Ramblings

We have learnt a new Arabic word, we have known the word for a car for a long time it is ‘sayaara’ which is useful, well last week we thought our friends were talking about a hiring car to go to the Bekaa valley, well they were, and we were to pay for a car to go there. But we were going to the Bekaa valley to visit some refugee Syrian families, and the word for a visit is ‘ziara’. We need a car, sayaara, to visit, ziara, some people in the Bekaa the conversation became a bit confused for a while.

Now when I say refugee families in the Bekaa I am not wrong but this is not what you might think, and this is the new situation of many displaced people and a somewhat politically difficult one. These refugees fled a war in Syria and landed in Lebanon with nothing much. But that was now 4 or even 8 years ago and they have lived here now for a significant time. Their homes have developed, they have electricity (when it works) fridges, heaters and satellite televisions. They do seasonal work in the fields and building sites, and receive UN support (some). The health and education situation is poor and unreliable but looking at Syria it is just the same there. Their homes here are made of wood and tarpaulins and the ground gets muddy in the winter, but this is not so different to where they came from, for many of them were poor Syrians before they were poor refugees in Lebanon. Inside their tents they have over the years become organised, with the kitchen having shelves and storage jars. The walls especially in the front room where guests like us go, are covered in decorative materials and there are carpets on the floor, they have a several rooms and you soon forget it is made of tarpaulins. In fact in the tents of the Bekaa the situation for most of the year is better than in the poor tenements of Beirut around where we live. Although they are labelled as refugees and the Lebanese want them to leave this place, in their own minds the Syrians are at home here in the Bekaa valley in their tented houses. This is their future now and they just wish they could get rid of the label ‘Refugee’ and carry on living without being in a political argument about where they should live. There is no where else for them to go, there is no room in the world for this number of people.

We go to visit some of these tents with a Syrian Friend who has hundreds of cousins living in a couple of camps in the Bekaa valley, the best agricultural land in the region. These camps are informal groups of tents usually around 30-50 tents in a field, the UN has built latrines and cesspits, there is electricity and the access roads do get muddy but on our visit had just been covered in fresh chippings. I even noticed in one camp one of the tents had been converted into a garage and there were a couple of old 4x4 cars parked under a UNICEF tarpaulin, some people are doing alright here.

The format of a visit is familiar now it is repeated many times. We arrive and park the car and we are ushered into a tent; we take off our shoes in the first room and walk into a carpeted room with curtain material lining the walls and ceilings, the cushions are quickly arranged and as guests we are given the most comfortable cushions and sit down first. The host then sits down and conversation starts, this is in Arabic so we are just observers taking note of when our names are mentioned so we can smile and nod appropriately.

There will have been a phone call before we arrived so there will be the man of the house as well as the lady. As we talk more people appear and of course the children appear. Quietly they gather around and without much fuss we have tent full of perhaps 12 people and as many children. 

Probably in the first visit we will meet a large important person and he will be involved in the conversation very much, we will be introduced and he will be the person who will approve or disapprove of our visit, without his goodwill we will not be free to visit any more places in that camp. I don’t believe this is a formal role but there will be someone who takes on this responsibility. The conversation is good humoured and we make jokes about how he has 3 wives and therefore has 16 children I throw my hands up in horror and everyone laughs. Having negotiated this we are free to visit other tents.

In this next tent the man of the house is elderly and obviously not well enough to work, but he is very happy to see our friend and the lady of the house welcomes us well, again a crowd gathers we sit on one side of the tent with our friend and the man of the house, the ladies and children all sit opposite us near the kitchen. Someone makes some very sweet tea which we drink out of small glasses which seem to be universal across the whole country. At one point our friend will kneel up and his manner changes just a little and I realise he is now teaching from the bible, it is Ramadan the time of Muslim fasting and he is sharing from Mathew 6 where Jesus talks about not making a show of your fasting, and how the attitude of the heart is more important than the appearances.

As I look around the room I feel a great sense of the privilege I have just being here, and because I do not have much language I soak up the atmosphere as my friend talks.

