ma salama, ya damashq!

My last few days in Damascus were spent with friends and the intangible character of the city. On my final night, after enjoying my last sunset on the highest ledge of the Jebel, I joined my remaining Damascene friends at a restaurant that overlooked the Omayyad Mosque, smoking argileh and talking to amazing people, before heading off to dance to 80's music at Jackson's... as it should have been.

I've been asked a lot lately what I will miss most about Damascus. This has been 9 months of my life... there will be a lot to miss. Honestly though, number one is the people. Damascus weeds out most of the narrow-minded ones... the ex-pat community here is so special.

And then I will miss the city itself. When I came back to Damascus in January, I had a few days of complete uncertainty with my choice to return, bordering on regret. My brief stay in America had left me wanting more, and the two people I was closest to in Damascus had just left. Then one day I was walking down the main road from my Sharia Qassa house to Bab Touma. As the road leads into the square, a string of brightly colored flags hangs above the traffic. I remember looking around and fully taking in this perfect Damascene evening for the first time since my return. A billboard of Arabic script, the swarms of people, the houses scattered down the side of mountain in the background. Women dressed in nakabs, in red heels, in shirts that say “Another break fast with you?” and other meaningless, slightly sexual English phrases. Groups of shabab with gelled hair, men selling grilled corn on the sides of streets. The sound of the call-to-prayer. I remember watching the orange sun set behind a simple blue-roofed mosque and its neighboring minaret. After that, I did not regret, even for a second, my decision to come back to Damascus.

I often think that reverse culture-shock is exaggerated. Whenever I go “home” to anywhere, it only takes me a few hours to feel like I never left. But I know that when I buy something from a store or order something at a restaurant, my instinctual response will be “Shokran kateer” not “Thank you.” I am sure that at first I will be taken aback by all of the girls wearing shorts. When I say “Israel,” I will probably lower my voice, if I use its name at all. The clean streets, the lack of habibi music, the fact that I don't stand out at all... this will take a little while to wrap my mind around again.

But tonight I am staying on a couch in the living room of a hostel in Beirut, mere feet away from an awkward Tunisian teenager. It is my last day in the Middle East, probably for a long time to come. After walking again through the hills of the city, past the most spectacular mosque I have ever seen, past army guards, past Hezbollah flags, I am sitting in a cafe with what will hopefully be my last Turkish coffee for a while. An Enrique Iglesias song is playing. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

where red, green, and black meet pale blue

Special pass and cameras in hand, we drove through several UN security checkpoints and into Quneitra. A special guard was assigned to stay with Anna and I, in addition to our driver and his 5-year-old son. Quneitra is the town that borders the Golan Heights. It was almost completely destroyed with bombs and airstrikes during the war with Israel in the 1970's, which is apparent even at first glance. From talking with Syrians about Golan, I know that this is still a major issue for the Syrian people. Syrians feel adamant that Golan was rightfully theirs, and still belongs to them. It is more than a point of lost pride or desire for land; it is about the people who lived there. It is about how families were ripped apart when the Golan Heights became part of Israel instead of Syria. Women had to choose between their families in Golan, and their husbands in Syria, knowing that the choice was permanent. You had to say good-bye to one of them forever; there was no chance that you could ever cross that border again.

We drove straight to the border of the Golan Heights and pulled over near a group of men. Three of them were in the green army uniforms worn by so many men in Damascus, the Syrian soldiers. One of them was in a uniform of pale blue and white... he looked like a walking Israeli flag. The border between Syria and the Golan territory is a patch of road in between two heavily guarded checkpoints. On our side, Syrian and Baath party flags hang from the roadblock. Looking across the brief patch of pavement, there is a star of David and a sign that states, in clear bold letters, “Welcome to Israel.”

