Notes from South Lebanon, part 4: "Awaiting"

Spring

Finally we manage to bring the kids and a few parents from Kfour to Beirut. We wanted them to break away for a moment from the constant stress caused by fighter jets and the sounds of explosions.

A lot of touching images put together like a puzzle. One puzzle is the arrival itself and a slight note of uncertainty: „what will happen here”? The other is the children painting hearts on a piece of paper and Hiba - our volunteer from YBTE - showing them how to blow with a straw so that the paint splashes outside the heart. Breathing is important and it is important that everything splashes beyond the edges of the heart. Like in the real life, breathing and throwing everything out.

Another puzzle is games and a shared lunch. Children are just a children: some are quiet, others running around, a few naughty not listening to anyone. The last puzzle is a time to say goodbye. In that moment one child is clinging to Hiba so tightly as if it didn't want to come back.

We promise to meet again. We just have to wait for the situation to calm, because no one knows what will happen next.

Summer

Tomek from Caritas and Kuba from our association are going with us to Kfour to donate funds for scholarships for all children from the village! 5,000 $ collected in churches in Łódź! Father Youseff is deeply moved, he says that what is unique about our relationship is that we do not promise anything, but we are still present, we still support them in some way.

In addition to money, we are also bringing backpacks for the children! Tomek hands them over with joy, and Kuba is everwhere around us with a camera, catching the moments which seems uncatchable. We talk to people a bit, they are tired, waiting for some good news about the end of the conflict. Umfortunately everything seems to be escalating.

Father Youseff mentions one very poor family from a village on the other side of Nabatiyeh. He asks for help and as always we do not promise anything.

About a week later we go to the South again. First we stay a bit on father Youseff's balcony. What a blissful silence reigns and resonates with the beautiful landscape outside the window. And Father says that it is quiet again, it always is when we come. And at night it was terrible. Low flights and the sounds of bombs.

Suzane tells how she says goodbye to him every time he takes her daughter to work. She waits for him to get to school, for him to come back from school, to come back from the parish. Sometimes this route is attacked by drones. Every day is like a whole life for this family, every minute a month, every dinner a celebration. How many families living like that are there in the South?
Than we go to visit other family, father Youseff mentioned last time. At their entrance there is a sculpture of Mary. Again that silence and the rustle of the surrounding trees. We are greeted by a short, extremely energetic woman. The kind who can look you in the eye from below as if she were taller than you. She tells us how they ran away in October, how much it cost them, how they took the decision to come back. How much she knows that she will “never, ever” leave this modest home of hers again. She lowers her voice as she asks her daughter to bring juice, and her daughter calmly, without rebellion, complies. Then she talks beautifully about her husband who has to work, and when he comes over, he always fixes something. As if he never sleeps. They don’t want to run away.

Suddenly, the sound of a fighter jet flying overhead. “It’s about to start,” the woman says. “We’ll never run away again.” We look at the bag and the floral backpack lying on the chairs in front of us, on the porch in front of the house. “We keep them tere if we had to run away after all,” the woman says. They’ve been lying there since they got back. Their whole world packed into two bags. The world of 5 people waiting… We say goodbye to her and her 3 daughters.

Autumn

We are sitting at Kfour for breakfast with Father Youseff, eating the fresh food prepared by his dear wife Suzanna. Suddenly, the woman twirls her finger in the air, pointing at the ceiling. A sound like the buzzing of a bumblebee comes through the windows. "These are drones monitoring the area" - the haughtiness in Suzanna's eyes - "People are scared to drive on the roads".

As is customary in Lebanon, we have to laugh. We tell each other about a video circulating on the web, in which a Shiite comedian drives through the southern areas in his car, waving a bottle of beer displayed behind the window. Laugh. A buzzing somewhere above us.

Father Youseff admits that the night was very difficult, that there are more and more of these explosions, and they seem to be getting closer. "We don't know what will happen, we are waiting...".

Time to get ready. Before we say goodbye, in front of the house, we look at the family garden: some of the plants will soon fade, some will have to dry. Above us, a buzzing. The family doesn't seem to hear it. Is it denial? Maybe sometimes you have to escape like this so as not to go crazy?
Warm smiles and that unique taste of air say goodbye to us.

Then we drop by the school in Nabatiyeh for a moment, meeting with Sister Marie. As usual, smiling, unwavering. We give her funds for scholarships for 3 girls from the other village. The sister says that these funds came at the right time, because the mother, planned to withdraw the children from school, due to the poverty in which they live. "Due to the situation, we don't even know how many children will enroll in school this year, we are waiting for the end of September," says Sister Marie as we say goodbye.

We agree with her that we will try to bring the children from Kfour to Beirut for the November’s exhibition of the Third Edition of "Gardens of Lebanon". So that they can breathe again. Perhaps we will wait in stress until the last day to see if it will work out? It is worth planning beautiful moments, dispersing the fog of hopelessness as much as possible.

After returning to Beirut, Sumar receives a message from Father Youseff. The priest explains in an anxious voice that after we left, there were low-flying fighter jets and a drone attack on one car. The person they were probably planning to kill died, but so did a Syrian walking by the road with his three-year-old son. The brutal, unspoken Price of War. "We escaped the Angel of Death," admits Sumar. "The drone aimed at the car driving on the narrow road we use to enter and leave Kfour."

We are eagerly awaiting the next trip to the South

P.S
“Since the beginning of the civil war, since 1975, there has not been a year in this country when something major or minor did not occur – fighting, crises, fear” – the father of one of our volunteers. It was in our Ain el Remmaneh district, on an autumn evening, in 2021, some time after the clashes between Muslims and Christians at the nearby Teyunneh roundabout. The man’s face was cut with wrinkles that gave him seriousness, and his gaze was slightly lowered. The air was soaked with patches of silence, occasionally torn apart by the sound of scooters and Arabic music. Whenever blood is shed, there is such peace afterwards. As if the Demons of War had satiated their hunger for a while.

One of the shrapnels of war is Awaiting. And I don’t think this shrapnel has been embedded anywhere else, like in Lebanon. Even our experience since 2020 revolves around this, going from crisis to crisis, waiting for something even worse to come tomorrow. Explosion in the port, power outage, lack of medicine, no baby formula at the market, currency collapse, clashes here, clashes there, war in the South, migration crisis, administrative crisis - when one is ove, they already predict another. Despite this, people move on, and our youth from YBTE bring light to others. Waiting for Lebanon to become a place of peace and development. Like it used to be.

Learn more about our support for South Lebanon: Support for South Lebanon