Cathy Sultan's Blog, page 19

TUWANI

 

Tuwani is a village in the southern hills of Hebron in the West Bank. It has a population of some 175 people, most of whom are either shepherds or farmers, who live in cave-like structures. Their village is important because it not only has the only school for the region, serving some 100 children, but it also has the only medical clinic and grocery store. The village had a mosque but it was bulldozed by the Israeli Army. The home of the mayor was also bulldozed and the school has a demolition order hanging over its head. The village has no water, electric power or telephone lines. An oil generator provides electricity for the houses four hours a night and their only water supply comes from two wells outside the village.

Surrounding Tuwani on either side are two illegal Israeli settlements whose extremist residents belong to the national-religious movement. One of the most dramatic consequences of the settlement expansion in this region, particularly from an outpost of settlers located some 500 meters from Tuwani, is the risk children must take to get to and from school, a risk caused by settler violence.

Alex was part of the Christian Peace Maker Team whose members stand with Palestinians and Israeli peace groups engaged in nonviolent opposition to Israeli military occupation. Since 2004 Christian Peace Maker Teams have escorted Palestinian school children to and from school in Tuwani. Alex���s mission each day was to accompany grade school children from the neighboring villages some two to three kilometers away to Tuwani and to safeguard them from settler attacks. Despite the ever-present threat of harassment, of being pelted with stones and chains, the children were eager to learn and happy to attend school. On the side of their small school-house they painted a mural depicting happy images and smiling faces.

���When I see these children so intent on learning, so willing to risk their lives each day, my sense of despair eases slightly,��� said Alex, who had been attacked and severely beaten a number of times.

The city of Hebron is a half hour north of Tuwani. Tariq was our host during our two-day stay there. His father had died eight years ago but because he was buried in a part of town now off-limits to Palestinians Tariq was denied permission to visit his father���s grave. When he told us this, we collectively said, ���We will escort you past the Israeli soldiers so that you can visit your father���s grave.��� As internationals we knew the soldiers would not dare stop us. We marched up a deserted street of boarded up Palestinian stores, all 13 of us, past heavily armed Israeli troops and slipped under the barbed wire surrounding the cemetery. Tariq, accompanied by three of the men in our group, knelt beside his father���s grave and paid his respects. After he had prayed, we retreated en mass��down the deserted street back to our bus.

I came away from my two-week stay in Israel/Palestine with more questions than answers. In the case of the Palestinians how does a popular upswing of democratic thinking ever take hold against a backdrop of such a brutal Israeli occupation? In America how does the majority regain its voice and convert a ���clash of civilizations��� mindset into an urgently needed ���dialogue of civilizations��� so as to resolve this festering crisis?

I also came away humbled in the realization that I have much to learn about patience, fortitude, forgiveness and hope if I ever aspire to walk in the footsteps of the Palestinians, most of whom practice nonviolent resistance, who have learned from the likes of the great civil rights leader, Congressman John Lewis, that hatred is too heavy a burden to carry.

My Lover City

1992 was the first year post-war I could safely return to Beirut. In route I had passed through Rome; one of my favorite places there is the Coliseum. I was struck by the odd similarity of ruins in both places. The buildings in Beirut had nowhere near the grandeur or size of the Coliseum, but there was a resemblance in the way they had been stripped bare of everything on the outside so that only the concrete skeletons remained.

In the midst of such desolation, I was surprised at how well Nature had resisted the war. Yellow sunflowers grew where Martyr���s Square and the ancient souks had once stood, where Cleopatra had strolled; where women had haggled over gold and bronze objects and merchants had traded their pottery and precious purple dyes to Persians, Babylonians and Greeks. ��Fuchsia bougainvillea and purple wisteria crept up the walls of shelled-out buildings. Despite broken water mains, smoldering mounds of garbage and the charred remains of cars, trees were blooming, their green leaves lush; their canopies shading tired, bullet-riddled facades from the summer sun.

