7. Daily Life in the Village

 

There were so many aspects of home and village life which intrigued and fascinated me. Our village was set like a jewel in the Lebanon mountains overlooking Beirut. Twin mountain ranges run north to south of the country with the Bekaa valley in between. This marks the beginning of the Great Rift Valley. The Ante Lebanon mountains are the highest ones, near the Syrian border, and extend to the Golan Heights, with Mount Hermon as part of that range. The Lebanon range is closer to the coast; the Great Cedars of Lebanon grow in the northern part of the mountains and the Barouk Cedars were further south and not far from Ain Zhalta.

As a special deal Dad took us to the wall on the small terrace outside the kitchen and pointed to a round metal cup-like device which had two pipes running out of it. With an awed voice he explained to us, “We now have water that comes from Barouk and the water is pure and good for us to drink! We can be very grateful!”

It would be a while before our water was all hooked up into the kitchen and the other rooms with taps for drinking. Imagine, and we had to imagine since we couldn’t really understand, the water came from Barouk and that was beyond Ain Zhalta. Somehow, through an astounding feat of engineering, that water was now available to us in Shemlan down a pipe.

Water was important to drink and to use for making tea, coffee and the delicious mulberry cordial shraab, and of course our usual cooking and washing needs. To heat the water, we had two options: gas or electricity. Electricity meant plugs, light bulbs, fuses and wires going all over the place. For some reason, known only to the experts, the earth wire for our electrical system was attached to a galvanized pipe leading to our lower bathroom bath taps.

On one memorable occasion, Mom had run the hot and cold water for our bath and once Graham had finished washing, he was taken off to the bedroom to be dried properly and put into his pyjamas. By the time my turn came around, the water had become tepid. I got in the bath and put my hand on the hot water tap. As soon as that water hit the lukewarm water, a strange and unfamiliar feeling raced through my body pinching the core of me and making me sweat behind my ears. I managed to let go of the tap and the feeling became less pronounced but still left me with a high frequency shake. The bath kept filling up and the water became hotter and hotter. I wanted to turn it off but was reluctant to touch the tap again. However, it had to be done, so I put my hand on the tap to turn it off. I was hit by two intensities at this point. Electricity flowing through the connection I was making with the water and the tap bit me, and, the heat of the tap burnt my hand and my hand stuck to it. Somehow, I’m not sure how, I managed to turn the water off. My hand came unstuck and my body felt normal again, and though the drama was over, my body still felt sore from the burn.

It took me a while to tell Dad about the incident, but it was before our next bath time. He didn’t believe me at first, but when he experimented for himself, he had a similar awakening to the truth of my statement. The earth was soon attached to some other woebegotten pipe somewhere else. It was only many days later that I could be induced to take another bath and when I did I never, ever, touched that tap again. Someone else always had to switch it on and off. If there was no one around to do that I would not get into the bath. If and when that happened I learned to wet my hair, face and other parts in such a way that no one could tell that I hadn’t had a proper bath. I was not going to be wet behind the ears ever again!

Dad had a workshop. Often he would go in there, close the door and make arcane noises relating to what we understood to be of a productive nature, but he nearly always emerged serene. For ages I really wanted to discover some of the rituals and exercises which he applied in that room of his.

One day, when I felt I was old and wise enough, and Dad was away for some length of time, I was drawn into his workshop as if by some unseen hand. What I discovered was a whole world of tools, devices and possibilities. The room had a bench, a vice, saws, hammers, chisels, mallets, screwdrivers and everything that any creative dreamer would need to build up to his castles in the air. I was hooked.

I asked Dad if I could come in when he working sometime, “I just want to watch!” I said casually. He eventually succumbed to my pleas. I carefully observed how he used the soldering iron and then took my chance when he was away to produce a soldered shape representing a sailboat which actually stuck together. I hid it somewhere in the workshop.

One day he found my artifact. When he accosted me he expressed frustration at my disobedience but it was mixed with an attitude of wonder at what I had managed to produce by myself. That piece of work hung on his office wall for quite a few years.

As a family, we ate some meals on our own, but many main meals were communal affairs with all students and staff eating together. We learned to love Lebanese cuisine. Olive oil is essential in the Lebanese kitchen, and so are olives. The LBI kitchen store had large ceramic jars of olives in brine. One was for green olives and the other for black olives. Most meal times would include a bowl of olives to enhance the food. Now and then I would steal a handful, when no-one was looking.

