Checkpoints, Curfews, and Explosions

You can taste the tension in the air mingling with the acrid scent of cigarette smoke and the sweeter aroma of argileih that wafts just above it.  People are afraid.  

I live in Southern Beirut, where the car bomb killed nearly thirty people last week.  I live in a Shia neighborhood.  The twin attacks on Friday outside of two mosques in Tripoli, killing over forty people and wounding four hundred others, was likely an attack against Sunnis, or more specifically, against two well-known and ultra-conservative Salafi preachers. 

Lebanon is not new to sectarian violence. The divisions between Christian and Muslim and Sunni and Shia have been a longstanding struggle for this country for centuries.  However, this violence feels - not unprecedented - but different in light of the escalating violence in Syria, the mass influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon that number nearly 700,000 and are in addition to over 90,000 Palestine refugees from Syria that have also entered Lebanon, and now the recent explosions of chemical agents and Serin gas that, on Thursday alone, killed nearly 1,500 people in Syria's capital city of Damascus.  Things have begun to change.  Things are different.

The Shia Hezbollah, largely backed by a Shia-dominant Iran, provides military support to Assad and the Alawite government against the Sunni Free Syrian Army, backed by the West and other Arab and Gulf States. There is a prediction, one I hope does not come true, that has been echoed by many of the people I've spoken with in the UN, in local governmental and non-governmental organizations, on the streets, in taxis, and across a broad range of Arabic and English Middle Eastern news channels. Will the fighting in Syria spill into Lebanon? I wonder this less and less frequently these days. In my opinion, it already has. 

The region is spiraling fast. I liken the explosions and attacks of violence and terror in Beirut to contractions - last year this time there might have been one attack every four to six weeks, but now the attacks are happening on daily increments. What will my neighborhood, which was open and accessible just three weeks ago, be like one year from now - no, not a year from now - but a month, a week, tomorrow? 

The checkpoints in the southern suburbs of Beirut make it difficult to get around. I can leave my neighborhood, Harat Hreik, with relative ease. But no taxi dares to venture back here, given the likely chance that they'll be stuck in traffic for upwards of an hour, just to try and get to a neighborhood that would typically take no more than fifteen minutes to drive to.  

My building has a curfew now.  It shuts down, like a fortress, at midnight. I feel like the Cinderella of a monstrous dream as I hand my ID to the Hezbollah security guard at the entrance to Harat Hreik.  He was the one to detain me and my Egyptian friend the previous weekend; I could have gone through, but my friend couldn't - too Egyptian, too tall, too bearded, too Arab-looking?  This security guard - a fifteen year old boy with a walkie talkie dressed in faded jeans and a casual tee shirt - knows me by my first name now and asks me about my Egyptian friend, the one who, for over an hour, he interrogated and hassled. 

I thank him and take back my ID, then start to make my way down the narrow, dusty streets of Harat Hreik, which are oddly desolate and quiet this evening. I do not tell him that I think the conflict between Sunnis and Shias is haram - against God, and against Islam - and that by aligning himself with a group that is fighting a war that is not theirs in the first place he is indirectly jeopardizing the safety of everyone in Harat Hreik, in Beirut, and in Lebanon. 

He shouts a brief good bye after me, but I do not tell him thank you.  Instead I turn and say salamtak, or peace be upon you.  He stares, perplexed, but I do not give an explanation.  Instead I walk quickly down the quiet streets, which are so atypically dark that I nearly walk straight past my building.  And when I go inside tonight, I do something I'd never done before. I step into the bright stairwell, and behind me, I close and lock the door.  

Sincerely, 

Apprehensive, and Waiting

Sexual Harassment: A Case Study

I am a girl.  I have lived in three different countries in the Middle East.  Sexual harassment in the Middle East is something that I was told about at my very first pre-departure orientation in 2010, something that is written about in the news, something that anthropologists and social scientists dedicate significant portions of their lives studying.  I’m not new to cat calls and wolf whistles from guys on the streets.  This happens in the States, in Europe, and I’m sure it also happens in (most) other countries. However, in Arabic the term for sexual harassment often denotes sexual violence.  It’s as if harassment is so common and widespread in so many of these Arab states that even linguistically, it loses its value and its cutting edge.  It’s when things get violent that they really matter.  Below are a summation of my experiences in three different Middle Eastern cities: Cairo, Amman, and Beirut, and a brief account of how sexual harassment has touched my life.

