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Sunset over Beirut

I grew up during the war in Lebanon. It started a couple of years after I was born and lasted for as long as I lived there and until my family and I finally fled 15 years in. I’m sad to say that while living there, I’d become “blasée” about the news and its atrocities, much in the same way a New Yorker becomes jaded about the substantial amount of daily murders on the nightly news. I developed a hard shell without which I don’t think I could’ve survived all those graphic reminders that my childhood was far from idyllic. Although, don’t get me wrong, my parents did an outstanding job at shielding us from the war’s ravages and I can assure you that I did indeed have a happy childhood filled with birthday parties, sleepovers, play and laughter. When it’s all you know, you don’t realize that it’s not normal to get days off from school because of increased battles. Spending a few days at friends’ houses with your entire family is just your idea of fun when in reality, it means fleeing your home “until things calm down”. For 15 years, I heard that sentence over and over again. We’ll move back to our place in Beirut when things calm down (we never did and ended up moving to a new place after 5 years of moving around). We’re going to New York for a visit until things calm down. I never moved back. I stayed in New York for three years then moved to Montreal, which I’ve called home for the past 25 years.

Every time a new attack happens–Beirut, Turkey, France, Belgium–I watch the news helplessly and I feel myself reverting back to that wartime child. Living in Canada has managed to soften and crumble the hard shell I had built up but I feel it creeping up and tightening its noose around me again in times like these. I can feel myself becoming jaded again, not because I don’t care but out of a sense of self preservation. Then I start reading about all the personal stories and they shatter me. All those feelings of fear, loss and confusion knock me down like a tidal wave. I relate to every single story on a personal level. The confusion, the sadness, the helplessness, the anger. The more I read, the more I feel like I’m drowning. When I visit an unstable country like Beirut, I expect the turmoil but if it can happen in Istanbul, Paris, Brussels, then how can one ever feel safe again? How can one ever want to step out of their house again? How can a traveller like me ever feel safe doing what I love most?

When I was a teenager, I rebelled against, well, everything, really. I especially rebelled against the war. If I wanted to go to the beach or hang out with my friends, I did, even if it meant putting myself in danger and worrying my poor parents (so sorry mom and dad). I am older now and without the insouciance of those teenage years, the world has become a much scarier place. I worry about my loved ones back home on a daily basis but the ugliness has now spread beyond the borders of those “troubled areas” and has seeped into the nooks and crannies of our safe places. The Lebanese people are a resilient bunch who never stopped eating, drinking, living and laughing throughout the war. In the end, this legendary joie de vivre and the willingness to live even more fiercely in the face of chaos is what saved us. It’s cliché, I know, but I won’t allow anyone to stop me from living or from travelling. No one will stop me from discovering this beautiful planet we call home, one country at a time and one culture at a time. I won’t allow anyone to instil a fear of my fellow human in me. My curiosity for getting to know them will always be far greater than any suspicion. No one and nothing will stop me from sharing a meal and a laugh with a stranger half way across the globe.

Keep travelling.