All posts by In The Fray Contributor

Paris, 2011: We saw him in different areas of the city with his two dogs. He kept a big water bowl for the dogs, and lots of water on hand. If he was awake, he gave us a big smile. Here, he and his dogs lie on the grounds of Notre Dame, cuddling in their sleep.
Paris
Photo Essays

Strays: Street People and Their Dogs

I saw them everywhere in Europe: street people traveling with their dogs. How can a homeless person who can barely take care of himself take decent care of an animal? With love.

Jim Ross

I first noticed them in Paris: dogs accompanying homeless street people. I saw a man in a heavy winter coat sitting on the stone ground of a bridge while his dog—a rust-colored lab puppy—rested, curled up, on a blanket beside him. A sign said the dog was for sale. It hit me hard: he was obviously caring for this animal, but it was mid-October, and there was a chill in the air. Surviving the winter can be a challenge for human beings, let alone animals.

Three dogs on the sidewalkA year later, I visited Europe again with my wife and our two adult children. My daughter said she wanted to create a calendar of dogs, so I fell into the pattern of taking photos of street dogs. Occasionally, dogs traveled with human companions, and I photographed them, too. Usually, the street people were alone with their dogs, or with one other street person. Occasionally, we saw them gathered in large numbers. One image that has stayed with me is the thick crowd of street people and their dogs that formed in front of the Matabiau train station in Toulouse at sunset, waiting for a van that delivered blankets and provided health care after dark.

I made several more trips to Europe over the next few years. Everywhere, I kept seeing street people and their dogs—more, it seemed, with each trip. The photos for this essay were taken between 2010 and 2013 in a variety of cities: Paris, Toulouse, and Lille, France; Brussels, Belgium; and, Edinburgh, Scotland.

To my knowledge, no one keeps a formal tally of the number of street people who travel with animal companions. Anecdotally, the number appears to have gone up in many parts of France over the last two decades, says Charlotte Nivelet, a French ethologist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The young, she adds, are more likely to be what the French call “travelers”—the untranslated English word used in that country to describe street people accompanied by animals, usually dogs.

In France, being a traveler has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, an emergency shelter will not admit a homeless person who has an animal. On the other hand, traveling with that animal provides a measure of protection—and not just the security of a watchdog to scare off attackers or wake you up when there’s trouble. If the police happen to arrest the human companion, they cannot jail the animal one, nor can they just abandon it on the streets. “Instead, they must house the dog in a special dog hotel,” says Sandrine Guilhem, a community activist in Toulouse. “For most offenses, that’s too much trouble and costs too much money, so the police simply do not prosecute travelers for minor offenses such as riding on a train without a ticket.” (The same goes for psychiatric hospitals, Guilhem notes: they can’t forcibly institutionalize a homeless person without providing separate lodging for the animal.)

Two street people eat sandwiches as their German shepherds watchComing across so many of these travelers during my trips to Europe made me think about the relationships they have with their animals. Many people might ask, for instance, how a homeless person who can barely take care of himself can take decent care of an animal. The more cynical might even accuse the homeless of using their animals to milk the sympathies of passersby. What I observed was something different. The homeless people I met were with their animals day and night, looking out for their welfare at all times. They didn’t leave their dogs in cages all day—the way some people do when they leave for work. The man with the sign in Paris was the only street person I ever saw who was selling an animal.

The loyalty the homeless people showed their dogs, in turn, seemed to be avidly reciprocated. The dogs protected their owners against attacks at night. They served as peacekeepers when large numbers of street people gathered at sunset, as in front of the train station, and tensions rose. The dogs, who knew each other well, would walk in intersecting circles, helping maintain a safe distance between their respective masters until tempers calmed.

Whether the homeless have the financial wherewithal to adequately care for their animals is another matter—and one that some advocacy groups are trying to address. In France, the IFAW has been developing ways to assist homeless animals (usually dogs) and humans in tandem, so that the animal is cared for while the homeless person is taking steps toward reintegration into society: attending training, going to job interviews, seeing a doctor, and so on.

In the United States, Pets of the Homeless operates a nationwide network to help street people and their animals stay together. Among other things, the nonprofit organization provides the homeless with free veterinary care and food for their animals. “We get lots of calls from people who are about to become, or just became, homeless,” says Genevieve Frederick, the organization’s founder. “They’ll ask, ‘What am I going to do about my dog?’ They don’t want to be separated.” As Frederick notes, homelessness is usually a temporary condition, which means there is little reason for street people and their animals to be permanently split up.