War-damaged buildings were being demolished to make way for a multibillion dollar redevelopment project, and archaeologists had been given six months to study Beirut���s ancient history. Buried beneath Martyr���s Square in the city center, they discovered an eight-thousand-year-old Phoenician city, proving conclusively that Beirut was Phoenician. It was called Berytus at the time and was home to the Roman Empire���s most important law school until it was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 551 CE. ��In 1969 and newly arrived, I was fascinated by a place that had so many names. I used to sit on the balcony, look out over the city and recite them: ���Beryte,��� ���Beyrouth,��� ���Beirut.����� It was as though I had all the names of a new lover rolling around in my mouth. Ultimately my affair with this city affected my judgment in totally irrational ways and as in any unhealthy relationship, I let myself be fooled. However mad, the lover-city was clever, too. It enticed me back each time I thought to escape. A credible rumor or a visit from some foreign diplomat lulled me back in the false hope that the horrors would stop. It was only after I became acclimated into the habit of war, when the daily skirmishes stretched into week-long battles, that I was hooked. All logic deserted me and I abandoned any notion of leaving my lover-city.

When the archaeologists had finished excavating the site, I watched bulldozers tear down buildings and dump trucks haul off mountains of masonry and rock. Somewhere in that desolation, buried deep beneath the rubble, lay the spirit of Beirut, my former lover. And it was fitting that I should be there to see it laid to rest alongside its distinguished forefathers.

BASSAM AND RAMI

Bassam Aramin is co-founder of Combatants for Peace, a movement started jointly by Palestinians and Israelis who have participated in the cycle of violence: Palestinians as part of the violent struggle for Palestinian freedom and Israelis as soldiers in the Israeli Army. The group started with four former Palestinian fighters and seven Israeli soldiers. Today they number 400.

Bassam is also the father of slain ten-year old Abir, who died instantly when an Israeli soldier fired a rubber bullet into the back of her head. She was a block from her home, laughing and talking with her sister and two friends, her hand inside her book bag about to retrieve some candy to share with her friends, when she fell to the ground.

After the death of his daughter, Bassam, a former Palestinian fighter, made the decision to seek justice rather than revenge.

���One Israeli soldier killed my daughter,��� he said. ���Four hundred Israeli soldiers came to her funeral and planted a garden in her name.���

Rami Elhanan is the father of Smadar Elhanan, who was killed in a September 1997 Jerusalem suicide bombing. She was sixteen years old. Rami is Bassam���s co-founder in Combatants for Peace. In April of this year, Rami and Bassam were invited to Warsaw to attend the Polish premier of a new documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their organization.

���I was excited,��� said Rami. ���I knew that together we would be able to convey a message of hope to people who, for the most part, had not the faintest idea about the conflict. I knew that by virtue of our shared grief, people would listen to us���perhaps even talk about peace. In my naivety, I completely forgot that Palestinians can���t just get up and travel wherever they please, like free men. And despite a barrage of phone calls and urgent pleas on the departure date, Bassam never received his visa to travel.

That was why Rami found himself the following evening on the stage of the Polish National Theatre, together with two ambassadors, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, and an empty chair. The film began with heartbreaking stories of unbearable human anguish, without political demands, without attempts to quantify suffering, just stories of bereaved families, both Israeli and Palestinian, reaching out to each other, a hug, a compassionate smile, a profound understanding, a bud of hope.

The Israeli Ambassador, after the filming, stood up from his chair, furious. ���There is no comparing the pain of someone who was hurt by terror,��� he said, ���with that of someone who was hurt as a result of others acting in self-defense.��� He then walked off the stage. Embarrassed, Rami stood up.

���I am Bassam Aramin,��� he said. ���I am here to represent the missing character, this brave and noble combatant for peace. That Palestinians are missing from nearly every international forum about the conflict, because they are not issued travel documents, is a source of embarrassment. This absent bereaved father, this ex-prisoner who chose the path of reconciliation and peace, is a powerful voice against the claim that we Israelis have no partner to talk peace with, yet he and others like him are repeatedly silenced.���

HATRED IS TOO HEAVY A BURDEN TO CARRY

On the anniversary of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, I am reminded of a day in April 2008 when I was about to co-lead my first delegation to Israel-Palestine.

I had the privilege of hearing Representative John Lewis, leader of the Black Caucus in the US Congress. During his interview at the Washington Cathedral, Congressman Lewis was asked how, in the face of the violence and persecution he suffered during the civil rights movement, he was able to practice non-violent resistance.

“For me, non-violent resistance was never a technique I pulled out of my pocket when I needed it,” he said. “Rather, it is a deeply held belief I have adopted as a way of life because I realized long ago that hatred is too heavy a burden to carry.”

