compared to conditions in other parts of the region. What kills me though, is the divide between the upper and lower classes. In between fields filled with tent-houses (I counted about sixty huts in one field) are mansions, large beauitful stone houses, gated and isolated from the desolation at their doorsteps. I can understand how its easy to ignore a problem from across the world, but when you see it out your kitchen window while you sip your morning tea... Perhaps, like how I adjusted so quickly to thinking of what I've seen as normal, the problem is not that they ignore the plight of those less fortunate, but rather that they fail to recognize it as a problem, as something that could be helped.