Like any community and this really is a community in a sense we have lost in the UK, most of these people are related and they live close together and their many children play together every day. I look across the sea of faces as my friend talks, they are all different. There is a young lady who has a very young baby, she is quite distracted by the infant in her arms she soes try to smile and engage with the talk but it is difficult to listen carefully she is so distracted. There is another young girl there whose eyes are staring into the distance her hijab frames a beautiful face but her eyes reveal she is away in her thoughts, perhaps the words of Jesus have caused her to dream of a different life. Between these two ladies another face framed by a hijab with a colourful jelabba is listening but very intrigued by us two old English people, especially my wife’s blond hair. Over on the other side there are some older ladies the grandmothers perhaps who are very happy to be surrounded by their family, their wrinkled faces and darker clothing are lightened by the sparkling eyes and easy smiles. One of them has obviously suffered much and is in some pain but still she is amongst her family and is happy to listen to our friend. One of them her eyes are full of pride, I believe she is an aunt of our friend and she is very proud of him as he shares from the Holy Bible and talks about faith. Another young lady sitting in the front is so very engaged she is listening raptly, it is like she has been thirsty for days and finally has some water to drink. As Jesus would say she was receiving ‘living water’ as our friend shared.

In the doorway two young men appeared, I watched them carefully as they were not smiling and feared that they disapproved and might cause a problem, they may have been checking what their wives were doing. They would stand at the door listen and then go out again and then come back. I never worked out whether they were approving of this activity or not, but it was like they could not stay away either, they were curious as well as suspicious. This group of people is a mixture of people who are slowly and carefully learning about Jesus, the centuries of prejudice are slowly being peeled back as they learn a new way of understanding the world. Some of them have really embraced the faith of our friend but others are just curious as they see their friends’ lives become transformed.

Here in these poor houses made from tarpaulins a forgotten people are finding out about a God who has not forgotten them, It is our privilege to see and be a small part of this.

I just read a marvellous sentence and I extract a piece for your edification.

‘….immersive, dramaturgical events and teachings, based on reconnection with deep time and the mythology of place.’

Now I have to wonder what this really means especially because they are actually asking me to spend some hard earned cash in order to learn about it. Is this language a trend or has it always been like this?

I cannot try and understand such phrases as ‘deep time’ because I have no where to start, I know the two words but put them together and I find myself in a world populated by people from another culture like perhaps Doctor Who.

It talks about something which is undefined in common parlance such as we might use in our local pub, and offers to introduce us to it’s meaning, for a price. Now what benefit is there to me in joining with this event, to me it seems quite a risk, let me be very analytical and list out the possible advantages

• I get to learn about something mysterious that these people purport to be experts in, nice if I enjoy learning anyway.
• I will feel enlightened as a result and that might help me with my own life choices
• I will probably feel a bit superior because I know something that few other people know
• I will meet other people who are like me attracted to this type of thing, this is especially attractive if I feel like nobody understands me

The risks are

• I discover though the jargon is new and attractive I might realise it is just old ideas I already know but dressed up in new jargon
• I might not like the other people at all
• I might still feel like nobody understands me

As these sorts of things are usually quite expensive I do not have choice of taking part, so although my curiosity is definitely aroused my sense of humour is also. I have deep fear that if I was to attend and I encountered some otherworldly thing such as ‘deep time’ I might disintegrate into uncontrollable laughter.

Maybe I should go anyway and try and be a bridge between such meaningless language and my friends down the pub.

We woke up this morning to gunfire but no, let me explain.

We woke up this morning to hear a strange random banging sound somewhere outside, and then we heard our hosts calling for us to come into the centre of the house. They are Syrian refugees and the noise was a like gunfire, they wanted us to get away from the windows and join them where they were gathered with their children. Outside there was smoke drifting across from the petrol station on the corner, and shootings at petrol stations have been reported often. Soon it stopped and conversations and traffic resumed, the children put on their shoes and headed off to school as normal. It was not gunfire it transpired it was a series of small electrical explosions lasting maybe 10 minutes. The  cause was people who had interfered with the supply cabling and switchgear to try and steal electricity, using salt and water to short circuit the switches. This obviously carries a high risk of explosions and that is indeed what happened.

Thankfully it was not gunfire but I would not have been surprised if it was, this is Lebanon where the normal ways of living have become a luxury enjoyed only in dreams and movies. As one friend said ‘in the past they were living in paradise but didn’t know it’, now the new reality is shockingly different to the paradise that they thought would last forever.