Every village has its groves of olives, painstakingly terraced, sometimes over centuries. As children, we knew very well that an olive couldn’t be eaten straight from the tree. It is bitter, and needs processing. In autumn, when it was olive harvest time, families went down to their olive groves and laid large cloths on the ground under one tree after another, so that falling olives could be collected. We kids helped to knock down the olives, although the men were really in charge of the whole process. After harvesting many trees, the lunch ritual occurred. By early afternoon, the collected green olives were put in bags hanging over the donkeys and taken home to put in alum and salt water to cure properly. All the olives I saw and ate in various homes had been cracked open a bit with a stone – perhaps to allow the curing to go deeper – and then put in big barrels (like brandy kegs) with steel bands to cure for as long as necessary. The alum and brine had to be changed regularly. Black olives were not so plentiful.

The best olives were taken in bags by donkey down the cobbled pipe-track to the next village, Ainab, to be stone ground in the big press. The resulting oil was poured into five, or ten-liter tin containers, and either taken back to our village or sold.

Gradually, everyone wended their way back home and began preparations for the evening meal. Cooking fires were set to cook meat or prepare vegetable stews. Meal times were the centre of so much village life and reflected their overwhelming hospitality and love of the land. I was occasionally included in the family when these things happened. As evening came on, the sleeping mats were brought out with various kinds of sewed up duvets laid out ready for sleeping after washing. This was the daily routine on dry evenings, with the focus varying according to the season and the kind of harvest expected.

There was other produce to be harvested and prepared in one way or another. One of my favourite fruits was the fig. Eaten ripe and fresh with a large bowl of yoghurt, they make the best breakfast in the world. If a family had enough fig trees, they would break open the ripe figs and put them in the sun to dry. Mediterranean summers are hot and dry and perfect for preserving fruit in this way. Dried figs extended the shelf life of the fruit and, if sold, supplemented the family’s income. They could then be eaten in winter when fruit was scarce, or made into a very popular stiff and exquisitely tasty jam. The same thing happened with apricots for apricot jam making. Graham once ate the kernels of some green apricots stones and I remember seeing him on the swing with the round seat, holding on to the rope with his legs crossed underneath, in something of a daze. Later it was realized that he had just been on his first “trip” given him by the raw pips. His walk was unsteady and gave us all a good laugh. I don’t think any of us realized that the cyanide in apricot kernels could be extremely toxic.

Almonds were also dried out and the nuts were used in all kinds of sweets. Certain kinds of pine trees, the stone pine, would have pinecones that were eagerly harvested as soon as they fell to the ground. One such grove was just up the steps from the LBI. Once enough pinecones had been collected, the whole family and some friends gathered around a cut tree trunk. Some of us took the seeds out of the cones with our fingers and a stick. These seeds were passed on in a sort of assembly line to others who cracked them open to reveal the kernel. Finally the brown sheath would be removed and the nut was popped into a container. We processed thousands. The white pine nuts were used to make kibbi and other Lebanese meals. The taste of fried hubub sanawbar will always make my taste buds sing.

Most of the villagers were involved in these activities in different ways. Older people were usually allowed to sit and be involved as they were able since they had played their part for so long.

Tourists did not flock to Lebanon for the game parks, but I discovered many captivating creatures. For example, our neighbors had a large terraced garden, which bordered on our property. I became fascinated with their bees and the beehives. Once I was fascinated for a little too long. There were some wasps that tried to attack the hive while I was watching. The usual steady arrival and departure of the bees from the hive was interrupted for a while as the “scout” bees fought with the intruders and finally dispatched them and dropped their bodies outside the hive like so much rubbish.

While I applauded their victory, it seemed that I too was posing something of a threat for the bees, since I was in some of their flight paths. All at once the bees started swarming around me, getting into my hair and stinging me. I was shocked and frightened but managed to respond by running away and swatting the bees out of my hair. When I explained what I had done to mom she felt the bumps, put some ointment on to sooth the bites and I went to bed stinging a bit, but after a good sleep, got on with my life having learned a couple of important lessons. It could well be that this affected me more than I knew, as the next time I was stung, many years later, I had an allergic reaction.

In spring, there were many kinds of bumblebees that went buzzing around from flower to flower. There was one particular kind with a shiny carapace, which frequented thistles that had sharp leaves and a purple tuft of stamens. When we were quick enough, it was possible to catch one of these bumblebees, render it helpless and tie a piece of cotton under the wings and round its body in such a way that it could fly. It would then be possible to let it fly off and yet control it by holding on to the long end of the cotton, like a small living kite. On one occasion we managed to get four of us to make each of our insects to fly in formation towards the river near the butchery. We felt like we had reached the pinnacle of bumblebee fame.

The sound of a donkey’s bray takes me straight back to our village. Some of the villagers had their own donkeys and used them for transporting goods. Sometimes older people rode them to get to difficult places. Mom once talked to me about donkeys after I had said some complementary things about them. I could bray like a donkey and loved their characters. She warned me to never pull a donkey’s tail. I did not want to simply take her word for it, so the next time I saw a donkey browsing near an old broken-down house, I went behind it and pulled its tail. It kicked me so hard in the chest that I landed a couple of meters away. Mother was right and I learned another lesson, which made me a little wiser than I had been. I had marks, for a short while, to show how wise I had become.

