Greetings from the sweltering suburbs of Beirut and welcome to the blog of the Caravan team for 2010/2011. We are a team of eight, but (and I'm sorry to begin this blog with sad news) tragically we have had to say a far too premature goodbye to one of our members, Simon Reiners, who has returned to Germany for medical reasons. We hold out much hope, however, that he will soon rejoin us in Beirut, we remember him in our prayers and, in the meantime, miss him enormously: he remains, as much as before, a member of our team.
So the rest of us: Ann-Sophie Moreau is our Bavarian guardian angel (and, more terrestrially, our team leader), a goddess of organisation and ever reliable in hard times, she is to be at the helm during our stay in Lebanon over the next five months. Following in her steps from Germany: Lexi Clary, who lives near Frankfurt, Antonius Aulock, from Schwerin, Cecily Bernsdorff, from near Cologne, Mareike Jonczyk, also hailing from Cologne. And then there is a significant minority from the English-speaking nations: Nicholas (Nick) Wingfield Digby from Dorset in the south-west of England and Eoin O'Conor from Roscommon in the north-west of the land where Whiskey and Guiness flow in the rivers [Ireland, for the unenlightened]. The name for this group is still a work in progress, but at the moment we haphazardly refer to ourselves as the 'Donkeys' in memory of Antonius's shooting skills at a Volksfest (funfair) in Heilbronn where the old boy was rewarded with an absolutely hideous synthetic donkey. The donkey has subsequently made it's way through an embarrassing altercation with the officials at Frankfurt Airport to Lebanon and has now flown back to Germany with Simon to cheer him up a bit. We'll let you know if our joint imagination can come up with anything more gratifying/appropriate...
Doubtless if you are reading this, you are interested in what we have been up to so far. We are now entering the third month of the project. We spent nearly a month in a monastery in Bad Wimpfen, near Heilbronn, undertaking a series of formative lectures and courses about, inter alia, the history of Lebanon and the Middle East, the conditions of the people with whom we would be dealing and more generally we bonded as a team. Then we shifted location to Lebanon, to the mountains above Beirut in Faraya where we spent a month caring for the so-called 'boys' and 'girls' who suffer from a range of physical and mental handicaps (most of them are in fact older, anything up to the mid-seventies). Malteser International has a beautifully situated centre up there for this purpose and I think the value of these weeks for the guests who we, and roughly 40 other German and Lebanese volunteers, hosted is indisputable. These weeks were interspersed with trips all over Lebanon, to Baalbek, to the Bekkar Valley and of course to Beirut. 10 days ago, we parted company with the other German volunteers, and the fellowship of eight, accompanied by veteran Lebanophiles Max Lobkowicz and Valerie Magnis, descended from the mountains to Naccache, a 'suburb' just removed from the hustle and bustle of urban Beirut.
We have been very busy since our arrival: practically every night has been spent sampling the multifarious joys of Beirut's evening culture (I suppose 'nightlife' is more trendy). By day we have now settled into a quite rhythmic timetable of Arabic lessons (three per week) which start mercilessly early; then we are picked up at exactly 12.45 by our driver, Chamoun, to be taken to Deir el Salib, the largest institute for handicapped and mentally ill people in Lebanon. We have lunch there (which is habitually cold, but Chamoun delivers tips on how to improve this misfortune), then we gather in the chapel, gloriously situated at the highest point of the area and commanding a staggering view over the whole of Beirut and its surroundings. We have a brief session of prayer and intercession to prepare us for the afternoon with the boys, and then we descend to Saint Dominique, the lowest floor of the Notre Dame institution. There we spend a maximum of three hours providing these people (whose disabilities range from middle degree mental impairment through to near complete paralysis) with the emotional care which the staff at Saint Dominique struggle to provide with such consistency.
The department is overseen by Sr Menal, a charming nun who gave us an effective introduction and who has since proved very helpful in spite of her terrific work load. Her team are equally pleasant, though some have zero English which creates misunderstandings. We try to deploy our rudimentary Arabic, but personally my attempts have led only to confusion: the one thing I can say with any great fluency in Arabic is 'chou rayik aam bisir bi siyesit Moscau' which means 'what do you think of the political situation in Moscow' - I have now desisted from saying this because the caretakers began to give me the kind of look which a doctor might give to a psychiatric maniac.
We have already had a party to which we invited all the Lebanese who we have so far met, at its peak probably around 35 people. Great success - despite one case of serious [Irish] drunkenness. We hope our friends enjoyed it as much as we all did. We have had light drinking sessions in Byblos, in Gamese, in local watering holes and some delightful suppers, the latest of which was with the excellent Dr Issa, one of the stalwarts of our project. Great fun has been had waterskiing, shopping, Sushi sampling, bowling, playing ridiculously juvenile slot machine games and this week we look forward to further steps being taken into Beirut nightlife (the famous, yet so far elusive 'Sky Bar' has been suggested for Saturday night and something called BO18 (??) as well).
In short, I wish to reassure the reader that we are having a super cool time here in Lebanon. That is due mostly to those who organise us: our Lebanese friends, our official Caravan assistant, Michel Yanni who has so far been invaluable in securing mobile phone cards, access to x, y and z... and haircuts, and in general the Maltese youth of Lebanon; we have so far found that the people of this wonderful country have been, with almost total consistency, hospitable, generous and so warm-hearted, as if it were in their genes (I say 'almost' because of the exception of the nun at Deir el Salib who thought I was a patient at the institution when I tried asking her in Arabic where the nearest loo was - she told me to be quiet and go away). Many thanks to all of you. Next update in a week....