I don’t need to say much more this story contains pointers to many issues about the situation, but above all it highlights how complex life is for humans on this precious world. We are all subject to many variables and our happiness is dependant on a lot of things in our environment and circumstances. When we try to simplify this story for whatever reason we reduce a wonderful beautiful multifaceted existence with many reasons to rejoice and be grateful to a smaller less iridescent existence, and raise up bitter ungrateful hearts full of complaints.

I am not an academic in a trained sense though I could have been one perhaps, if I had not made such a mess of my Biology A’Level. Anyway, I noticed that I used a term in my last Blog which sounded both distracting and boring because it is a sort of jargon which I hate.

‘The West’

You see I am from the England, but I have for a few years been living in foreign parts working with different cultures. This is extremely stimulating and rewarding it opens my eyes to different ways of working and of seeing the world. So sometimes I encounter something that makes me see a piece of my home culture, of my original home life in a different way. I can then contrast the new world with the old one and draw out some thought. In common parlance I find that my home culture is called ‘The West’ and so I used that term.

Perhaps I should use a different term because as I think about that phrase it comes with quite a bit of loaded meaning, and I should I suppose, now set about defining it clearly in my terms or perhaps create a new word or phrase to convey what I truly mean. For now though I refuse to be so fussy, I will put up with it and allow you dear reader to consider what you think about this term ‘The West’.

It is nearly a month since I rambled in this blog and things are progressing albeit slowly.

For a while I considered travel writing as my genre but here in this blog it is something more abstract, which perhaps could come under religious writing. Sometimes I am just entertained by something ironic that I want to share, or something that I think is worth saying because it is beautiful or worthwhile thinking about, sometimes it could be plain comedy.

I have therefore created another page for devotional writing, everything else will be put here under heading of ‘Ramblings’. That is until I feel that there is another subset that can be labelled separately and drawn attention to as a separate thing. This definition somehow makes me happy because I like things to be organised and arranged neatly. Not that this applies to my desk!

It all comes down to a need to index and categorise my world, this is a very western way of navigating the world. You see now I can write something and put into a category and you will be able to find it along with everything else I have done that is similar. Perhaps even more significant I might be able to find it myself!! But then again I have this category of ‘Ramblings’ where I can put anything that does not fit into an index. This ably demonstrates the weakness of 'The West', in that it does not cope very well with things that don’t fit in, or indeed fall outside the definitions that have become established.

Indexing and categorisations are powerful tools and have enabled many of our modern efficiencies to work. Correct organisation and administration is essential for many institutions to run well and we all benefit from this new way of looking at the world. But we are also all victims of this way of working. We find ourselves being labelled and often feel that we have been reduced to a smaller version of ourselves, we rail and rant about the inadequacy of the systems which do not allow us to express more than a simplified view of ourselves, we are insulted and feel dehumanised. Yet even worse are those moments when we put ourselves into a category as a way of staying safe or of hiding. We say ‘oh, I don’t do music or poetry I’m a scientist’ or ‘I am a businessman’. Maybe we say ‘I don’t do religion I am just not that type’, or sometimes ‘I don’t do relationships I am just a loner’.

Every time we accept a label or category we are in danger of closing a door that could lead us into the very life we long for.

It is fair to say that I enjoy writing and in starting this blog I thought I would read some books about getting started. Well I bought a few cheap kindle books but honestly they were very little help. 

They were really motivational books about how to keep going when you find it hard. Well perhaps you only get what you pay for. But one question that the books raised was 'what is my genre? I must admit I don't know what you would call it. I am not writing a novel or a story nor is it technical factual book. It is just a collection of my own observations. Does that type of writing have a name perhaps it is a journal or does it come under auto-biography. I will have to do some research and see what it should be called. Then perhaps I can look up to get some tips.

Well this is a 'Hello World' moment.

I have been threatening to produce a Blog and here I am. There are a lot of questions to ask myself not least of which is what do I want to say and why. Then right at this moment I need to decide what I want it to look like. 

So I thought I would travel abroad and start writing, and now I have started building a blog page I am now assailed with lots of choices about designing a website. Now I am lucky I do enjoy doing that sort of thing, and I don't have the resources to pay someone else. But that does mean I will be a bit distracted for a while designing a website and not actually writing.

So my friends Hello world I am here but there will now be a short delay.