December 10, 2006

Sunday. This is the day Nasrallah has said they will move to the "next stage" of demonstrations. Walking to de Prague (my neighborhood coffee house), Hamra seems quieter than usual, though Sundays are generally quiet. 2:10 PM. Amy tells me the demonstration doesn't start until sometime after 3. Not sure if the anticipation I feel is just mine or is shared by those around me. Could I just be projecting? Unlikely, with all the talk I've heard over the last two weeks and all the bales of razor wire I saw yesterday. Funny how it can color your perception of everything. I've been feeling that people are receiving me differently lately, even feeling that people are driving more aggressively lately.

Lots to think about after my walk down to the Solidère area yesterday to see the demonstrators camped out and assembled. Was turned away from one checkpoint and sent to another, after communicating to one of the soldiers stationed there in my ramshackle Arabic that, no, I was entering for work, I just wanted to see the demonstration site (this, after I had already walked all the way back to my apartment in Hamra the first time, because I hadn't thought to bring my passport with me. Never had to pass through a security checkpoint requiring passports just to cross town). The guard at the second checkpoint was friendly, joking "This is you?" as he compared my unshaven appearance to the bearded face on my residency card (in an effort to look less Western, I'm in the process of growing the beard back). Then he ushered me past with a warm smile.

As I walked along that street, headed to le Place D'Étoile, the street didn't seem remarkably different. That stretch never seems to have pedestrians, and there were still plenty of cars passing. It occurred to me, as I watched the cars passing, crossing from East to West Beirut, that by choosing the Riad el Solh as their gathering point, the demonstrators were creating a blockade between East and West Beirut in the exact same place where the Green Line divided the city during the Civil War, though in that case, ethnically segregated neighborhoods clashed in battle there, while now, the dispossessed lower class Lebanese, were camped out before the Parliament's home in le Grand Serail to clash with a government they see as serving the wealthy and corrupt.

Then I saw the coils of razor wire and the tank blocking the street's access to le Place D'Étoile, and I realized just how much the downtown area had been altered. I kept circling around the perimeter of the Solidère area, until I came to a wide, long street that leads up to le Grand Serail. Six or seven soldiers were stationed in front of those bike-rack-looking metal barricades that are such a common sight around Beirut. I could see some tents at the other end of the street. I stood there looking down the street, until one of the guards came up to talk to me. He was friendly and asked if I was looking to enter, in a mixture of Arabic and hand gestures. When I told him I speak little Arabic, he responded in English, and I was able to get across that I just wanted to enter to look. He brought me to another soldier who asked for my passport and what brought me to Beirut. The boys were quite friendly, and seemed interested or pleased by the fact that I'm a teacher. They questioned me about where in the States I came from, if I knew Arabic or French, and after looking over my residency card, sent me in with a pat on the shoulder.

I felt my hear rate increasing as I walked down the emptied street towards the white pavilion tents at the other end. One of the side streets offered me a view of the clock tower at the center of the Place D'Étoile, and I took in the absence of people around it. As I came up to the barricades separating off the tent area, I expected there to be another guard station, blocking my entrance into the demonstration area proper, but there was none. After standing at the barricade for a few minutes, looking up at the Parliament building, I realized I was free to enter the area.

My heart rate stepped up even more, as I crossed over. I could feel the adrenaline of my fight or flight response seeping in, as I expected one of the campers to come up to me any second, bellowing "Amriki," and shove me up against a building. No one really gave me a second glance. There was a station of port-a-potties and several large, plastic water tanks propped up on scaffolding, with garden-hose type spigots sticking out from the bottom. There was, of course, a line for the port-a-potties. To my left was a van with large placards erected on its roof, and beyond that, a large outdoor speaker system, like those for outdoor concerts. An older man with a green flag wrapped around his head was rambling on loudly in Arabic, sounding drunk or mad, punctuated by laughs from the people around him. It looked like I had just entered Burning Man, or Lollapalooza, except that, beyond the tents were more loops of razor wire and several tanks in front of the steps leading up to the Parliament Building, standing high above, on the top of the hill.

I passed slowly through the area, still wondering if someone would decide to accost me as an undesirable. As I walked away from the Grand Serail, past the Riad el Solh, with it's statue of Solh, Lebanon's George Washington, I began to see the camping areas stretched off quite some distance. It was strange to walk through this SoHo of Beirut and see no shoppers on a Saturday afternoon. One large, space-aged looking tent – across from the Roman ruins that stretch out along TGI Friday's – had a group of college-aged guys lounging out front and a Brazilian flag sticker on it. More and more like Burning Man.

Around the old, bombed-out theater above Martyr's Square was an even larger tent city. Lots of men were clustered on plastic chairs on the sidewalks and the sweet, pipe-smoke aroma of nargileh hung heavy in the air – usual Saturday afternoon fare, but never on this street, in the shopping district where no one lives. Normally. At the massive intersection, where I normally take my life into my hands as I try to cross to get over to Gemayze, the only traffic was two little boys, riding around on bikes with bright orange balloons (orange being the color of one of the opposition parties) bouncing off the back, like bright rubber tails. Across the intersection from the tent city, soldiers stood up from a row of tanks behind a tower of razor wire, stretching all the way across the intersection, blocking off the symbolic Martyr's Square, where hundreds of thousands gathered two weeks before for Pierre Gemayel's funeral.

Here, I turned to head back to the street where I had entered. I couldn't bring myself to enter the tent city, and figured I'd just make my way out. As I walked back, I noticed all the children. One little girl, maybe four or five, was outside her tent with a couple of slightly older siblings and Mom and Grandma. She was draped in the bright yellow flag of Hizbullah, with its large green machine gun emblazoned across the top. Four high-school-aged girls, heads wrapped in scarves, walked down the street with arms linked. A young boy duck-stepped down the street with a Hizbullah flag hanging off one shoulder, a Lebanese flag from the other, and his mother walking beside him. It hadn't occurred to me that families would be here. Young families, with parents the same age as me, and children younger than my 7th grade students. I hadn't expected whole families to come from their villages. It then occurred to me that, judging by their trappings and the 20% plus unemployment rate in Lebanon, many of them might have all their worldly possessions collected in these canvas, army-surplus tents supplied by Hizbullah. I thought of the tent city erected in Washington during the Depression – the Pensioners Army. Then I thought of the soldiers, the tanks, the razor wire, the possibility of more weapons secreted among these tents, and people's tense anticipation of today, with Nasrallah calling for a larger wave of demonstrators to descend on the capital. I was brought back to a quote Thomas Friedman uses in From Beirut to Jerusalem, in which someone is asked when the war will end and responds "When these people learn to love their children more than they hate their neighbors." And I realized that, as an American, I have rarely seen the human face of political conflict and strife, and that, even more disturbingly, it is often the face of a child.

3:45 PM.