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365 from the archive~ day 21~ Lebanon
At about age 5 or 6, my sister and I used to love playing house games with the neighborhood children in our village. We had an unfinished floor in our home that was still cement walls and bricks and we created our own pretend little world there. We had a basket tied to a rope from the kitchen window on the top floor and we snuck food ingredients down in it to create our own breads, coffee and other pretty disgusting recipes that we ate with total pride. We also found there an old discarded yellow closet that we declared to be our very own church. We acquired all sorts of iconic pictures, crosses and religious signs and hung them inside the walls of the yellow closet. We would go inside it with complete reverence and pray daily for miracles. One day a miracle finally happened. We heard a big bang on the walls of our little yellow church that made it vibrate miraculously! We ran yelling in awe and in great fear with shaking knees declaring our religious status and direct connection to all that is holy. It was only a couple of years later that our neighbor Nabiha, the very same one who offered us the yummy bread from her 'saj', gigglingly confessed to have thrown rocks at us to make believers out of us.

photo taken: My daughter visiting a favorite church or ours in the mountain in Lebanon.
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365 from the archive~ day 20~ Lebanon
In a geographically small country like Lebanon, people of different religions live side by side. It is so difficult to explain how religions, tradition, cultural norms, rules, and social order organize themselves there. Within each religion are sects, groups, different belief systems, different dress codes and different tolerances.

Having been born to a christian family, the only veils I saw in my village were worn by older aunts and grandmothers who wore them in the church out of respect or from self imposed reverence. With some of our muslim neighbors, the veil was imposed on girls as they reached puberty and it was mandatory.

The veil has become a very hot global issue in the last decade and attached to it is the idea of freedom of choice or the lack of, feminism or living in the shadow of men, a religious statement or a political one and it goes on even to the courts of Europe that had to deal with the issue outside of the muslim world.

The veil originally was only worn by the wives of the prophet Mohammed, and was only much later introduced as a symbol of conformity to a strict religious belief.

365 from the archive~ Day 19~ Lebanon
I don’t think I can remember a single meal at our home in Lebanon that did not include Lebanese bread. There is a saying in Lebanon “between us is bread and salt” which means that we are friends, we are close, we are on ‘sharing life’ terms. And as a child I remember that neighbors’ doors were always open and we children were able to just walk in and out throughout the neighborhood without any type of formality. We had a neighbor living right across the little road from us and she used to have a special old fashioned oven called saj outside her home where she made fresh bread. I still remember smelling the firewood burning signaling the start of the bread making process and running up to her home with wide eyes as she happily made us her special bread called “mtabbkah”. This was a flat loaf sprinkled with sugar and then folded to let the sugar melt inside and it was mouthwatering.

With the modernism of Lebanon, these types of ovens are becoming a rarity. I was so thrilled to see the special traditional market in the center of Beirut (souk el tayyeb) that celebrates old traditions and the best of homemade delicacies that Lebanon has to offer.

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365 from the archive~ day 18~ lebanon
Everywhere you look in Lebanon, you find layers of history and ages superimposed upon ages, telling stories of kings, princes and rulers that left their mark on this small country. About 50 km south east of the capital Beirut, lies a small village on the shoulders of the Chouf mountains, and I have always been caught by its name: Beit ed-Din (house of religion, or house of faith). Besides its natural charm, the village is home to a beautiful palace. In the Druz area of Lebanon, the emir(prince) Bachir Chehab the second ordered the building of the palace by arab masons as well as Italian architects, which gave the building the distint style of traditional arab masonry mixed with a touch of baroque. Today the palace is partly open to the public and partly serves as a presidential summer residence.

The more I write about Lebanon, the more I realize that it would take years to tell its story with me and my story with it...