Why I’m afraid to visit the Middle East (and why it’s not what you think)
In just a few short weeks, I’ll be flying home to Beirut on an assessment trip with Partners, the NGO I work for.
I say home, because I’ve moved so many times in my life (19 by my rough estimate, but I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting some) that home has come to mean people and experiences, not really places; but that’s not totally true with Beirut. Somehow, over the course of the 18 odd months I lived there, Lebanon left an indelible mark on my spirit, my soul, and my beliefs. The feeling I get in my stomach when the plane wheels screech on the tarmac at good ol’ Rafic Hariri International can’t be ascribed solely to the knowledge that soon I’ll be gorging on obscene amounts of hummus and fattoush, or the fact that Lebanon has some of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen, or even the fact that some of my closest friends live in Beirut. It’s more than all that. Lebanon changed me. The sum of all it’s parts, flawed and messed up as many of them are, ushered me into a new era of understanding; a new perception of myself and the world that can only be achieved by stepping back and looking at yourself from the outside. That’s why I say I’m going home. Maybe not the home, but definitely a home.
And for the first time in my entire affair with the Middle East, I’m scared.
I’m scared because on this week long-ish trip, I’m staring straight into the eyes and the souls of one of the largest refugee crises in recorded history. Because my new role as a story teller is going to put me in the position of looking directly at a problem I could never bring myself to fully acknowledge while I lived there. Because the idea of a few people from an organization based in Thailand making any appreciable dent in the overwhelming flow of broken humanity flowing out of the Levant region is laughable at best. Scared isn’t really even the word for it; I’m calmly, resignedly petrified.
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