Everywhere I traveled, whether I was in Israel proper or the occupied West Bank, I saw John Lewis. I saw him in the Palestinians who were obliged to walk through checkpoints on a daily basis to get to work or school. I saw John Lewis in every Palestinian who had been thrown off his land, had his house demolished and his three hundred year old olive trees uprooted to make room for illegal Israeli settlements. I saw him in the faces of the Palestinian people who maintained their dignity, their humanity and more importantly their sense of humor in the face of daily humiliations.

When I went through the Qalandia checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem from Ramallah in the West Bank, I encountered an angry Israeli soldier. When she demanded my papers in the harshest manner possible, and refused to understand that it was the metal in my knees that made the alarm go off, my first instinct was to respond to her crassness by screaming back at her. I quickly realized that those Palestinians around me simply shrugged off such treatment. Outside the checkpoint terminal I asked one woman how she managed to stay so calm. “It is very simple,” she replied. “No matter how badly the Israeli soldiers treat us, they will never be able to defeat us. Knowing that gives me my strength.”

Sderot is an economically depressed immigrant town that borders on the Gaza Strip. Until a recent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, its residents lived in fear of Qassam rockets coming down on their homes from Gaza. Frustrated because their government refused to negotiate with Hamas, the people of Sderot decided a citizen initiative was needed because they and their counterparts in Gaza shared a commonality of challenges that desperately needed to be addressed. Both communities lived in fear; both suffered economically. They faced bleak futures and their children were traumatized. The Sderot residents I spoke with acknowledged the presumptuousness of such a grandiose plan but felt they had no other choice.

“It’s up to us to make things work if we want to live in peace with our Palestinian neighbors,” said Erik, the leader of the group. He remembered a time when he and his Palestinian friends from Gaza swam together in the sea, when they played soccer and carried on as best friends. He wanted these same happy memories for his children.

Erik and his neighbors were from all political persuasions. It was unlikely in normal times that they would have ever spoken or acted with one voice. But act they did! To counter the shrinking food supplies in Gaza, they organized a convoy of huge dump trucks. Filled with food supplies, the trucks backed up to the wall on the Sderot side of Gaza. On the other side, the Gaza residents did the same thing. A conveyor belt was then used to transfer grain and rice from one side of the wall to the other.

“Anything is possible, said Erik, “when people are willing to work together to end the suffering and stabilize their lives.”

In the words of John Lewis, hatred is too heavy a burden to carry. A lesson we can all learn.

HATRED IS TOO HEAVY A BURDEN TO CARRY

On the anniversary of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, I am reminded of a day in April 2008 when I was about to co-lead my first delegation to Israel-Palestine.

I had the privilege of hearing Representative John Lewis, leader of the Black Caucus in the US Congress. During his interview at the Washington Cathedral, Congressman Lewis was asked how, in the face of the violence and persecution he suffered during the civil rights movement, he was able to practice non-violent resistance.

���For me, non-violent resistance was never a technique I pulled out of my pocket when I needed it,” he said. “Rather, it is a deeply held belief I have adopted as a way of life because I realized long ago that hatred is too heavy a burden to carry.���

Everywhere I traveled, whether I was in Israel proper or the occupied West Bank, I saw John Lewis. I saw him in the Palestinians who were obliged to walk through checkpoints on a daily basis to get to work or school. I saw John Lewis in every Palestinian who had been thrown off his land, had his house demolished and his three hundred year old olive trees uprooted to make room for illegal Israeli settlements. I saw him in the faces of the Palestinian people who maintained their dignity, their humanity and more importantly their sense of humor in the face of daily humiliations.

When I went through the Qalandia checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem from Ramallah in the West Bank, I encountered an angry Israeli soldier. When she demanded my papers in the harshest manner possible, and refused to understand that it was the metal in my knees that made the alarm go off, my first instinct was to respond to her crassness by screaming back at her. I quickly realized that those Palestinians around me simply shrugged off such treatment. Outside the checkpoint terminal I asked one woman how she managed to stay so calm. ���It is very simple,��� she replied. ���No matter how badly the Israeli soldiers treat us, they will never be able to defeat us. Knowing that gives me my strength.���

Sderot is an economically depressed immigrant town that borders on the Gaza Strip. Until��a recent��cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, its residents lived in fear of ��Qassam rockets coming down on their homes from Gaza. Frustrated because their government refused to negotiate with Hamas, the people of Sderot decided a citizen initiative was needed because they and their counterparts in Gaza shared a commonality of challenges that desperately needed to be addressed. Both communities lived in fear; both suffered economically. They faced bleak futures and their children were traumatized. The Sderot residents I spoke with acknowledged the presumptuousness of such a grandiose plan but felt they had no other choice.