Quneitra itself is just a physical memory of the past. The old town is now just remains of bombed-out buildings that with time have become overgrown with weeds. It is startling to see so much destruction on both sides of you as you drive down the road. The main “attraction” of Quneitra is a hospital that was bombed during the war. Above the entrance, a sign reads “Golan Hospital: It was destroyed and changed into a firing, target, and training place by Zionists.” This sign, as read by a third-party, is phrased as such blatant propaganda that you have to laugh. But the inside of the hospital takes your breath away. Bombs have ripped apart entire sections, pillars have been torn down. More than that though, it is clear that at some point the inside walls were used as a make-shift shooting range. A misplaced bomb did not cause the destruction of this hospital alone; people with guns must have purposely. Bullet holes cover even more hospital wall space than the graffiti does.

Our cab driver had brought his son along because the little boy's only alternative was to stay home along. His name was Adain, and of course was more interested in the guard dogs than the ruins of the war-affected town. His father kept trying to explain the surroundings, describing in Arabic how bombs had come from Israel and destroyed the town, how everyone had to leave, how the hospital was filled with explosions. At first I thought that the man was essentially instilling in his son a hatred of Israel. I hate the concept of children on either side of a conflict being fed ideas that perpetuate a circle of violence. But from everything that I understood, the man only stated facts. He did not describe ideals or religion; he only recounted facts from past violence and war.

I will say though, this may have been the only time in Syria where I have felt out of place because of my American passport. It was clear from how many times our military guard said “One of them is American” that my nationality was a point of interest. Even our driver seemed unsure if the scenes around us would evoke emotion in me, and if so, which kind of emotion.

We ended our tour of Quneitra after seeing a church that was practically hollowed out. Before getting in the car, Adain ran full speed screaming at a group of cows crossing the road. We all laughed as the cows began bounding away from him. Next to the church was the single wall of a house, still upright. While graffiti lined almost every surface you could think to write on in Quneitra, on this wall was a detailed drawing. It was a woman who looked like she was wearing a hijab, smiling, and holding her hand up in a peace-sign. In an area where every piece of fallen cement reminds you of a bloody past, it was nice to see a message of peace for the future etched into one still standing.

treatment of children

There was in article on BBC News recently that dealt with keeping Syrian children in school. The life of a child here is so different from in the U.S. The happy, healthy children seem to dominate their parents in public. You will be sitting in a nice restaurant, and two screaming boys will dart under your table, while their parents sit smoking and chatting up a storm a few yards away, unaware or indifferent. However, in our Sharia Qassa house, we can hear the yelling matches that go on in the next-door apartment, and it is fairly clear that the mother of the house beats her children.

When we were at the pyramids, Kate and Bill rented horses to ride. Even with my complete lack of horse knowledge, I could tell that the horses were weak and badly cared for. The horses wouldn't run, even after being hit repetitiously with whips by the young boy who was assigned to be the guide. These were not just scraps of clothe, but whips with worn-in knots at the end. Kate said that eventually she couldn't handle the mistreatment of her horse, so she told the young boy that they wanted to head back to the stable and wait for us (after my last horse-in-front-of-the-pyramids experience, I opted for a camel, along with Jesse and Cooper). After desperately trying to convince Kate and Bill to continue riding, pleading with them that the horses would go faster, that he would ride with them, that they could have extra time, the boy broke down in sobs. Kate was taken aback, and asked him what was wrong, saying that of course they would still pay him. He pointed back at the head-guide, who was riding camels with us, and mimicked being hit. Nothing that Kate and Bill said, even when they gave him an extra-large tip and praised him to another man at the stable, changed the state of this little boy.

It's situations like those that I feel show the difference between child work and child slavery. In Petra, kids run around trying to get your attention, whether to sell you a necklace or grab your hand and give you a tour. But those kids are also the ones sitting in groups on rocks near the amphitheater, eating candy as they play with dogs. They are, without a doubt, being used as adorable wide-eyed tools by their parents to earn money. But there is a difference in my mind between pushing kids to manipulate tourists and forcing them to pull the rein of a horse with the knowledge that if no tip is earned, pain will follow. Neither is right or good, but they are different. Understanding this behavior is not cultural sensitivity, it is a cultural excuse. Some things I simply do not understand, nor do I want to.