When we have a strong emotional response to an experience, our minds are in a heightened state of awareness. A heightened state of awareness means the experience will make a deeper imprint in our memory and nervous system. Basically when our minds are blown and our hearts are moved (in any direction) our eyes are wide open to what’s in front of us. And what happens when our eyes are open? We are awake. We are paying attention. We see with clarity.
On the other hand, when our minds are blown we might not have any clarity. In fact, the clarity that comes from studying abroad in Lebanon is a bit like U2’s song, City of Blinding Lights, in that “the more you see the less you know.”
In lieu of clarity, there’s wonder and curiosity. There’s an impetus to learn more, a desire to be immersed in the process of discovery. This is why students who study abroad at the American University of Beirut (AUB) extend one semester to two; it’s why they stay for the summer; it’s what compels them to return for their master’s degree.
The reality of life in Lebanon
Government travel advisories and concerns of risk in the region present restrictions for students motivated to learn from and about Lebanon. Those who circumvent these obstacles are keenly self-aware, flexible, and grounded.
These traits are necessary to be in relationship with a country confronted with the pain of degradation. Lebanon’s economic crisis is one of the worst in the world since the 1850s (including the global Great Depression of the 1920s) and it impacts every aspect of life. Every. Aspect.
A fish vendor in Saida's old souk. Photograph by Matthieu Karam
When we’re newborns we observe and connect to the people and environments around us. We may not know how to speak, but we communicate the best we can and every waking moment our young minds are blown as we listen and actively observe. There’s so much to process that it makes sense why we need so much sleep.
As we get older and start learning a language, we typically begin with the alphabet. The alphabet provides a foundation to build from. It’s a map to show us what we have to work with. We develop an understanding that the letters themselves are basic but because of the possibilities for each letter to relate to another, millions of permutations emerge in every corner of life. Each letter gives rise to the other, and even for the few that stand alone, they do not exist in isolation.
So if we’re going to talk about studying abroad in Lebanon, we need to reference the alphabet.
The ABCs of study abroad in Lebanon—a system by which to live (and learn)
A still from the documentary “The Snoubar Skatepark and Other Small Things,” directed by AUB alumni Nazlee Radboy, Dalia El Husseini, and Hala Al Shami. This film won first place at the 2022 AUB Unseen Film Festival, and was selected as a finalist for Best International Director and Best Documentary Film for the 2023 Oregon Documentary Film Festival. Photograph by Nazlee Radboy.
Ahlan Wa Sahlan. Welcome to the ABCs of study abroad in Lebanon.
A: Awareness
We might have a general awareness of the unfathomable circumstances in Lebanon, and maybe we hear or read about the country as a separate pillar of society removed from the rest of the world.
It could be that we have a hard time relating to the level of duress given much of the lavish excess in the Global North (accounting for the fact that access to the excess is another story).
Lebanon, seated in the Global South, is not an isolated society, and it’s misplaced to consider its circumstances as unrelated to the Global North.
B: Bread
Dunes of Beirut. Photograph by Dia Mrad.
Bread is central to life in Lebanon and is the common denominator in most meals. Toss some zaatar and jibneh on it and now it's manousheh. What else will properly hold a kebab? What else are we going to dip in our hummus? (Besides crudité.)
Bread is inseparable from the traditional and popular mezze; an assortment of appetizers that act as an escalating introduction to the main dish. Mezze is rooted in community and abundance and is symbolic of shared connection and hospitality.
READ: Be Our Guest: 4 Ways to Be a Considerate Guest in Lebanon
It’s common to see tabouli, baba ganoush, labne, olives, grape leaves, halloumi, and so on and so forth surrounding infinite stacks of pita bread. Before a meal, it’s customary to hear “Sahtein”—a toast to be full of health. Sah(a) is health, and tein is two, so it’s a wish for double health.