Street people and their dogs head back to the tents where they live along Toulouse's Canal du Midi

Legend has it that street people first traveled with dogs in large numbers in the French town of Montpellier. If this way of life really began in Montpellier, there’s something curiously wonderful about that. Montpellier is the birthplace of St. Roch, a fourteenth-century mendicant pilgrim and ascetic, the patron saint of dogs and dog lovers.

According to accounts of Roch’s life, the governor of Montpellier—Roch’s father—decreed on his deathbed that his son would succeed him. Roch would have none of that. Instead, he gave away his wealth to the poor. When he fell victim to the plague, Roch hid in the forest, expecting to die there. As the story goes, a dog began to visit him every day, bringing him stolen food and licking his wounds. (For that reason, depictions of Roch usually show his left hand lifting his tunic to reveal a wound on his thigh, while his right hand accepts stolen food from an attentive dog.) After the dog nursed him back to health, Roch traveled throughout Italy healing others.

A street woman plays music for her dog and catIn a sense, today’s travelers are much like Roch: outcasts nursing wounds. For them, says the IFAW’s Nivelet, animals are “a lifeline, a family, a safeguard, an antidepressant”—a way to cope with an intensely precarious and disheartening state of being. “At times it is this bond,” Nivelet adds, “that represents the final safety net before a total break from society.”

University of Colorado sociologist Leslie Irvine has conducted interviews with people who live on the streets with their animals. In her 2013 book My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals, these individuals describe their animal companions as life changers and lifesavers—sources of unconditional love who encourage them to be more responsible caretakers, silent witnesses who keep them from falling back into risky behaviors.

In turn, animals can help the homeless stay connected to the rest of humanity. As Frederick points out, people who normally never approach a homeless person living on the street react to them differently when they see them with an animal. They will first interact with the animal, petting it or talking to it, and then, once they feel more comfortable, they will begin to chat with the animal’s human companion. “Having an animal helps homeless people open up communication with non-homeless humans, who see them as caring,” Frederick says.

I like to believe that having an animal companion deepens the compassion of homeless people, who often live relatively solitary lives. And perhaps seeing these travelers with their dogs also deepens the compassion of those of us just walking by. If at first we’re drawn to the dog, with any luck we get to know its human companion, too. We recognize and relate to that age-old bond between human and animal. And maybe we walk away changed, having known the homeless not as panhandlers or social burdens, but as other caring human beings.

Street people entertain passersby with balloons while their dogs rest

A health researcher by profession, Jim Ross has published stories and photos in the Atlantic, Friends Journal, Pif Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among other publications. He resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. He can be reached at jamesross355@gmail.com.

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Tiedoli, Italy
Commentary

A Half-Sentence

A note inscribed in the margin of an ancient book connected me, across an ocean and a century, to a fateful decision.

Peter M. Nardi
Small stone church with two spires
The Church of S. Giovanni Battista in Tiedoli.

The musty aroma of mushrooms was everywhere. It was the Fiera del Fungo, a festival of porcini mushrooms held every year in the northern mountain town of Borgo Val di Taro, Italy, and I was here sightseeing with two colleagues of mine. What had lured us was the mushrooms, creatively incorporated into dishes of all kinds—from soup to gelato. But what that smell evoked in me was memories from an ocean away, of my childhood in the Bronx and the times when my grandparents, immigrants from Italy, would excitedly open a package of funghi from the “old country.”

That was my real reason for visiting Italy. I wanted to see the part of the country where my grandparents used to live. The college where I teach happens to have a study-abroad program in the nearby city of Parma, and in 2005, I flew out there and met up with two of the program’s directors. One morning, we drove out to the festival in Borgo Val di Taro, taking a few hours to indulge in the town’s more famous dishes. Then we decided to head into Tiedoli.

My grandfather Pietro had grown up there. A small village nestled on the edge of the Apennines mountains, Tiedoli was not even on our Google map. We drove up a winding road until we came across a tiny, barely legible sign that reassured us we were headed in the right direction. As we drove into Tiedoli, I could make out the double steeples of a church—by far the largest building among the village’s smattering of houses and farms.

