Complete nightmare

Today, I had to elbow a reporter in the chest to get him stop pushing me (and as a result the people in front of me) into razor wire for the sake of getting a shot.

First the news.

When I got back to Talal's last night, I heard him swear for the first time, for the first time get actually emotional about what is happening in Lebanon. It's starting to happen. This is what he was angry about:

Over 300. All civilians. Compared to the Israeli number in the tens (still with a high percentage of civilians), the news has helped to shift the tone of the war. It's much more serious now, much more personal than it was even days ago. Then, Talal laughed it off pretty easy, saying it would be one, two days...some damage and then they go home. "Is always how it is." Not this time, I think.

The world seems to be getting more and more polarized on the issue. Some want peace, outright. Some still seem content with war. The issue is dividing communities. Everywhere, everyone is weighing in. It's growing, and it's growing fear.

Where is my country?

Here in the city, things are complicated on a different scale:

Today in a cab - Cabbie (to me): "Why are you still here? Why? Leave Lebanon!"

Me: "The boat was full. Why are you still here?"

Cabbie: "Where can I go? I live in the south. Every night, Israel f***s my home. Every night. Last night was the first I have slept in a week."

(The same can be said for me - with international evacuations taking place, Israel has calmed its airstrikes in the city. Last night was so wonderfully peaceful. The only hit we took was to a parking lot in my neighborhood - apparently, some construction company had parked a large drilling machine (the kind you see used to drill holes for large posts and things) in a lot near the hostel. The Israelis, it is thought, took it to be a missile launcher.)

Me: "Will you fight?"

Cabbie: "I have lost - in the civil war, I lost my whole family. A brother, my father - when I was a kid, yes, I would fight. Now, look (motioning out the window) look at the bird - I could not kill a bird. Could you? Could you kill a man?"

Me (thinking about the one and only thing I have killed with a gun - a turtle in a pond in Texas - and hating myself for even that childish exploration): "No, no I couldn't."

Cabbie: "And they want you to. Today, today I was asked am I Christian? Am I Muslim? You know Sunni and Shi'a? Today! I was asked it! It never change! Lebanon never change."

There had been this idea early on that such a provocation of Hizbullah might cause, yes, a response from that group but then a secondary response from that groups enemies within the country...leading to another civil war. I didn't think that a valid concern until I heard what people were talking about on the street...And in the news.

Still, the main issues (to me) are the dead and the injured - as well as the crippled city. At least for right now. And my heart really felt sick when I arrived this morning to take my place in line for a boat to Cyprus.

Back to the boat. The American and I showed up just after 7 am where we found that the Lebanese military had set up a blockade (two large military trucks with razor wire between them) to keep people back. As the minutes passed, the group waiting to be let in past the Lebanese to be processed by the Americans (marines and State Department Reps) grew quickly...and quickly grew restless.

Here's a quick summary of how the State Department is handling getting people to the boats. The first step is "contact". We've all registered with the DontS through phone or email. They have a list (according to them, today) of almost 35,000 people who either want evac information or want to get out. 10,000 bigger than estimated in most news articles. For the past couple of days, the DontS have been calling the same number of people that they have room for on whatever boats can take bodies that day (two military cruisers are now transporting Americans, alongside the well publicized "Orient Queen" cruiseliner). This, obviously, has been a misstep as not only will the invited show up to take their place but so will their family members (OF COURSE). So, from what I can gather, they have had up to four or five times the number of people come for processing and departure as they can handle each of the last two days.

As you can imagine, the scene this morning was total, absolute chaos. The Americans ("for our safety") process us miles from the dock and then transport those processed to the ships by bus. The processing point is a parking lot north of town and the line leading up to the processing point is on an overpass of the highway. We sat, baking in the morning sun, gulping up exhaust fumes and trying desperately to find some information, something to act on, something to think. Babies were crying, adults were screaming for respect, the military was screaming at us about lists and checkpoints and please calm and can we form a line - people got thirsty and hungry, shoved each other. It was a terrifying display of the worst parts of people. Including me - once or twice.

The DontS would come forward with "information" only once every hour or two; I think they stayed away as a) the fact of the matter was that they were simply taking an incredibly long time to process people already inside and had nothing new to report and b) they simply couldn't respond to the demands screamed at them by this incredibly irate mob. Some people waiting had waited all day yesterday as well - they had been given vouchers which promised them easy access today...at the appearance of a Dont or military person, the vouchers would shoot up into the air frantically, madly.

The thing was, the waivers didn't matter. Nothing really mattered - there were four for five systems, different rules changing all the time, chaos. An overwhelmed StateDepRep ran frantically about, sometimes screaming this or that into a weak megaphone...