Those wishes were pulverized in 2020 when a 2750-ton explosion of ammonium nitrate decimated the country’s grain silos. There’s a subterranean level of bodily terror that grips the heart when it’s unclear if the ground shaking is a bomb, an earthquake, or an explosion.
If that which we hold holds us, it is noteworthy that the same cherished bread and grain so key to connection, and held in such high esteem, ended up protecting half of Beirut from the catastrophic blast.
The devastation of the explosion along with supply chain issues around the world, hyperinflation, geopolitics, and the high price of oil, have all amplified the bread crisis in Lebanon. It has shifted Lebanon’s bread autonomy to a reliance on exports from Russia and Ukraine.
In 2022, Russia blocked Ukraine from exporting grain via the Black Sea, catapulting the price of bread in Lebanon. To make matters worse, electricity is intermittent and unreliable, and with crushingly high prices of fuel, bakeries can hardly afford to operate. As oil giants post record-breaking profits around the world while countries suffer, it begs a closer look at how and why systems are built the way they are, and for who.
READ: How to Decolonize Your Education Abroad Experience (and What It Means)
C: Compassion
Samir, aka Abu Ali, smokes a cigarette during his break. Photograph by Megan Scanlon.
In a 2016 interview for The Sun Magazine, writer Jack Turner recounted his observations and insights to Leath Tonino decades after visiting the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan. On the topics of wildness and humanity’s lost intimacy with the natural world, Turner said,
I think that anybody who goes into a wild place like that for the first time is simply stunned, not only by the land but by the differences in lifestyle. The average per capita income in Baltistan [a region in northern Pakistan] at the time of my first visit was seventy-three dollars a year. I quickly learned that Western ways of classifying people according to education and career are meaningless. There are brilliant people who can’t read. There are ways of living that don’t have anything to do with our way of living. People in the Hindu Kush knew virtually nothing of the U.S., nothing of our ways of life, and their own ways of life were thousands of years old.
Turner’s evaluation is an exquisite example of advanced cultural awareness. He has a firm grip on his individual and cultural assumptions in relation to a culture wildly different than his own.
The experience was a wake-up call for Turner as he reflected on his personal and cultural relationship to wilderness. He points out that if we’re not in relationship to the wild, we’re not going to understand it, care for it, or be a steward for it. We may be aware of “events” in the wild, but awareness plus compassion is the difference between inaction and action.
The thing about compassion is that its true meaning often gets lost. To feel compassion is not pity; it is to feel deep tenderness and/or sorrow because of shared suffering, even if what we suffer from is different. Compassion arises from connection, and Turner’s established and embodied connection with the wild illustrates that the only separation between humanity and the wilderness is in our minds.
Turner defines wild as “something that is self-willed, autonomous, self-organized. Basically it’s the opposite of controlled.” It’s counterintuitive to the way wild is typically used, but if we are curious about connecting to the wilderness of our minds, then there’s nothing like being in a completely different environment to become aware of that which has gone unexplored.
There’s risk in this of course. The hazards less discussed in considering study abroad in a country that holds 5,000 years of history is the risk we take in having everything we think we know about the world flipped on its head.
There’s risk in total life re-examination. Risking our beliefs can be confronting, disillusioning, and unsettling. We need only to look at examples of humanity’s attachments to beliefs and the subsequent divisiveness and violence to know there are consequences when belief systems are questioned.
The other side of risk is that it can be clarifying, illuminating, and liberating; and is part of the process that lays the foundation for critical thinking. If we hold the magnitude of this risk with compassion, recognizing that everyone has afflictions and that everyone wants to be happy and fulfilled, then studying abroad in Lebanon presents an opportunity to simultaneously explore our belief systems and cultivate connection with people experiencing the world through a lens different than our own.
READ: Study Abroad in Lebanon: 5 Unexpected Benefits to Consider
Another piece of the pie
Khalil Gibran portrait as seen through a partially ruined building. Photograph by Dia Mrad.