I wondered if the church had any records of my grandfather. We walked over to the building, an imposing stone structure topped by a statue of John the Baptist. A priest emerged from the front doors just as we arrived. I asked him if there were documents dating back to the 1880s. He laughed. Their records went back to the 1700s, he said.

The priest quickly found a book with baptismal notices from 1886, the year my grandfather was born. He slowly turned the pages, folio-sized sheets filled with handwritten paragraphs of names, dates, and family information. All of a sudden my grandfather’s name jumped out. There it was, in a baptismal announcement in Latin.

The priest confessed he could not read Latin—“O tempora! O mores!” I wanted to exclaim—but I assured him that between his Italian and my four years of high school Latin, we could probably stumble through the paragraph.

Although we have different middle names, my grandfather, my father, and I share the first name Peter, or Pietro. The name, which means “rock,” goes back to the founding of the Roman church. My grandfather would sometimes remind me that June 29 was our name day—the feast of St. Peter.

Author in front of house door and sign
Standing in front of a house in Tiedoli and a sign with the village’s name.

I have always admired my grandfather. He left Tiedoli to join the carabinieri at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when members of the national police force looked not unlike the figure stamped on the old Galliano liqueur bottle. He was stationed in Rome, and there he learned about the cosmopolitan world outside the farm country where he had grown up.

When he was in his mid-twenties, Pietro left Italy to seek a new life in America. Many decades later, he told me stories from those early years. After passing through Ellis Island, he looked for work in New York. Signs in store windows told Italians not to bother applying for jobs. But my grandfather would not be discouraged. His first gig was sweeping up in a burlesque house, where the pay amounted to whatever coins had been tossed at the dancing girls and left on the floor. Eventually, he worked his way up to becoming the chief room-service waiter at the prestigious Hotel St. Regis, where he served Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, and the silent film star Nita Naldi.

Pietro met my grandmother Celestina in New York’s ethnic neighborhood for northern Italians—what is now the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. As it turned out, she had grown up in a small hill town just twenty miles from Tiedoli. They were married for fifty-two years before she died. He lived to the age of eighty-nine, remaining to the end a smart, self-educated man who loved to read the newspapers.

When my grandfather died in 1975, I was in my late twenties. I realized then how fortunate I’d been to be able to ask him some of the questions I wished I had brought up with my other grandparents before they died.

Baptismal notice in ancient Italian book
My grandfather’s baptismal notice.

According to my grandfather’s August 10 entry in the church’s baptismal records, he had been born the day before, on August 9. The names of his parents—my great-grandparents—were also listed. The entry noted that his father was an orphan with no parents identified. (Back then, these words could have meant that the parents had died, or that the child had been abandoned for being illegitimate.) My grandfather had once told me that it would be difficult to trace our family tree because of his father’s unknown lineage. He often joked about being a possible descendant of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born about fifty miles away, near Busseto, around the same time as my great-grandfather was.

As we were about to close the folio, I noticed a note in the margin next to my grandfather’s entry. The words were written in a different handwriting and ink, and in Italian, not Latin. Went to America 1913, it read.

That’s when the operatic tears started to flow. In those four words lay a major decision in my grandfather’s life. The path he had chosen had taken me, almost a century later, down the road to this village, this church, and this baptismal notice. It had taken my family to another country and another way of life.

In that overwhelming moment, a half-sentence note in the margin connected me to something much larger than myself.

Peter Nardi is a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitzer College. He previously wrote a column for Pacific Standard on critical thinking and has written numerous academic publications on the role of friendship in men’s lives. Site

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Blog / Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Free Speech


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | March-April 2015: Free Speech

The massacre of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo provoked outrage around the globe. Street demonstrators and world leaders alike denounced religious extremism and defended the principle of free speech. While they decried the violent acts, however, some prominent voices reacted to the attack by speaking out against the opposite evil—anti-religious extremism—which they saw in Charlie Hebdo‘s deliberately offensive portrayals of organized religion. “One cannot insult other people’s faith,” Pope Francis said in an interview—drawing a fierce rebuttal from critics, who likened his view to, among other things, a wife-beater’s defense.