It was basically children and the sick first (which took up the majority of the spots for today) and then, with really no system of actually getting to the people with vouchers, it devolved into first come first serve. Hence, this sad email from the State Department today:

Because of the high-volume of Americans going to the ship processing center,Embassy Beirut is moving from a reservation based system to a first come,first serve system for assisting Americans in departing Lebanon.

Americans wishing to depart Lebanon should monitor the local radio -105.5FM,or the embassy website http://lebanon.usemabassy.gov for the latestinformation on when and how to depart Lebanon.

We waited nine hours in total, moving some 300 feet. During that time, I only got into two scuffles. First, while waiting close to the razor wire, looking for someone to direct a question to I was pushed from behind into the two young girls in front of me which then pushed them shockingly close to the razor wire set up by the Lebanese. "Back off!" I yelled over my shoulder but the pushing kept coming. It was (guesses?) a reporter, leaning into me to get a good shot of the military talking across the threatening looking wire to the people pleading for assistance or answers (the military had scolded him earlier and told him to go - he was using us as cover). He dug into my back, I took my elbow and knocked him in the chest back hard and turned and (actually) gave him that raised eyebrows/shrugged shoulders "you want to go?" motion...and...yeah...just a heated stare down into his black eyes (they were black!) for about 10 solid seconds. I guess blue beat black - he walked. "Boys, stop fighting!" yelled an Irish woman (who I had met ten minutes earlier) just as the stare down came to a finish. After he left, I went over to her and said "Sorry, yeah, sorry that was pretty childish...but it was pretty cool though." She laughed and quietly conceded it was cool. I'm still not sure if it was actually cool. Cool's hard.

But yeah, in the mob people were going insane. What's funny about mobs is that characters start to appear - it's like standing in a broken elevator with 1000 people for 9 hours - you get to know them pretty quickly as they're under amazing stress. For his part, I can't speak highly enough of the American. Dude keeps his cool, keeps it light. He's also particularly savvy at getting physically through a crowd and knowing what information you should and should not trust from the talking heads that came out occasionally.

It took the American and another friend to calm me down during the only time I officially lost my cool - the second scuffle. The day was hot and no one had brought enough water. Every so often, a marine would show up with a few bottles of water and instruct the crowd to pass them around and share them. I had brought my own and so would just pass the bottles to the woman behind me - the second time around, I noticed her take the bottle and slide it into her stroller (she had four children with her) where, too, there was another full bottle of water from the last distribution.

"Excuse me, are you...are you just taking that water?"

"I have four children."

"What? WHAT?! Look around - everyone here has children! We're supposed to share this water with people who need it!"

"There's no water on the boat!"

"Look, Jesus Christ I'm not going to argue with you - you do what you want but I don't know what makes your children more thirsty than any of the other kids here - but whatever, let's just be clear here - you're just stealing from people - you just do what you want."

When I turned around, the American was sitting on his backpack and smiling at me. "This always happens in crowds."

I had forgotten to try and find a silver lining. I mean, you had to scour the place for it, but this has been something I've been trying to work on. A friend of mine (who seems to find the bright side to absolutely everything - to my general awe and often to my annoyance) told me the story of how she developed optimism as a skill. As a child, she had to take a horrible hour long ride home from school on a bus full of kids she didn't like - the most painful part of her day. To try and change how it effected her, she started practicing finding the good things about this daily nightmare - would think to herself the good things about how the bus was well constructed and how amazing the combustion engine that ran it was, this or that good thing about any person on the bus...she worked at it and it worked.

Today, here are some of the things I thought as practice:

"That Razor wire is so shiny"

"That man really puts his whole body into screaming"

"Man can that baby just suck on that toy"

In other, better news:

When we got back to the hostel, it was dark. The city has been doing rolling blackouts for the past week. We ran up the stairs - myself and the American - to find sitting in the lobby Talal with...a girl.

Last night while looking through and deleting some of the photos that I had uploaded to the Hostel's community computer, I found a few pictures of Talal and this same young woman by the sea. The pictures seemed to be of some date...and I thought it kind of adorable that Talal had taken the time to upload them to his computer - to save them in spite of how relatively unspectacular they seemed (lots of out of focus, odd angles, etc.)

You could see from the photos two people who - although they looked from their body language to be a 'new' couple - genuinely enjoyed each other's company. Just a lot of honest, playful smiles in the photos.

When we walked in to find them in the lobby...they were just sitting, talking...they looked just as they did in the photos, as two people who took comfort, joy and a mature excitement from the other that gave each of them a sort of glow. Talal was quiet when we walked in (he's normally quite a character); he had the quiet look of confidence that comes from contentment, from securing something for himself that fed something pretty deep. He was happy.

I can leave Beirut.