November/December 1994, Pages 47, 86

Letter From Lebanon

House by House and Village by Village: Restoring a Country

By Marilyn Raschka

For 10 years Abu Jamil's neighbors never knew his name. Not that many bothered to ask. He was yet another Christian refugee in a neighborhood already poor, cramped, crowded and dirty.

Abu Jamil had been a resident of the Chouf, an area of Druze and Maronite Christian villages southeast of Beirut. The first eight years of their country's civil war had little effect on most of them. Their principal leaders, though engaged on opposite sides in the war, reached an uneasy live-and-let-live agreement that kept the fighting in Beirut and along the Damascus Road from spreading into the closely interspersed foothill villages where summer was never unbearably hot and winter was tolerable with the help of simple heaters.

In June 1982 Israeli forces overran the area on their way to occupy Beirut. Then, 15 months later, in September 1983, the Israeli forces evacuated the area. The sudden withdrawal left a void which both the Maronite Christian "Lebanese Forces" militia and the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) militia which, like the Maronite forces, had received arms brought in from Israel, sought to fill. The PSP won.

The battles produced a record number of refugees in a record amount of time. Within weeks 150,000 people had fled their villages. Christians crowded into Christian sectors of East Beirut, Druze moved in with Druze families or sought shelter in Druze social centers in West Beirut.

Abu Jamil and his family fled the village of Fawwara—leaving behind their homes, their life's possessions and, hardest of all for Abu Jamil, his precious peach orchards and olive groves. The abandoned houses first were stripped, then later vandalized. But, most cruelly of all, many of the trees were hacked to pieces.

Now, 11 years later, in September 1994, Abu Jamil again was working in his garden. He is happy to be home, but also realistic. Now in his late 60s, he doesn't have time to wait for another generation of peach trees to provide him a living. So he's planted tomatoes.

His village is wealthy in water and hence its name, Fawwara, "gushing spring." Abu Jamil jumps from terrace to terrace hoeing open or closing up various irrigation ditches. He is too busy to hear the goings on in his house or his neighbors' houses. Electricians, plumbers, painters and carpenters—or villagers with those skills—have set to work to repair the houses needing limited repair.

The Lebanese Ministry of Refugees, established in 1991, did an in-depth study of the devastation of domiciles in its first year. The statistics tell a sad story. Throughout Lebanon, more than 35,000 houses were ruined beyond repair during the 16 years of conflict between 1975 and 1991. The majority of the displaced 500,000 people from among Lebanon's total population of 3.5 million sought refuge in Beirut and its suburbs.

The Chouf refugees were latecomers, and had little to choose from in the way of accommodations. Many still live in abandoned schools and apartments.

Their Rightful Owners

This year the Ministry began clearing out the apartments and returning them to their rightful owners. Most families received between $5,000 and $7,000 to leave. The Ministry's main goal is to return every displaced family to its home, beginning with villages and homes that require limited repairs. To date some 7,000 families whose homes were lightly damaged have received funds that covered repairs to their houses. Owners were awarded up to $9,500 per domicile. The entire bill for returning Lebanon's displaced refugees has been estimated at $500 million.

It has taken much more than money, however, to convince the villagers to return. If they had felt secure, many families could have financed simpler repair jobs and returned in early 1991, after the militias were disarmed. Instead, during this period, refugees would drive through their villages but never leave their cars, just in case those who had occupied or destroyed their homes and farms were in the neighborhood.

What finally calmed their lingering fears was the deployment, in hefty numbers, of the Lebanese army throughout the Chouf early this summer. There now are armed soldiers at checkpoints at the entrances to Fawwara, which also bear recently erected signs that read: "Fawwara Welcomes You."

Today in most Chouf villages weekends are busy times. Families return to work on basic repairs, have a barbecue picnic and, like Abu Jamil, tend their gardens. As living conditions still are at summer camp level, almost no one stays during the week.

Recreating a village is a long job, requiring cooperation and confidence, dedication and cash. Today Fawwara has only one shop. The electricity that reaches the village still does not reach the individual homes. Nor will the school be ready for this year's classes.

Any visit by an outsider to a Christian village in the Chouf begins with "This is where the church stood." In most cases only a heap of stones remain. In Fawwara only the steps leading to the church of St. Anthony still exist.

The Ministry of Refugees recognizes how crucial the church or mosque is to each village and is funding their rebuilding as well. Some 300 churches in the Mount Lebanon area alone are on the Ministry list.

Linda Touma, now 12, was a baby when her family fled Fawwara. She views the place as boring. She was raised in a Beirut suburb, goes to school with sophisticated Beirut girls and has trouble climbing up and down the terraces and stairs that are the "sidewalks" of the village. When she visits Abu Jamil and gets mud on her shoes, she grimaces, turns up her nose and pouts.

She poses for a family snapshot next to a pile of onions and garlic—much as a U.S. city slicker would stand cockily next to a haystack. She is amused by the contrast. She carefully brushes her clothes off in case any leaves or dirt have stuck.

She doesn't ponder her response when she's asked where she'd prefer to live. Looking down the mountainside at Beirut, situated on a peninsula extending into the glittering Mediterranean, she points and says, "There." She's never heard the World War I American song "How you going to keep them down on the farm...?" But the question applies to her generation of young Lebanese refugees.

Their parents remember the harrowing days of September 1983 when they literally left lunch on the table and fled the Chouf for their lives. Though they dwell on these experiences, many of their children are too young to remember.

One teenager reacted angrily to his mother's tirade: "It's over, I don't want to hear about the past." That's the reality, in a land where even good memories of the past are always tinged with anger and frustration. Everyone knows that, no matter how much money comes from the Ministry of Refugees or the non-governmental organizations working for a return of normality, there's no bringing back the good old days, no returning Abu Jamil to his peach orchards, or making Linda long to return to the simple pleasures of village life.

Marilyn Raschka is a free-lance writer who lives in Beirut.