In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that have something to say about free speech—its importance and its limits, its necessity and its consequences. When does cultural sensitivity become excessive political correctness and censorship? To what extent does free speech make a democracy more vibrant, and to what extent does it make a culture more hateful?

Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN APRIL 30, 2015. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.

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Blog

My Worst Best Friend

By Jill Pohl
A model's perfect waistline
Photo by Daniela Vladimirova, via Flickr

I had no friend quite like Ed. We also hated each other.

He was with me all the time. He knew all my secrets. When I was in high school, all I wanted was to be perfect. At 5:30 a.m. I would run six miles. Then, after school, I would study until 10 p.m., breaking only for dinner. I always had to get an A. He understood why I would wrap my hips and abdomen in duct tape to keep it all in, so that my tight pants would fit perfectly and no amount of fat could bubble over the top.

When we had meals together, he would reassure me that it was okay to eat only fruits and vegetables. He would agree when I would say, “I’m fat, I need to lose weight.” He saw what I saw in the mirror.

He didn’t mind that I didn’t make much of an effort to get to know him. He understood that I was wrapped up in my own troubles.

I came home from college for winter break, and my parents said I had lost too much weight. They wanted to know what was happening. I lied. I told them I was fine, just busy. Ed and I laughed about it later.

When I returned to school after a Christmas spent eating only cranberries, frozen fruit, and broccoli, I went to a dietician. She told me that I was sick and needed to gain weight. I said I would try. Ed and I walked home from the appointment. “Great job,” he told me. We made fun of her stupid meal plan and her naïveté in believing me. I repeated the lie to my parents, too.

But after several months, my body broke down. My doctor told me that I couldn’t physically exert myself in any way, lest I have a heart attack. The news didn’t faze Ed. He smiled and said, “Let’s go for a run. You’re looking a little heavy.”

“Ed,” I said, “I really don’t think I can run.”

I agreed to go into outpatient treatment. Ever the loyal friend, Ed came with me. “These other girls are sicker than you,” he said.  “You don’t belong here.” I looked around the room. Some had tubes in their noses. Others were drinking protein shakes because they had refused lunch. Ed and I laughed at these pitiful creatures. We thought up ways I could outsmart the staff. “Exercise when you get home at night,” he told me as we sat in the waiting room. “Don’t pay attention during the activities.”

I did what he said. I had entered treatment in June, but a month later, I still hadn’t gained any weight. I was told I would need to receive inpatient treatment and defer school for a semester.

That’s when I turned my back on Ed. I still liked how I looked at seventy-five pounds. But what would it matter if I were cooped up in a treatment facility, isolated from everyone I knew, living among ghosts? I started to realize that I might become like the people around me: pale, emotionless, wheelchair-bound—barely able to move a muscle.

I began seeing a therapist. She told me I needed to get Ed out of my life. “Tell him ‘No,’” she said. “Every time you sit down to a meal, every time you want to run six miles, don’t do what he’s telling you to do. It will get easier each time. Trust me.”

I did trust her. She became a new friend, and with time I learned to listen to her instead of Ed.

It took about a year to get myself over 100 pounds and regain the trust of my parents after promising them repeatedly that I would try to get better.

Ed never stopped hectoring me. On my wedding day, he told me my dress didn’t fit properly. When I thought about having kids, Ed warned that I would gain too much weight and turn ugly.

But by then I had found a true best friend, my husband. He told me he loved how I looked in my wedding dress. Later, we decided to have children.

In the seven years since I had my falling out with Ed, I’ve learned to tune out diet fads, step away from the mirror, and divert myself from self-destructive thinking.

Ed, my eating disorder, is still around. He never does go away for good, I’ve learned. Sometimes he joins me during meals or exercise. But it’s not the same as it was. He and I aren’t friends anymore.

Jill Pohl is a military spouse and freelance writer. Website: visionsofjillhanna.com

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Separatist fighters survey the steppe after recapturing Saur-Mogila from Ukrainian forces. Sergei Kopylov, via joyful-life.ru
Saur-Mogila, Ukraine
Commentary

Unearthing Another War

Best of In The Fray 2014. Last year I visited Saur-Mogila, a burial mound in eastern Ukraine that commemorates the Soviet soldiers who died driving back the Nazis during World War II. Today it is a battleground for a new war, as separatists fight for independence and Russia moves its troops into the lands it once liberated.