���It’s up to us to make things work if we want to live in peace with our Palestinian neighbors,��� ��said Erik, the leader of the group. He remembered a time when he and his Palestinian friends from Gaza swam together in the sea, when they played soccer and carried on as best friends. He wanted these same happy memories for his children.

Erik and his neighbors were from all political persuasions. It was unlikely in normal times that they would have ever spoken or acted with one voice. But act they did! To counter the shrinking food supplies in Gaza, they organized a convoy of huge dump trucks. Filled with food supplies, the trucks backed up to the wall on the Sderot side of Gaza. On the other side, the Gaza residents did the same thing. A conveyor belt was then used to transfer grain and rice from one side of the wall to the other.

���Anything is possible, said Erik, ���when people are willing to work together to end the suffering and stabilize their lives.���

In the words of John Lewis, hatred is too heavy a burden to carry. A lesson we can all learn.

HOW CRUEL WAR

 

������������������������������ One morning I looked in the mirror and saw a line of while along my scalp. I didn���t know what it was. I pulled my hair back off my forehead, certain it was just poor lighting. I leaned closer to the mirror and looked again. My hair had gone white at the roots. I used my fingers to part other sections; the white was everywhere. It was as if someone had injected me with a potion that turned me into an old woman overnight. I pulled down the toilet cover and sat. When my tears tried and my chest stopped heaving I stood up again and stared at the woman in the mirror. I had been too busy hiding from bombs, caring for my family and hardly sleeping at night to pay attention to how I looked. I washed my face and brushed my teeth each day, and may or may not have applied lipstick, but the last thing I had time to do was study myself in the mirror. Nor did I wonder when I ran a comb through my hair what my roots were doing because it was not important. But now I was quite distraught. I had lost weight, too, and the first place it showed was in my face. My cheeks had shrunk into hollow pits and I no longer looked thirty-three. I looked forty, fifty, maybe older.

How cruelly war tramples your self-esteem.

I was reluctant to leave the peacefulness of Ghazir and return to Beirut. Despite the bombings, Parliament had managed to convene to elect a new President, but people were openly pessimistic about the chances for a long-term truce. This scared me. For the first time I considered the possibility of leaving. I can still remember the shame I felt. My husband, Michel, had called me ���the woman with the nerves of steel.��� Foolishly I thought I would disappoint him if I admitted I could no longer tolerate the war. But was that just a convenient excuse? Deep down didn���t I really think I would be failing myself if I abandoned my destructive lover, Beirut?

The city I loved, the place I called home was vastly altered. The discos and night clubs were shut. My favorite landmarks���the historic mansions and ancient souks���had crumbled under heavy shelling. Gardens of hibiscus, bougainvillea and cypress with their old thick stubby trunks, lay abandoned. Open spaces had become garbage dumps. Miles of sandy white beaches had been turned into shanty towns for the city���s new homeless. Balconies which had once been dressed in layers of pink geraniums were transformed into distorted metal forms protruding from gaping holes. In my dreams they recurred as the shrieking mouths of blinded captives nailed into concrete, dying from starvation and neglect.

On our street the buildings were pockmarked from shrapnel and bullets; the awnings on the shops torn and tattered and broken windows lay in disrepair. There was a severe shortage of water and electricity. Noisy generators hummed across the city in place of the shelling and black electric wires were strung haphazardly across streets and alleyways.

When I saw all this I wondered if I would ever dance again with my tantalizing lover, Beirut.

 

A MAGICAL PLACE

In the spring, Ghazir, a small village of some fifty families about nine hundred feet above the sea, is a magical place. The homes are built on stone terraces that from a distance look like giant steps. It took us only about fifteen minutes to reach Ghazir one we left the coastal highway. It was a lovely day and we drove with the windows open. Naim and Nayla sat in the back seat with luggage piled between them. I was behind the wheel while Michel, lost in thought, stared out the window. The last twenty-four hours had been difficult. Our apartment had taken a direct hit. As we neared the last bend in the road, I said, ���We���re almost there,��� the cue for everyone to look up to the right and catch the first glimpse of Marga���s house, perched on the edge of a mountain ridge atop a canopy of green.