We learn an alphabet so that we can express ourselves, understand each other, be understood, and make sense of the world. Yet even within one language the odds of misunderstanding are sky-high. Lebanese writer and poet Khalil Gibran said, “between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.” Lebanon is a high-context culture, which means it is key to listen to what's not being said.
The students listening to what's not being said have their senses awakened by the expressions of love in Lebanon that emerge in the wild freedom of a Sara Abou Mrad painting or etching that speaks to femininity, autonomy, and the paradoxical nature of the universe.
That love is felt in the images of Dia Mrad, a photographer who collaborated with Swiss engineer Emmanuel Durand to document the destruction of Beirut’s colossal grain silos. His images capture the scale of the silos, their cultural utility and significance, and the oceanic weight of grief.
The permutations of the alphabet in The Carton Magazine display a tenderness for upholding tradition and syncing with modernity. Though no longer in print, the remaining editions of The Carton are filled with stories of Mediterranean food culture. Food is only one piece of the pie when it comes to culture, albeit a big one. A culture’s relationship to food tells us more about the culture than it does the food.
The Carton’s feather-light heft of unglossed paper is marked with the same outpouring of love and hospitality of mezze. The tales of doting relationships to the land; the stories of lack and survival in a Lebanese women’s prison; the familiarity of local grocers who know each customer’s orders; this reverence for community is inked into the pages and imprinted onto the culture.
Awareness breeds compassion
AUB alumna Razan Ghalayini '17 and her sisters Lea and Rawan enjoy an afternoon in Ras el Haref-Mount Lebanon. Photograph by Razan Ghalayini.
As we continue to listen to what’s not being said, we will see and hear evidence of compassion, kinship, and affection.
It extends itself in the great care AUB takes in making a home for the 200 cats on campus. It’s in the way that the minimalist decor of the New Indo Lankan restaurant is eclipsed by the warm welcome and giant flavor of their Sri Lankan dishes, served above a supermarket in the neighborhood of Dora. When French Lebanese antique shop owner Michel tells his customers they are forgettable, his kind eyes and the tender notes in his voice reveal before he does that he means unforgettable.
The expressions of love in what’s not being said are seeped into the culture even in the hardest and most exhausting of times. Strangers invite strangers to play soccer. A hotel concierge is ready to gift away her necklace after receiving a compliment. New friends will truly, happily go to great lengths to make sure guests to the country visit the mountains, the sea, their families, and all the Lebanese delicacies and places of significance and interest.
Friendships will emerge with kind Egyptian and Bengali gas station attendants who work long hours to send money to their families, with the guy selling saj on Bliss Street in Beirut, and with the only other person in the movie theater watching the same obscure film.
The space between and around these relationships will reveal the context of regional relations, opinions, and nuances with eye-opening and mind-blowing detail. These insights reshape our understanding of the world and all of a sudden we see the distinctions between Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and Bahrain and stop lumping regions of the world together.
We will no longer question “why the Middle East can’t just get it together” or consider Syria a sound bite in the news once we read AUB historian Samer Frangie’s eviscerating letter to a historian in the future. We will acknowledge and validate that the repository of experts on the Middle East…are in the Middle East.
NEXT: 3 Misconceptions About Study Abroad in the Middle East
Now you know your ABCs
There are many reasonable considerations to make in choosing whether or not to study abroad in Lebanon. When our minds are blown, our hearts are moved, and when we’re curious, we do not forget the experiences that open up our eyes, soften our hearts, and light up our brains. The world exists eons beyond our experience, and if we include these considerations, then we will do more than bridge gaps between awareness and compassion.
We will map out where and how to build bridges and paths in the direction towards compassionate stewardship of ourselves and each other.
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This article was written with help from the American University of Beirut. AUB is an extraordinary education, health, and research institution that is also serving to aid refugee populations within Lebanon. Beirut’s greenest space is highly diverse, multicultural, and its boundaries are a haven for students who are encouraged to think critically and express their individuality, as well as embrace civic duty.
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