Michael Long
Photos by Sergei Kopylov

In the frigid autumn sunlight I climbed the stone steps of Saur-Mogila. The burial mound, located atop a bluff encircled by the bronzed steppe, covers the bones of Soviet soldiers killed during the Second World War. More than 23,000 died fighting the Germans for this hilltop along the eastern edge of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The panoramic view from the summit is coveted for reasons both aesthetic and strategic, and I could easily see why. At 277 meters, Saur-Mogila is the highest point in the region.

Continue reading Unearthing Another War →

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Caracas, Venezuela
News

Street Fighters

Dozens died in mass demonstrations earlier this year against the Venezuelan government. While the violence has subsided, the conflict continues to spill out onto the sidewalks and storefronts of urban Caracas, where opponents and supporters of the government engage in an art of war over the symbolism of the protests and the memory of the dead.

Story and photos by J. J. Gallagher
Man walking past graffiti-marked wall in Caracas
A neighborhood in central Caracas bears the marks of dueling political groups.

Armored vehicles roll down the street, ringed by dozens of police in riot gear. Further down on the palm tree-lined Avenida Francisco Miranda, one of Caracas’s main arteries, small groups of protesters clad in bicycle helmets and gas masks arm themselves with stones and hastily construct roadblocks with whatever they can find: sign posts, bits of concrete, a steel cable taken from a nearby construction site. Bags of garbage burn nearby, spewing black smoke into the air. Though it’s early on a weekday afternoon, the storefronts that line the normally busy street have already been shuttered, antigovernment graffiti scrawled on their windows and walls. A crowd of several hundred people—a mixture of peaceful demonstrators and onlookers from nearby businesses—clank guardrails amid shouts of “Resistencia!” and “Libertad!”

Protesters sitting alongside candles and photos of the dead
People gather to remember the dead in Altamira Square, the epicenter of many of Venezuela’s fiercest protests.

Slowly at first, the police lob tear gas canisters into the crowd. Protesters quickly pick them up and cast them away. Then the canisters start raining down, scattering nearly everyone. Crates full of rocks and bottles and containers filled with gasoline appear suddenly among the demonstrators. Someone hurls a firebomb, which explodes underneath a contingent of about six officers, who, seemingly unscathed, continue advancing. Marching in rows through the choking fog, the police start aiming their tear-gas guns directly at the protesters still gathered on the street. A group of teenage boys break into a furious sprint as police on motorcycles hurtle down the sidewalks after them. One of the boys, shaking with fear, frantically jabs at apartment buzzers as a group of workers nearby shout, “Let him in! Let him in!” He slips inside the apartment building’s steel gate, just out of an officer’s reach.

The April 1 demonstration in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas—a protest march that swiftly descended into an armed brawl with security forces sent out to clear the streets—is one of dozens that have taken place this year, fueling a major popular uprising against the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Since February, forty-two people have died, though the violence has tapered off in recent months. The fatalities have included both opponents and supporters of the government: José Guillén Araque, a thirty-four-year-old National Guard captain and father of two teenage daughters; twenty-two-year-old beauty queen Génesis Carmona; Adriana Urquiola, twenty-eight years old and five months pregnant; and many others, drawn from all parts of Venezuelan society.

Protesters wearing gas masks on the streets of Caracas
A protester hurls a tear-gas canister back at advancing riot police.

As in many of the popular uprisings that have broken out in places like Syria and the Ukraine in recent years, repressive tactics intended to quash the protests have only served to inflame them. And as they have elsewhere, Venezuela’s artists have been a driving force within the opposition movement, crafting a compelling narrative to motivate resistance.

Since the killings began, street artists have memorialized the dead in spray paint, tagging walls and sidewalks throughout the city with their faces and names. “[The government] has all the power. They do whatever they want, and they are extremely violent,” says Marina, a twenty-seven-year-old English teacher and a member of anti-Maduro student artist collective called Stencil Resistencia. (Because of fear of government reprisals, the protesters I spoke to asked me to withhold their last names.) “That’s the idea of painting the faces of the dead, to remind everyone of who we are dealing with. They are the violent ones.”

The demonstrations began in February, over local issues. College students in the western city of San Cristóbal turned out to protest a sexual assault that had occurred on campus. The resistance quickly snowballed into a national movement. Angered and aggrieved, thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets since then to decry the government’s failure to deal with a raft of problems.

