Sunday July 16th 2006

That was the worst Sunday I ever spent in the village. In the afternoon we discussed my return to Qatar. I agreed to leave on Thursday before things got worse. I had nothing of my stuff with me in the village except my passport and ticket. They were the only necessary things I needed of course, but they were not my stuff. I remembered the graduation pictures. And my footage tape for the documentary. And my tennis. My DVDs. And I have not seen my friends. Shadi had said he would visit yesterday because he was going to Baalbek to watch Fairouz. Of course the musical was cancelled, and the whole festival. Baalbek itself was almost cancelled. It was being bombed daily.

Nothing to do. When you have nothing to do you start thinking of strange things, and remembering things you would have never remembered otherwise. It was strangely pleasant in a way to have nothing to do but think about existence and life. At one point I thought that I would be able to write few scenes in the screenplay am writing, since they say suffering brings creativity. But I could not. I was living in a film and was not able to write in a different timeline. If what happened in Lebanon was a film it would have certainly been a sci-fi horror fictitious stupid comedy.

Once there was a country called Lebanon. The second day it was not. Somehow it has been erased in one day. The people, the buildings, the bridges, the roads, the airports, the sea ports, they all disappeared overnight.

The minister of tourism said we were expecting more than one million tourists in August. Lebanon is a country that depends on tourism to survive. But some people thought it was not necessary for us to survive. They were people who get mad when animals are beaten but could not care less if Arabs died. I had all the time to remember. In our Media and Society class Dima –my teacher- once said something about degrading people before going to war and killing them. Because you cannot kill people when they are people like you. You have to make them look like animals or even worse so that nobody would pity them. And in my desperate trials to grasp how could any human being ever think of us as being less than animals I thought:
Well, probably they think of us as people but think of themselves as Gods.
It was of course better than thinking of us as animals and them as people. There was only God to save us. There is only God to save us. And punish those who think they are owners of the world.