In Beirut at the height of its unyielding summer, the heat and humidity
had spent me. Australian-born, it was my first visit to my mother's birth country and I had come mostly to please her. She had always
beseeched me to go, raving about how much I would enjoy it.
Well, I wasn’t enjoying it. Accommodated by my loud and sometimes dramatic relatives, I had surrendered my personal space and the time alone I was used to. We slept four to a room and every four hours the government-supplied electricity would cut out and for the next four hours a generator would be used, its moderate power reserved for necessities like the refrigerator, meaning luxuries
like air conditioning had to go. When the electricity cut out every night at two am, the heat would wake us up and we'd sleep in discomfort until dawn.
I'd wake with an insatiable thirst and wait agitatedly for the morning delivery
of purified water - drinking tap water was a no-no.
In the daily heat of thirty five degrees or more, I’d sit in the
humidity that coated me like thickened cream and wonder why my mother had
always raved about this place. Unlike my usual travel adventures, I was in a
city without a subway, with unsafe, unreliable buses and taxis that my family
insisted would cheat me and so forbid me to use. I began to feel suffocated and
I craved a few minutes alone walking on a strip of beach and wetting only my feet just to ebb the discomfort. Displaying typical Arabian hospitality,
my cousin graciously offered to take me on a hunt.
Two hours of crawling through grating Beirut traffic without air
conditioning and four disheartening pay-for-entry beaches later, we finally
found a free one and headed towards the water. But we were stopped by a beach
guard yelling, “Mamnouh! Not allowed! No swimming in clothes! Muslims must
remove clothing!"
That was my breaking point. I was appalled by what my mother never included in her idyllic descriptions of her country - the unstable
government, the inadequate electricity system, water you couldn’t drink, toilets
you couldn’t flush paper down, roads you couldn’t drive on without fearing for
your life and now I was being labelled a particular religion just
because I wanted to go walk in the water! Yet my incredulity was immediately
allayed by my cousin’s calm, acquiescent demeanour.
And then I realised why she, like many others who have left it, romanticised the place. It
wasn’t the amenities or the luxuries of the country; it was the spirit of the
people. Even though to someone like me, the country was almost primitive and putting up with it
seemed atrocious, they accepted their rollercoaster-ride lifestyles and admirably, rarely complained. They had tasted the real fear and danger of dying or losing their country in
war and were grateful for what was left behind, embracing it with gusto. People
I had just met uninhibitedly asked me, “Lebanon is nicer than Australia, don’t
you think?”
Back in Sydney, I stroll dreamily along the beach towards the water,
fully clothed, no one restricting me, smiling at my new-found gratitude for
Australia as the waves flick at my feet, my heart with the people of Lebanon
who don't know this type of freedom but a different kind and maybe a better
kind- of gaining freedom the hard way, appreciating the life they have and of
being so proud of their small, messy country that, charming as it may be to us
world travellers, they don't care to know another.