Tire blockade with the word "Resiste"
A protest barricade, one of the opposition’s favored tactics, completely blocks a major artery in southern Caracas.

Despite having the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela has struggled economically, and in the past two years its fiscal woes have reached crisis levels. During his fourteen years of increasingly unrestrained rule, the late president Hugo Chavez succeeded in rearranging the country’s power structure and lowering the poverty rate, mainly by allocating more of the country’s oil wealth to programs for the poor. But he also left the legacy of an isolated and sputtering economy, as well as a byzantine currency-control system under which, critics say, tens of billions of dollars in public funds have gone missing.

Today, the country consistently ranks near the bottom of global measures of freedom of the press and the ease of doing business. It boasts one of the highest inflation rates in the world—more than 60 percent annually—as well as an increasingly exorbitant cost of living. Basic necessities like toilet paper, cooking oil, and flour, nearly all of which are imported, have become scarce. Alarmingly, the number of murders has also surged over the past decade: according to the United Nations, Venezuela now has the second-highest murder rate in the world.

Meanwhile, government repression of dissent has been at times brutal. The first protester fatality occurred on February 12. Bassil Alejandro Dacosta Frías, a twenty-three-year-old carpenter, left his home in the nearby city of Guatire to join two of his cousins in a protest march in Caracas. An estimated 10,000 people took to the streets that day. In a scene that would become familiar, the demonstration ended in chaos. Once the police came out in force, most of the protesters filtered out into nearby streets, but small groups stayed behind or were diverted by the security forces.

In the confusion that ensued, at least one member of the security forces opened fire into the crowd, using live ammunition. The protesters fled. A video released later showed Dacosta running and then falling to the sidewalk, struck from behind by a bullet to the head. (A forty-two-year old member of Venezuela’s national intelligence agency is now in jail awaiting trial for firing the fatal shot.) The night before he was killed, Dacosta announced on Facebook that he was going to “go out and march tomorrow without fear of anything, with the hope of finding a better future.”

Protester spray-painting a stencil of a dead protester's face on a wall
Members of a group of street artists calling themselves Stencil Resistencia adorn a wall with the faces of people killed in the protests.

In the weeks that followed, the country’s fractured politics continued to play out bloodily on its city streets, with dozens more dying in the violence. Remembering the dead became an act of resistance that united the opposition. In the outpouring of emotion following Dacosta’s death, his face became ubiquitous, popping up on T-shirts and placards, painted onto walls and sidewalks.

The activists I interviewed have helped blanket the city with his likeness, along with those of the unrest’s many other victims. “These people who died gave their lives for the country. We must not forget them,” says Alejandro, a twenty-five-year-old economics student who has dedicated much of his free time since the protests began to the opposition movement. Using digital photos published in local media and shared on social networks, he and other artists create images in Photoshop that are then cut into stencils and spray-painted onto surfaces.

Antigovernment street art carries with it some irony in Venezuela. Chavez popularized graffiti and murals as political statements, and the government still hires artist collectives to work on public projects, which often carry strong anticapitalist and anti-American messages. Chavez often mocked the highbrow sensibilities of Venezuela’s elite and sought to empower the country’s poor by celebrating their culture. But now the government-sponsored street art has become an institution as well as a propaganda tool. After his death, Chavez’s image has become omnipresent, with his face, his recognizable signature, and even his eyes occupying the sides of buildings and billboards. In Caracas, the writing on the wall is usually a good indicator of whether you are walking through an opposition or government stronghold.

Police wearing protective gear and firing tear gas
Police begin firing a barrage of tear gas at the protesters who remain on the street.

The government has also organized marches of its own and rallied an army of pro-government musicians and street artists to its side. They depict a world dominated by Yankee imperialists, allied with Venezuela’s wealthy elites, who threaten to subjugate the poor. With America’ record of meddling in the affairs of Latin American countries, Venezuela’s history of entrenched inequality, and the country’s persistent political instability—punctuated by upheaval and coups—this message resonates with the government’s supporters, who have vowed to continue the populist political agenda championed by Chavez, who died in 2013 after a prolonged fight with cancer.