Cairo: 

Sexual harassment may be the 11^th plague of Egypt.  This terrifying epidemic has seen recent escalation in the post-January 2011 Revolution time period.  I am not an expert, but from what I’ve learned both academically and on-the-ground, this explosion of sexual harassment and sexual violence may be attributed to the lack of law and order, endemic poverty, and skyrocketing unemployment rates that antagonize an already sexually-frustrated segment of the male population who, because of these factors and in tandem with a social culture that precludes men and women from dating (and often interacting) outside of marriage, lack the financial means necessary to marry wives and later provide for these women.

I had the opportunity to be in Cairo before, during, and after the 2011 Revolution, as well as a year later during the first presidential election since the ousting of Hosni Mubarak.   What I noticed before the Revolution was that while cat calls and wolf whistles were so common that it became irregular and surprising when men didn’t shout at me as I waked down the street, there are so many people in the streets themselves that it didn't feel particularly frightening. I never felt that I was in any real physical danger or that my life was threatened.  While the police don’t generally get too excited about anything in Egypt, as a foreigner, I still felt comfortable walking up to one of these policemen on the street corners and asking for help, no matter the situation. 

During the Revolution, the levels of street harassment were at an all-time low.  Men and women were protesting alongside one another and the bubbling feelings of excitement and hope pushed away all thoughts of fear and anxiety.  As sexual harassment reverted back to it’s previous state in the post-Revolution climate, something else happened too.  I don’t know what it was, but my best guess is the lack of experience in the new government somehow affected the state’s ability to provide an adequate police force (which you would think would be one of the top priorities in a new and fragile government). As a result, Cairo has seen incidents of mass assault, gang rape, and other cases of gender based violence in the very same square that was a symbol to the world of the strength and resilience of the Egyptian people.  Tahrir Square.  In Arabic, tahrir means freedom. 

The only time that I was ever physically touched in Egypt was after the Revolution, during the presidential race that saw the election of Mohammad Morsi as president.  Say whatever you want to me, but the moment some fifteen year old boy’s hand touches my ass, then it’s time to call it quits.  I turned and shouted at him and asked him, in Arabic, if this is the way he would treat his sister or the way he would want his mother walking on the streets to be touched.  He said no, then proceeded to slap my ass a second time before running off into the darkness.  Frustrated and angry, I tried to find someone to tell or some authority-esque looking figure with whom I might file a complaint.  But the streets were empty, and I found no one and I know that I am not the only woman in Egypt who has felt this way. 

Amman: 

Unlike Cairo, Amman is small.  The streets are desolate and empty most of the time, like a perfectly manicured little ghost town.  I lived there for three months after being evacuated from Cairo at the onset of the 2011 Revolution.  In Amman I was surprised that generally the women did not dress as conservatively as they had in Cairo, where the majority of girls wear too many layers of clothing to count and almost all wear the hijab, or hair covering.  In Amman many girls also wore the hijab though outside of that, dressed like I did – in H&M and Zara - as well as in designer brands at the apex of fashion.  I found also that the men in Amman did not cat call as much and on first impression, I felt that perhaps the sexual harassment there was not so bad.  I later had to criticize and amend this impression.  

In Amman harassment was not “as bad” in the sense that cat calling on the streets didn’t happen to me as often as it had in Egypt.  Yet while this harassment may not have been as abundant in terms of quantity, when it did happen it was scarier than anything that had ever happened in Egypt.  One of my friends was physically attacked on a bridge trying to get to school in the morning.  I was followed by a car while in a taxi.  My taxi driver, alhamdullilah, did some evasive maneuvering and lost the car by backing into an alleyway with the headlights off in the dark.  Two boys tried to force themselves into my friend’s and my apartment.  Walking alone day or night my friend and I realized that if we were harassed or assaulted, there was no one on the streets who would hear us, let alone come to help.

