LOUISVILLE — The droning voice of an anonymous news anchor is background noise as 75-year-old Salim Sahiouny talks into a sputtering telephone, with only a tenuous connection to a U.S. line.
“Today is the worst day we have passed through until now,” he says, speaking from his house in western Beirut, his voice tired and low. “The shelling has been extended to places that were not hit before.”
Shells from more than 50 Israeli air raids pummeled Lebanon Thursday night and the night before. Five major bridges linking the north to the capital were blown to smithereens. Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets in Beirut’s southern suburbs, asking the population to leave, he says, citing the newscast in the background, his voice ricocheting with shock.
The president of the Supreme Council of the Evangelical Church in Syria and Lebanon, Sahiouny, a Presbyterian pastor, isn’t leaving the house or the city, no matter what they say. “To me, it is a matter of principle. I feel,” he says, pausing to sigh, “that a pastor stays with the congregation.”
So he is staying: Listening to the news, 24-7. And taking calls from his kids, faraway, checking on him, pleading with him to move to an apartment outside the city, or, better yet, join them in the States.
Sahiouny’s dilemma isn’t unlike hundreds of other Christian — and Muslim — Lebanese who face painfully personal choices about their childrens’ futures in a nation repeatedly reduced to rubble with each new wave of conflict between its neighbors and its own internal clandestine forces.
The cycles of violence propel more young Lebanese of means to leave their often tight-knit families and head for the U.S., Europe, or Canada, while the latest round of combatants hunker down.
When the Palestinian Liberation Organization — Yasser Arafat’s forces — pulled out in 1982, Israel occupied Lebanon’s border areas until it withdrew in 2000. Syria ended a de facto occupation of Lebanon last year, but, along with Iran, continues to bolster Hezbollah’s military arm, which was founded in the early eighties when Israel invaded. Hezbollah — which claims to be both a political party and a resistance movement that refuses to disarm — still controls southern Lebanon.
Once again, as in the earlier conflicts, families again face heart-wrenching choices. It isn’t that parents want their children to leave, far from it; but many think they need to go to have the best chance for a decent education, job, life.
“It is painful to the immediate family. It is painful nationally … we lose the best of our people,” he says, adding that he has no handy percentages for emigration within the church. “If they are able to leave, they’ll go to a safer place. Their parents finance it. A lot of people don’t have the money.
“But, if it means leaving the whole country to be in a safer place, they will do that and they will do it happily.”
In southern Lebanon alone — where the clash between the Israeli army and Hezbollah’s fighters is the most fierce — Sahiouny is assuming that the 15 to 20 Presbyterian churches in the region are razed: The pastors and members are long gone, seeking shelter with family in safer zones as the civilian casualties climb.
But he has no head count of Christian dead or wounded. Nor does he know yet how many are homeless among the estimated one million Lebanese displaced by violence that is wrecking whatever infrastructure was built during the last 15 years when Lebanon’s open warring ended.
In a world like this one, leaving may be the pragmatic choice. Actually going is the real heartbreaker. But goodbye never gets easier to say, despite the years apart.
SIPPING A CAPPUCINO at a Starbuck’s in a Louisville strip mall, Elias Sahiouny, 43, says his father’s face is burned into his mind as he slammed shut the taxi door that was taking his visiting son and his wife out of harm’s way, again.
The look was determined, but sad, expectant, but worried.
The newlywed couple was back home in Lebanon for a July visit, but Sahiouny’s wife, Elian, barely saw her parents during her Beirut holiday. They’d relocated to the presumed safety of a town 15 miles from the city center and the whoosh of fighter jets made it impossible to travel. She spent only minutes in their company after her brother braved the roads to get her for a quick hello and goodbye.
“I spend most of my time crying (now),” she says of life in her house in suburbia where she knows practically no one. She’s jobless since the state licensing system is dickering over the validity of her credentials as a nurse, trained at Beirut’s American University.
Her friends are on the radio, which plays non-stop. At the BBC. At CNN.
She takes her laptop room-to-room as she cooks, dusts, sweeps, relying on a cheap internet telephone service to stay connected minute-by-minute with her mother, her father, her four brothers and sisters and her nieces and nephews.