It was the roof we saw first, the bright red of the tiles that shone in the sun. Great clusters of poppies ran wild along the terraces below the house. After I parked the car and we began walking, a multitude of speckled butterflies danced around our legs. Our feet brushed against a new crop of wild thyme bordering the path releasing a delicate perfume. Trees full of white apple blossoms with soft-red-rose interiors dotted Edith���s green terraces, and pink flowering succulents overran the cobblestone path in front of the house. As we neared the front door, Naim gently pulled one of Marga���s trumpet vine flowers to his lips and pretended to play it, announcing our arrival.

Within a few days the children appeared to have recovered from the bombing. Nayla and Marianne fell into their usual routine of playing with dolls and collecting wild flowers while Naim and Rami ran into the valley doing whatever young boys do when they are looking for adventure.

It was amazing after all the death and destruction of Beirut how a simple thing like a wounded bird could galvanize everyone���s attention. It was the Monday before Easter, a few days after we had arrived, when Naim and Rami on one of their treks, heard shots fired. They fell to the ground and waited for the noise to stop. When the guns fell silent they discovered an injured stork on one of the terraces. They rushed home with the news.

Watching from the window I saw the two boys emerge from the woods fifteen minutes later followed by Marga���s husband, Riad, who carried the large white bird in his arms. Marga had already covered the table on the terrace with newspaper and Riad placed the bird carefully down so Michel could examine him.

The bird trembled and we could see its tiny heart pounding. The men fashioned a splint to set the broken leg while the rest of us looked on. The children made a straw bed in the storage room below the house for the bird. They left water and bread soaked in milk and took turns sitting quietly beside it, willing it to recover.

���It needs peace and quiet if it is to get well,��� Nayla said in a strange tone of voice. I stared at my daughter. I wondered from the urgency in her voice whether she was referring to the stork or herself.

The following day, while Marga and I baked cakes for the holiday, Nayla and Maryanne decorated Easter eggs. They spent a joyous afternoon at a white square table in the living room near the tall windows. The sun beamed down on their heads. When I peeked in on them they appeared to glow in the light, even their giggles sounded angelic. Judging from the smile on her face, Nayla appeared to have forgotten her pleas for peace and quiet, whether for her or the stork. I was greatly relieved. I thought what a wonderful thing peace was. All I had to do was look at their faces to see it. In that isolated moment in time everything was right with us. Marga and I enjoyed each other���s company. Michel found camaraderie with Riad, Naim and Rami went out exploring each day, and in the storeroom we had a wounded stork that appeared to be recovering.

LEILA

Leila was my cleaning lady for many years. She lived in West Beirut, and had no telephone, so I used what we housewives in Beirut called ���the Arabic telephone line.��� I contacted my English friend who employed Leila���s cousin; she, in turn, contacted Leila to tell her I had returned after an extended absence in a ���safer��� part of the country. Devoted and energetic, she was the only person I wanted by my side as I began the seventh clean-up of my apartment since the outbreak of civil war.

Before Leila could begin her work, the windows and the glass in the balcony doors had to be replaced. Two glaziers from the glass cutting factory showed up on the first morning and spent most of the day cutting glass, fitting and caulking it into window and door frames. As part of their job they swept the balcony and apartment clear of all shattered glass. When that was done, I was ready for Leila.

She washed the balcony first, swirling a short-stemmed broom with a full head of feathery bristles and plenty of water mixed with detergent around the pots and furniture. In some places she would go after the dirt on her knees, her jaw firmly closed, her hair wobbling, the muscles on her arms rippling, the curve in her back perfectly arched, her eyes searching for any speck she might have missed. I lovingly called her my ���Rav-O-Vac battery.��� According to Lebanese television commercials they never quit working.

When Leila cleaned windows they sparkled. She hosed down the glass on the outside then wiped it clean with newspaper. She found an old toothbrush worked best for cleaning between the radiator panels and in and around the bathroom and kitchen fixtures. Leila���s lovely voice singing Arabic songs made the work seem less tedious. I often heard her humming while I was in the kitchen preparing our lunch and she was getting ready to say her prayers to Mecca. I would put the food on the kitchen table and wait while she prayed on her mat. When she finished we would sit down and eat together.