Beirut:

Beirut is a fascinating city.  There are such a varied and beautiful compilation of ethnicities, religions, nationalities, and races residing in the same tiny metropolis alongside one another.  Many people that I’ve spoken to claim that this variety is what creates such a messy political scene – you can’t have a Shia or Sunni or Christian president without pissing somebody off somewhere.  As far as it goes for being a woman in this city, I’m still shocked that I can wear shorts and a tank top out in some areas of town without receiving too many unwanted looks.  Where I live (in Hezbollah territory), life is a little more conservative, so if I’m going out I throw on a pair of sweatpants over my outfit and take them off when I reach my final destination.  I can still wear a tank top even in Hezbollah’s stronghold, which is more than can be said for where I lived in Cairo.  Last time I wore a short-sleeve tee shirt with a V-neck in Egypt a little boy on a bicycle had a great time throwing dates at me. 

Sexual harassment here doesn’t seem to be as widespread on the outside looking in; however, as a colleague of mine pointed out, when men do stare they look at you like as if they're hungry.  I don’t know if it’s me and if so, what I’m doing wrong, but I have been physically assaulted twice since I arrived here three weeks ago – both times, not by complete strangers but by people I knew for a few hours and who I had just started to trust.  The first time might have been called a misunderstanding – if I’m being generous – but the second time when I’m locked into into a bar by the bartender and have to shout “stop” at the top of my lungs, then I find it hard to believe that there could be any misunderstanding.

I like to be an optimist about everything, but honestly I’m just tired.  I am female.  This should not be such a troubling concept for Middle Eastern men to grasp.  And while I have always condemned the foreigners who hang out with only foreigners in their little enclaves of foreign-ness, rarely ever interacting with the host country or its citizens, I am starting to understand why they do this.  I am more and more often beginning to think that it would be impossible for me to live in the Middle East for an extended period of time without losing every tattered shred of sanity I have left.  I miss not worrying about being attacked on a bridge or in a bar or being followed home at night.  I miss going through my wardrobe and not having to think about the risks involved in choosing to wear a tank top over a tee shirt. And the craziest thing of all is that I love the Middle East.  I continue to crawl back to it, like an abuse victim to its abuser.  But as my patience wears thin, all I have left in me to do is ask the men of the Middle East to look at me as they would a sister, speak to me as they would a friend, and treat me like an equal.  My breasts do not change the fact that I am still human.

Sincerely,

Tired and Annoyed and Human

A beautiful day in Beddawi refugee camp

I am an intern for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (or UNRWA, in case you don't feel like stumbling over that mouthful) and had the opportunity recently to travel with a photographer to one of the refugee camps in Lebanon. 

The camps that UNRWA works with are those meant for Palestine refugees coming in from Syria. The individuals in these camps are displaced, most of them for the second time, and as of July 2013 the total number of Palestine refugees from Syria living in Lebanon has reached over 92,000 people. This number is expected exceed 150,000 individuals by the end of December and does not include the mass influx of Syrian refugees who have moved to Lebanon in response to the Syrian crisis or Palestinian refugees from Palestine that already inhabit the country. 

I traveled north with this photographer and toured the UNRWA school in the Beddawi refugee camp.  The camp, unlike what I had previously expected, was not a compilation of tents and other makeshift structures, but a city.  The city operates autonomously from the Lebanese government and even the Lebanese Armed Forces are not allowed to enter beyond the gates.  Instead, the city is run by the Internal Security Forces, a coalition of the various sects within the Palestinian camps, and it administers its own laws, rules, regulations, and order.  It's a fascinating and complex system that I still don't fully understand, but what I do know is that even though Palestinians in Lebanon are denied many of the basic services and civil rights extended to Lebanese citizens, the kids I found within the camps were resilient and incredible and inspiring and filled me with a renewed rush of hope.  The remainder of this entry will be written in images, rather than words, because nothing I could write would be able to capture the energy and excitement of the Beddawi camp kids. They were, to put it simply, incredible. 

Sincerely,
Inspired