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The Road to Beirut, August 7, 2006
The Road to Beirut
by Diane Wilson
August 7, 2006Diane Wilson, author of An Unreasonable Woman, traveled last week with a delegation of people from CodePink: Women for Peace to Jordan where they met with members of Iraq's Parliament to discuss the Parliament's plan for peace. Afterward, four of the women went to Lebanon to witness firsthand what the current conflict is doing to the people caught in the crossfire.
Damascus…. We heard last night on CNN that all the roads into Lebanon have been bombed and there is no way out or in. Still we had decided to enter Lebanon at whichever border we could. So Medea Benjamin and Gail Murphy commandeered a bus from a singer they met in a outdoor café in Damascus at 2:00 a.m. He was so taken with hauling four women to Beirut that he offered, on the spot, his brother’s company bus to drive us straight to Beirut, then to wait for us in Beirut until we finished our business. He would then take us back to Damascus. And all for $100. Which was a fine plan for us given that we’d heard all the roads were bombed out, and if there were drivers, they were charging anywhere from $600-$1,000 American dollars to haul people fleeing the bombing in Lebanon to Damascus in Syria. A good plan indeed.
But the next day the singer came sheep faced and red and said his brother said he must be crazy to offer such a thing. So our plan to leave Damascus at 7:00 a.m. was nixed until we could find another driver and another car and another price.
So we climbed into the highly fringed bus with the curtained windows (12 seats to one woman!) while our apologizing singer drove us, first, to the Syrian Red Cross, who we had been told was sending supply trucks to Beirut. Unfortunately the Red Cross was only for Syria and they couldn’t help us with a route or a convoy to Beirut. Besides, hadn’t we heard, almost all the roads were bombed out and only the northern route might work? So our singer (after singing us a song from a free standing mike hooked to the dashboard and dancing some kind of salsa mamba through the aisles) took us to the International Red Cross who told us that yes, convoys were going almost daily into Lebanon, but no, we couldn’t hook a ride. Eventually, after a lot of talking, we were given the route the convoy was taking. We got back on our fringed bus while the only woman who could speak Arabic haggled the price with the singer. The $l00 to Beirut had become $l00 just to the Lebanon border where he could take us without occurring the wrath of his brother, the bus company owner. The singer eventually settled on $60 to take us to the border, but we, privately, were thinking ‘wait and see’ if we can get him to take us further. We had good reasons for wanting that bus. We were warned that if we took a southern route into Beirut we would have to get out with our suitcases and walk for a considerable distance over bomb craters to get to the other side where we may or may not find a car that would take us the rest of the way. Having a bus eliminated a lot of walking through bomb holes.
An hour and a half later we arrived at the northern most border. The border was like a small town in west Texas—hot and dusty and jam-packed with cars and buses and people. There were a half dozen little nondescript blonde block buildings where we handed over our passport then received slips of paper that we filled out to turn in at another little block building. The last passport entry into Lebanon was almost a deal breaker. One of our four women had been into Israel a year ago and the entry was in the passport. So while we waited on the verdict, some of the more savvy travelers (Gail Murphy and Medea Benjamin) negotiated with drivers to take us into Beirut. This was where reality hit the pavement. There was a UN delegation at the border who was telling us it was going to be VERY EXPENSIVE to get a driver to take us to Beirut, but the real truth was it was cheap as dirt. The price started at $60, then dropped to $50. Lucky for us, we found a driver that had lived in dear ole Houston for one year but got fed up quick and went home to Lebanon.
He worked for a nice taxi service in Beirut that exchanged taxis every two years. This driver charged us nothing and waited two hours while we sweated over our passports.
Around 3:00 p.m. we crossed the border into Lebanon and started seeing the roads pockmarked with bombs. The first had occurred the night before and looked like someone had chiseled a many-spangled star into the asphalt. We drove about 80 mph, skyrocketing into Lebanon, apparently on a self-imposed deadline to get into Beirut before nightfall when the bombs would start falling.
We made it to Tripoli around 5:00 p.m. and the sun was getting red and low. Our ex-Houston driver wheeled into an open vacant garage, yelled something at someone who yelled something back. The driver then wheeled around in the middle of the road and cruised up to some men who were hanging around minivans. One was already full with about ten men. Apparently we were at our bus stop; the next minivan would take us into Beirut for five dollars a woman. Our suitcases where tied down on top of the minivan and a half dozen men piled in with us.
To say we four women were an oddity is an understatement. Our oddness blared out like we had speakers hanging off our necks. Not only were we women heading INTO Beirut, but two of our group were blonde, blonde, blonde and smacked of Americana. I was amazed by the Lebanese cordiality in spite of the well-known position of the Bush Administration giving a green light to the bombing of the cities. They always said, ”you are very welcome here.”
The minivan had the same kind of air conditioning I had in my truck back in Texas: 2-80. Two windows down and driving 80 miles an hour. Then 30 minutes into our ride, we saw the real bombed out bridges and roads that CNN was talking about. Huge holes the size of small buildings with jagged chucks of cements and rebar poking in every direction. But amazingly, feeder roads trailed around and through trees and over hills, then thru narrow neighborhoods. Then whack! We were back on the main road and we’d all look back and see the gaping hole left by the bomb blast.