My friends were jealous. They knew how good Leila was at whatever she did, and they all wished she worked for them. Her greatest talent was cooking and she taught me everything I know about cooking Lebanese food. She had worked in several prominent Lebanese homes and learned from some of the city���s finest cooks. In addition to the more traditional dishes like tabouli, stuffed grape leaves and hummus, she taught me how to prepare fresh quince with veal shank and flavor it with garlic and fresh mint. She added chopped cilantro and grenadine syrup to okra stew, cumin and red pepper sauce to her kibbeh and generously doused grilled white fish with a blend of chopped walnuts, garlic, cilantro and lemon juice. Her specialty was the sabl��, a three layer round butter cookie. Both the top layer, with a round hole in the middle, and the bottom had a distinctive petal edging. After baking the two layers were glued together with thick apricot marmalade then generously sprinkled with powdered sugar.

On this particular clean-up the kitchen was the hardest. Though the temperature rarely dropped below forty degrees Fahrenheit during the winter months, Beirut was extremely humid. We found thick clumps of black mildew growing like hungry weeds across the ceiling and down the walls. The more we tried to scrub it off the more the smudge spread. Eventually we conceded defeat, a primer and two coats of oil-based paint doing what we could not do. After Leila had scrubbed the walls throughout the apartment it was my job to paint them. One day I was up on the ladder painting the ceiling. From my vantage point I was able to look out over the city. I saw a window-washer, a team of men cleaning carpets, one housewife hanging her laundry and another painting like me. I saw a woman pacing her balcony with an infant in her arms. I heard a city coming alive again after so many months of bombing. I heard traffic hustling, horns honking, music blaring from passing car radios. It was a perfect cloudless day and the sky was that blue only a Mediterranean climate can produce. I heard street vendors shouting and mistresses haggling, bargaining over a final price on a kilo of tomatoes. Arabic music poured forth from the taxi stand across the street, and I could hear Leila���s lovely voice on the other side of the apartment, singing the words to the music she knew by heart.

PETS IN WAR TIME

I don’t remember actually planning to get a dog. We were, after all, in the midst of a civil war when it happened. And before any of us could exercise an ounce of common sense, Foxy Lady, a German shepherd, joined our family. She was more high-spirited than most dogs. No doubt that was because we were a lively family and our personalities informed her behavior.

Foxy—unlike most German shepherds who generally responded to only one master—had four to whom she was entirely devoted. She primarily depended on my husband, Michel, for her walks but I fed her and let her share my bed. From our eighth floor apartment she could decipher the sound of the children’s school bus out of a street full of traffic when it was still a block away. Her ears would stand straight up like fine-tuned antennae tracking the exact location of the bus. She followed its noisy engine and knew precisely the moment it stopped in front of our building. At that point, she would walk to the front door and sit at attention, waiting for the sound of the elevator, then the giggling voices of Naim and Nayla as they ascended to the eighth floor. As soon as they arrived and the elevator door opened, Foxy announced their arrival with joyous barking.

I had become quite good at storing bits of traumatic baggage I did not want to think about. Eventually this got me into a lot of trouble. At the time there was so much going on in our lives, so many lift-threatening incidents, that it did not seem helpful to dwell on any one of them. Now when I think back to one particular day, when I had to rescue my children from school under the bombs, I realize how blessed we were to have had Foxy in our lives and how she helped all of us survive.

Our son, Naim, was quite animated when describing our return home that day. “Bombs were following us the whole way. I was watching them in the side view mirror. Some of them fell right behind us. You should have seen Mommy. She had her foot to the floor the while time. She could hardly control the car.”
I wanted him to stop. Couldn’t he see how distressed Nayla was? Couldn’t he see how any relief she might have felt about arriving safely had suddenly vanished while listening to him? Couldn’t he see how her jaw had slowly fallen open when she understood what a close call we had had? When she got up from her chair, walked over to the mattress in the corner of our shelter and sat down, back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, I had no idea what Nayla would do with this bit of news. Naim did not seem to notice his sister’s reaction but Foxy sensed something was wrong. She got up from her spot in the middle of the room and sat down beside her. I watched the way she laid her head in Nayla’s lap, the way she looked up at my daughter with her gentle eyes. As she began to stroke the soft, silky spot on Foxy’s head, her shoulders went limp and she began to breathe more deeply.

