Washington College Magazine
"How We Are Living"
In southern Lebanon, when an Israeli air strike hit an apartment building, falling debris crashed into the street below.
The remains of an apartment building in Tyre, in southern Lebanon, stand as a reminder of the human cost of the war.
Thousands of leaflets were dropped in and around Beirut warning residents to flee upcoming air strikes, but evacuation was impossible for most.
A mother holds a young child up in the window of a bus taking the family back home on the day after the ceasefire.
Ratimah Houmany sits at the bedside of her husband, Kamel, in a schoolroom in East Beirut.
A Look Inside the War in Lebanon
Text and Photos by David Snyder '92
Since 1997, photojournalist David Snyder '92 has followed humanitarian relief efforts in more than 45 countries in crisis, relating stories of human suffering and injustice that too often go untold. His latest venture took him to the Middle East.
I met Kamel Houmany in an empty schoolroom in East Beirut, one week before the end of the war in Lebanon.
He was lying on a foam mattress beneath a thin red blanket, dying of cancer. His wife and two sons kept a quiet vigil nearby.
Like nearly one million other Lebanese, they were there because they could not go home. In mid-July, Israeli forces invaded southern Lebanon in response to the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militants. The resulting conflict displaced 980,000 people. While most of those stayed with family or friends in other parts of the country, others packed Beirut's public buildings, unable to return to their homes down south. When met Kamel he had just finished chemotherapy at a Beirut hospital. The doctors sent him home with a few days left to live—days he would spend in a high school crowded with 400 other people displaced by the war.
For the Houmany family, and thousands of others like them, these were days of tension and fatigue. air strikes pounded targets in Beirut daily, most of them in the city's largely pro-southern suburbs. Every few days, leaflets dropped by Israeli planes would flutter over the city warning of new raids in new areas, telling everyone to leave.
But leaving was not an option for most. With the roads into and out of the city unsafe or impassable, people sheltered where they could. Aid agencies, local groups and volunteers scrambled to meet their needs—food and water, medicine and clothing. Aid efforts were often locally organized and spontaneous. I was at a school one day when a group of newly displaced people arrived, exhausted and tattered from their journey north to the relative safety of the city. Volunteers set out literally door-to-door, asking for donations from the local community. Minutes later they were back carrying bags full of clothing.
While such was the reality for many throughout the conflict, others experienced the war far differently. Once known as the Paris of the Middle East, Beirut is a city of high-end nightclubs and five-star restaurants. Throughout the war, well-dressed patrons could be found sipping $12 cocktails in trendy bars across the city, even as explosions lit up the southern skyline just a few miles away. A country of 17 official sects, Lebanese society is a complicated tapestry of dramatically different political, cultural and religious perspectives—differences that erupted into a bloody 15-year civil war that ended in 1990.
"That is the problem of Lebanon: everyone has his own opinion," a young Beirut club owner told me one evening. "Every second of time, something is going to happen in Lebanon."
Hope is an option most Lebanese guard closely, but the days before the August 14 ceasefire brought a new feeling to Beirut. People spoke openly, if in measured tones, of the coming end to the fighting. At dusk on Sunday, August 13, you had the sense that Beirut was gritting its teeth for one final night of bombardment.
The bombardment came not that night, but at six the next morning—a furious salvo of heavy shells from Israeli naval vessels offshore, just hours before the 8 a.m. ceasefire took effect. For several minutes, the city shook. But as the 8 a.m. hour came and went, a new momentum filled the vacuum of quiet in the wake of the guns—an awesome tide of humanity, going home.
Within hours of the ceasefire, tens of thousands of people were on the move. Later that morning, I visited a school where about 400 people had sought shelter. As in similar centers throughout the country, it was buzzing when I arrived. Men worked quickly, lashing foam mattresses on top of vans, cars and rented taxis. Women stacked pots and pans, blankets and clothing to be packed for the trip back. My photos from that day are filled with children flashing the peace sign—a joy born as much of relief as from any sense of real and lasting peace. On August 14, what mattered was only that people were going home.
The next morning joined the wave heading south to see first-hand what was left for people to return to. The road was packed to a standstill with every description of vehicle.
Traffic police worked furiously to channel the tide, directing cars around bombed-out bridges and cratered roadways. A 500-pound bomb lay menacingly beside the road, one of the estimated 3,000 such bombs dropped during the war, about 300 of which failed to detonate. Traffic crawled past. What had been a 20-minute drive to the city of Sidon before the war took us 4 1/2 hours that day.
For days afterwards continued to travel south, heading deeper each time into the areas most affected by the war. Each mile south of Sidon, the damage grew worse. Whole blocks of towns and villages near the Israeli border were destroyed. While some residents began slowly clearing the rubble of their homes, others feared the ordnance left buried in the debris, and rightfully so. Along with massive bombs and naval shells, baseball-sized cluster munitions littered southern Lebanon. Several people were killed in the first week of the ceasefire. With so much ordnance still undiscovered, more victims will certainly follow.
The focus for aid agencies turned quickly from short-term emergency relief to mid- and long-term developmental assistance. The Lebanese government estimates that the war inflicted $3.5 billion in damages on the country's infrastructure—nearly triple that figure in lost revenues and incomes.
For international aid agencies, the challenges of rebuilding Lebanon remain daunting. Hoped-for donations to fund the relief effort did not materialize from an American public confused about the causes of the war and wearied by more network news of Middle East conflict. As the government of Lebanon and Hezbollah's civil arm pledge to rebuild the estimated 15,000 homes destroyed during the war, aid agencies are concentrating on rehabilitating the water and sanitation systems damaged by the conflict as well as creating job opportunities for people desperately in need of work until the economy can recover.
Rehabilitation of farms and orchards, as well as psychosocial support for those scarred by the war, are also underway. As UN monitoring troops arrive in south Lebanon to patrol an uneasy peace, those efforts are sure to continue for many years to come.
A few days after the ceasefire, I tried to find Kamel Houmany. Laden with a small bag of food and medicines, set out with a local woman who knew generally of the family's whereabouts. They had left the school, she had heard, and were now staying with a family in the southern suburbs of the city, an area hard hit by Israeli air strikes.
We drove through the rubble of the city, stopping often to ask directions of people working to reclaim their lives from the debris. Mounds of broken concrete lined the route. Finally, we arrived at a nondescript apartment building on a narrow street lined with shattered glass.
"It is best if you wait," my guide said, worried about me being an obvious foreigner in a part of the city running high on anti-Western sentiment. She headed in alone. waited to the sound of brooms on pavement, the car sweltering in the summer heat. few minutes later she emerged, crossed the street, and lowered her face to the open window of the car. Kamel died two days ago, she told me. The family had returned home to bury him in his village.
On the ride back through the ruins of south Beirut thought back to the day I'd met the Houmany family. took a photo that day of Kamel's wife, Fatimah, Kamel's thin silhouette outstretched on the foam mattress behind her. Though reluctant at first to be photographed, Fatimah adjusted her headscarf carefully, then took a seat on a small metal stool at the foot of her husband's bed.
"I want you to take my photo, so you can show the world how we are living," she said quietly. "God be with you, and let the future be of peace."
David Snyder '92 is an independent writer and photographer based in Baltimore. He arrived in Lebanon in early August to cover the work of Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services. You can find more on his experiences in Lebanon during the war on his Web site, www.dsnyderphotography.com
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