On International Women’s Day it occurred to me that I should write a story about a Middle Eastern woman, a story that would be a tribute to the brave and noble women of our world. Then I become indecisive, knowing so many women— smart women, strong women, abused and used women, courageous, creative, happy […]
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An answer to the soldier (and 364 others who read my confession): Two weeks ago I posted a blog called: Bombs in Brussels, Drones in the Middle East, the Confessions of a Coward. For three days afterwards my website was visited frequently. A great many readers “liked” the article. Some thanked me on facebook, […]
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One of the advantages of living at Mafraq Sharooq in Musaitbeh, Beirut, was the presence of Mustapha’s grocery just around the corner. It was not a modern supermarket, not the brightest, cleanest, most organized store in West Beirut, which is exactly what was so nice about it. Mustapha Kais, the owner and manager and […]
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Grace Kusta writes a personal traumatic experience, enabling us to see both the stress of life in Lebanon during the civil war and how she coped with it. It was the summer of 1985, I had scheduled my annual vacation from work, planning to go spend a week in Cyprus, an island that is […]
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(Last night I finished this article, though I intended to post something else, a cheerful guest blog, on my website today. This morning I woke to the news of another savage terror attack in Brussels. Now both my reader and I are horrified by the descriptions of headless bodies, people who suddenly have no legs, […]
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There had been a furious battle in the area of Beirut called Ain ar-Rommaneh. As I recall, it lasted several weeks. The population of the area had been paralyzed and the death toll had mounted while two “Christian” militias shot at one another from building to building and up and down the streets. I no […]
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Last week I shared with you my own story, “Meditation on My Home in Lebanon.” As I did so, I kept thinking about the many thousands of Lebanese who lost their homes during the Lebanese civil war. In response to my sadness about the little house in Beit Meri, many people including Lebanese, sent me […]
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Watercolor painting a gift to me from Tara Dunn I made a mistake in my book. Let’s just say that I was wrong. In the epilogue of In Borrowed Houses I said that the little stone house around which my whole story revolves would outlive all of us. My actual words were: “It will […]
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The Lebanese author of this story is known to me. She prefers that both her name and the name of the center where she works be withheld, not for her own sake but to protect the privacy of the refugee children whose stories she tells. In these two stories, the focus is on the children, […]
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Did you see the evening news about the starving Syrian town? The pictures of children crying for food? The 11-year-old boy too weak to walk? The little chests with rib bones protruding? All of it is even more shocking, because while the people of Moadamiya starve to death, barrel bombs delivered by airplanes of Assad’s […]
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