When I was bedridden with meningitis, Foxy sat beside my bed, attentive as a nurse, resting her head next to my face. These are but a few of her stories. It was also the way she made us swell with pride or belly laugh at one of her escapades. It was the way she made me angry when she managed to topple my chicken off the stove and onto the floor and eat it; the way she tore up my bed, throwing the pillows and bedspread on the floor when I had left her alone for too long. It was never having the heart to reprimand her and the compassion I felt when she cowered under my bed during the bombing. It was the times I felt her almost human, sitting on her rump in my car, paws gripping the partly rolled down window, peering out at the sights. It was the need to cuddle her in my arms and sink my face into her soft fur or the lick on my cheek that welcomed me home, taking the edge off a stressful day.

In war, when life as we had known it was forever changing, a pet was a reassuring constant, and it was important that we were held to that task. This was what Foxy did for all of us.

PETS IN WAR TIME

I don���t remember actually planning to get a dog. We were, after all, in the midst of a civil war when it happened. And before any of us could exercise an ounce of common sense, Foxy Lady, a German shepherd, joined our family. She was more high-spirited than most dogs. No doubt that was because we were a lively family and our personalities informed her behavior.

Foxy���unlike most German shepherds who generally responded to only one master���had four to whom she was entirely devoted. She primarily depended on my husband, Michel, for her walks but I fed her and let her share my bed. From our eighth floor apartment she could decipher the sound of the children���s school bus out of a street full of traffic when it was still a block away. Her ears would stand straight up like fine-tuned antennae tracking the exact location of the bus. She followed its noisy engine and knew precisely the moment it stopped in front of our building. At that point, she would walk to the front door and sit at attention, waiting for the sound of the elevator, then the giggling voices of Naim and Nayla as they ascended to the eighth floor. As soon as they arrived and the elevator door opened, Foxy announced their arrival with joyous barking.

I had become quite good at storing bits of traumatic baggage I did not want to think about. Eventually this got me into a lot of trouble. At the time there was so much going on in our lives, so many lift-threatening incidents, that it did not seem helpful to dwell on any one of them. Now when I think back to one particular day, when I had to rescue my children from school under the bombs, I realize how blessed we were to have had Foxy in our lives and how she helped all of us survive.

Our son, Naim, was quite animated when describing our return home that day. ���Bombs were following us the whole way. I was watching them in the side view mirror. Some of them fell right behind us. You should have seen Mommy. She had her foot to the floor the while time. She could hardly control the car.���

I wanted him to stop. Couldn’t he see how distressed Nayla was? Couldn’t he see how any relief she might have felt about arriving safely had suddenly vanished while listening to him? Couldn’t he see how her jaw had slowly fallen open when she understood what a close call we had had? When she got up from her chair, walked over to the mattress in the corner of our shelter and sat down, back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, I had no idea what Nayla would do with this bit of news. Naim did not seem to notice his sister���s reaction but Foxy sensed something was wrong. She got up from her spot in the middle of the room and sat down beside her. I watched the way she laid her head in Nayla���s lap, the way she looked up at my daughter with her gentle eyes. As she began to stroke the soft, silky spot on Foxy���s head, her shoulders went limp and she began to breathe more deeply.

When I was bedridden with meningitis, Foxy sat beside my bed, attentive as a nurse, resting her head next to my face. These are but a few of her stories. It was also the way she made us swell with pride or belly laugh at one of her escapades. It was the way she made me angry when she managed to topple my chicken off the stove and onto the floor and eat it; the way she tore up my bed, throwing the pillows and bedspread on the floor when I had left her alone for too long. It was never having the heart to reprimand her and the compassion I felt when she cowered under my bed during the bombing. It was the times I felt her almost human, sitting on her rump in my car, paws gripping the partly rolled down window, peering out at the sights. It was the need to cuddle her in my arms and sink my face into her soft fur or the lick on my cheek that welcomed me home, taking the edge off a stressful day.

In war, when life as we had known it was forever changing, a pet was a reassuring constant, and it was important that we were held to that task. This was what Foxy did for all of us.