“This is our routine. We’re on the phone with Elian’s parents, with my father. Or on the Internet,” says Sahiouny, recounting how bombs wrecked two areas shortly after the couple passed on their way to the Jordanian border. From there, it was onto Paris and then home, meaning Louisville.
“This time, it was so hard to leave,” he says. “It was very emotional and it was bittersweet crossing the border, leaving them behind.”
Leaving has never been easy.
Sahiouny came to the United States in 1986 to work on a master’s degree in Chicago, where his only sister was studying — just as the sectarian conflict in Lebanon was worsening. Violence was shredding the city. The university was closed for two weeks, open for one. Street fighters waged war along its wide boulevards and set cars aflame in once quiet, old neighborhoods. Missiles were dropping outside classrooms.
It was impossible to further his studies.
A year later, the violence went from bad to worse. Militias sought to rout the PLO from its Lebanese strongholds and major combat returned to Beirut, drawing the Syrians further into the fray.
Sahiouny always intended to go home, but he got a letter from his parents, urging him to stay, if possible, rather than come back to chaos. He’s now manages financial services at the Presbyterian Center, the national offices of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Although it has been 20 years, he says, it feels like yesterday when he stepped off the plane at O’Hare, a kid away from home for three years, at best.
SAHIOUNYS ON BOTH CONTINENTS are aghast as Lebanon, again, crumbles into ruins and the world watches, again.
“I’ve never witnessed such a thing in my whole life,” says the older man, who has seen his share of war up close — so much so that, in the 1980s, Muslim militias escorted him to the perimeter of west Beirut, where he was met by a Christian militia that took him to the Presbyterian church he served in the city’s eastern sector. His Muslim neighbors offered him protection from harm during the throes of the conflict.
“It’s unbelievable what’s happening. The killing of children, women, elderly people: It’s cold-blooded … using these sophisticated weapons,” he says, weighing the newest violence against Lebanon’s catastrophic past.
He’s alone in this war, helped by a housekeeper. His wife died recently. The kids are abroad. Other local relatives are stymied by streets that air raids warn are too vulnerable to travel.
He believes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the heart of his country’s troubles — and the lack of international will to create two, viable states capable of living side-by-side in peace. Nor does he understand why the international community stays hamstrung by Lebanon’s latest trauma instead of negotiating an immediate cease-fire.
“I think the big powers could establish peace in the area … but I cannot accept why they do not. I think they can. I don’t understand why they don’t,” he says.
Thousands of miles away, in a Louisville coffee shop, his son and daughter-in-law worry about what happens next. “Since 1990,” the younger Sahiouny says, “the troubles stopped. People, ’til then, were running … from place to place. But they’ve forgotten (what it was like), the bombs, the rockets. They don’t have the energy they had before.
“They don’t want to start over again,” he says, explaining that Beirut was beginning to make a comeback as a tourist destination and its leaders — of even contradictory political persuasions — were beginning negotiations in a state that has its first democratically elected government in decades, whatever its internal tensions.
“It was a chance to move ahead,” he says. ” … But this has sent us back to the 1980s.”
Elian speaks up. The public health problems alone will be deadly, she says. Rotting bodies in the rubble. Refugees crammed into public buildings with overflowing toilets and no showers. Scabies. Meningitis. Typhus. It all boggles the mind.
“It is as if it is our destiny to have such neighbors,” she says. “We’re occupied by the Syrians for 30 years. They left us, but we can’t rest. Somebody (else) wants to occupy Lebanon as well.”
But thinking of home boosts her spirits. “People will keep giving day after day. It’s destroyed, yes. But we will begin again. It is the most beautiful country. The Mediterranean. Beautiful weather, hot but not humid like here. The winters are cold. But there are beaches. And mountains.
“You can swim. You can ski,” she says.
But not anytime soon.
“Lebanon,” Sahiouny says, ” has become the arena where the major powers settle their own scores.”
While he sits far away in a coffee shop.
ALEXA SMITH is a freelance journalist living in Louisville, Ky.
MORE INFORMATION Presbyterians seeking more information on the PC(USA) responses to the Middle East crisis and/or ways to donate through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance can get this information at two Web addresses: https://www.pcusa.org/worldwide/lebanon/index and https://www.pcusa.org/pda/response/middleeast/lebanon-index.htm
