For the past three years that I’ve been living in Beirut “small” incidents have randomly happened on the borders of this country. During my first week there were some rockets exchanged between a village in the south and the Israeli army. I was completely fresh and didn’t know if I was supposed to freak out or not, but my local friends assured me that this was somehow “normal” and life went on as usual.
Lately there has been fighting in the North, something that hasn’t really affected my life all that much, and I’ve been sending comforting messages to my family trying to explain that I am in no danger by any means.
The closest I have ever been to something really horrible was in Oslo last summer when a car bomb aimed at one of the government buildings killed eight people. I had passed the site of the bomb only 20 minutes before it blew up, and was chilling out on my bed when the bottles that used to hold the curtains down in my bedroom window got tossed into the room. Then 69 kids were murdered on an island summer camp outside of Oslo.
In Norway this was the worst case scenario. The damage was what horrified us. When the bomb went off in Beirut last Friday the feeling was very different. It was horrible here too, super horrible, but far from a worst case scenario. People here fear that this is a beginning, not an end as it was in Norway.
The first few days were very quiet, and not many people chose to go out at night. Most of the people to be seen on the streets gathering on the pavements outside of the bars were foreigners. What else would we do? Sit at home alone? We who don’t have families here needed to hang out together.
However, I’m glad to see things a little more stable now, and hope it will continue like that. I don’t want to see this country go to shit.