Later on, I was in Ain-Anoub and a young boy was offering rides on his donkey, “twice round a playground for only 50 piastres.” I paid my money, but didn’t enjoy the first circuit so suggested he give me 25 piastres back for only going once. The owner of the donkey may have been young, but like many Lebanese, he knew how to strike a deal and was unwilling to refund me half the fare. I did not want to waste the money, so I had to go around again to get my money’s worth! Somebody once told me a joke about a foreigner who came to Lebanon to teach mathematics at primary level. He asked his class, “What is 1 plus 1?” There was silence, until a young boys asked, “Am I buying, or selling?” This illustrates something of the ancient Phoenician culture passed down through the generations.

The family next door had a double-story house. The Farajallah’s rented the upstairs part of their home to some students at MECAS (Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies). At some point, this centre, situated further up the hill, became known locally as the ‘spy school’ as a Lebanese politician alleged that many of its graduates worked for the C.I.A. or Britiain’s Foreign Office. Whether true or not, the students were learning Arabic language and culture and did not seem to mix much with the local villagers, and I rarely saw them. I think I visited their apartment once, and all I remember is that it was quite grand.

My friend Antoine, the butcher’s son, dislocated his arm and the family decided to take him down to Ain-Anoub to the bonesetter by car. The whole family had to accompany him, and I joined them. We were in the house while Antoine went to be with the bonesetter in a side room. The bonesetter soaped his arm in warm water and tried to manipulate it back into place with my friend writhing and yelling in agony and getting into a real lather. He worked on it for at least an hour, but did not get it right and Antoine was in paroxysms the whole time. Finally, the whole affair was stopped, and we all went back to Shemlan in the car. This action prevented the family from reacting in ways they would later regret. I sensed, with empathy, they really wanted to beat up the bonesetter with all their pent-up energy. He was a fortunate man!

It was decided that Brenda and I should go to a school in Souk-el-Gharb, the next town along towards Aley, for a few terms. Learning how to write and read the Arabic alphabet and numbers seemed to be the aim of the exercise. I was 5 and Brenda was 4 and we had blue dresses with large white collars. Dad had a bike on which he took me, but I think Brenda got a ride with another family. He placed me on the crossbar in front. Because he had knock-knees he found it awkward to peddle without lifting me off the crossbar now and again. It must have produced quite a comical spectacle to those watching us go by!

Although the ride was only about 3 km, the tire had to be pumped up at least once, sometimes more, before he dropped me off at school. I remember complaints from him about pumping tires when I was not with him. Fixing the tires permanently seemed like a last resort. O the fun of pumping! Later the bike became mine but it was fixed in first gear so I could never go too fast. The wheels would wobble anyway if I exceeded the limit set by the beginning of “wheel wobble.”

Later, we bought a car – a VW Beetle, the colour and characteristics of which will be argued by Graham and Howard until they depart this mortal coil. Me, I just remember it as a VW Beetle! Later on, when I was older and went to school in Beirut, I went with George Hitti in his taxi, filled with smoking men, down to Beirut on Monday mornings and returned with him and the smoking men to our Shemlan home. He dropped me at the front gate of the LBI. I spent the weeknights with one of the mission aunties in Beirut.

Dad once took a group of us on a hiking trip towards Ainaab. We veered off the road and up a small river bed coming across some Bee orchids growing out of a crack in a rock in the middle of the stream. We marveled at such exquisite beauty and variety, standing around it for a while. The lower part of the orchid looks like a female bee; the male bees are thus attracted and pollinate the flower. A few weeks later a visitor wanted to see the Bee orchids because he did not believe they existed in Lebanon. Other people were not able to accompany him, but I volunteered. He was skeptical of my ability to find the location, as were some of the members of my very own family. Well, the upshot was that I took him straight to the location and there were the Bee orchids in all their glory. He was left somewhat surprised by their existence and even more amazed that I was able to go straight to them without hesitation. I loved wandering in the mountains behind the village and came to know the countryside like the back of my hand.

Coming into our village from the direction of Aley, a rocky hill rose to the left. From the top of the hill, a view of the Mediterranean Sea stretched out, and in the distance the great city of Beirut could be discerned behind its customary hanging haze. Many hours were spent climbing around on this hillside. The more climbing around done the more the hill rose to become a mountain in the hiker’s estimation. Somewhere in the centre of the mountainside was a small cave, which could be turned into a treasure store, a den of thieves or a hide out for little boys with big imaginations.