Jezzine

So the next day, Jezzine, the village where my grandparents were born. Cousin Charbel was kind enough to drive me the 2 hours into the southern mountains to get there. I simply had to visit this tiny part of the world that I had heard so much about for so many years. And it did not disappoint. Seeing the house where my grandfather Gidou was born, even the humble little room in which he was born, was profound and meeting my father’s cousin Boutros who has lived in the house continuously for decades, working on the land and eking out a living was very moving as well. Especially when he told us about how when the Israeli army occupied southern Lebanon and Jezzine in particular, they forced him to register his sons with the Lebanese Christian Militia in order to fight with and for the Israeli cause and against the Palestinians. Boutros tried to resist this but was, he said, beaten until he complied. This was a harrowing thing to learn about while sitting together drinking Turkish coffee and looking out over the bucolic valley while watching the sun set over the nearby forest, the same view and the same forest that my grandparents knew intimately before they left to live out their American Dream.