Since he took office, Maduro—Chavez’s handpicked successor and the leader of the country’s ruling socialist party—has drawn heavily from his predecessor’s playbook. He has claimed to be the target of frequent coup attempts and made vague accusations of interference from US-backed militants. Amid the recent wave of protests, the president, his supporters, and the state-run media have sought to portray the opposition as bent on conflict and destruction. (Maduro has even taken to calling the protesters “Chuckies,” in reference to the ginger-haired, knife-wielding doll of 1980s horror-movie fame.)

Protesters holding a flag and flagging passing cars
Demonstrators vie for the attention of passersby at one of the many peaceful protests that took place in Caracas.

Government forces have come under gunfire in several of the confrontations, and the protesters have on numerous occasions tussled with them and set fire to buildings and vehicles. Because of the international media’s focus on the street battles that have led to deaths like Dacosta’s, masked young men have come to symbolize Venezuela’s protest movement to the outside world, even though their groups generally number in the dozens, compared to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators who turn up at major opposition marches and rallies. The protesters—many of them in their teens and early twenties—complain, in turn, about the police’s heavy-handed tactics, which they say are employed even when the demonstrations are nonviolent. (A number of protesters claim the police often incite the violence and viciously beat them even when they do not resist arrest.) Images purporting to show the bloodied and bruised bodies of demonstrators circulate widely on Twitter and other social media networks, fueling the outrage.

The government has deftly used the street skirmishes to justify its crackdown. Maduro recently vowed to bring to justice “criminals who seek to fill our country with chaos and violence.” In May, his forces raided a protest camp outside of the UN office in Caracas, even as the government engaged in internationally mediated peace talks with the opposition.

More than 3,000 people were detained in connection with the protests earlier this year, according to the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal Venezolano; seventy-five remain jailed today. The group also says it has documented instances of beatings and torture. Beyond its violent crackdowns on demonstrations, the government has hounded opposition politicians and media outlets that it accuses of fomenting the hostilities. In June, images of Leopoldo Lopez, the former mayor of the Chacao district in central Caracas and the government’s most famous prisoner, were leaked, showing him bearded and gaunt after spending more than a hundred days in detention under charges of instigating violence and damaging property. (With his pugnacious rhetoric and overt support of the fighting in the streets, Lopez played a critical role in sparking the protest movement.) Lopez’s trial finally began in late July. His lawyers say he could face up to ten years in prison if convicted.

The April 1 protest in Caracas was set in motion by Maria Corina Machado, another vehement critic of the Maduro government, who urged her supporters to come out for a political rally and march. Machado had just been accused of treason and ousted from her seat in Venezuela’s parliament after denouncing, at a Washington meeting of the Organization for American States, human rights abuses allegedly committed by the regime. (In Venezuela Machado is a controversial figure, whose political organizations have in the past received financing from the US government. The government has long called her a puppet of the Americans, and in late May she, the US ambassador, and several other opposition politicians were publicly accused of organizing an assassination plot against President Maduro.) Thousands turned up to hear her speak at a plaza in downtown Caracas, but when it came time for the symbolic walk to the steps of the National Assembly, many of the demonstrators found themselves face-to-face with police and National Guard troops, who shut down metro stations and blocked major avenues.

Police standing on a rock-strewn street
A view of police gathering in the distance, from the protesters’ vantage point.

While they don’t agree with using violence, the protesters I spoke to see the street demonstrations as a necessary and effective tactic. Instead of addressing the country’s problems, they say, the government has marginalized legitimate political dissent and attempted to silence criticism. Beyond their hostility to the government, however, the protestors have little in the way of a unified agenda. Their demands range widely—from moderate policy reforms to regime change.

Like many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans, the activists I interviewed complain that their day-to-day lives have rapidly deteriorated over the past few years, as crime has grown and the economy worsened. “The situation is as bad as it’s been in the past fifteen years,” said Alejandro, the economics student. “The [government] officials can’t go on denying the weakest currency in the world, the lowest minimum wage in the world. We are demanding a change—not necessarily in the government, but in the policies that they are carrying out.”

With the potent symbolism of their street graffiti, artists like Alejandro have helped the dead protesters achieve a near-mythic status in Venezuela. Sympathizers often refer to them as “los caídos,” or the fallen ones. Even as tensions in the street have calmed in recent months, with no new deaths being reported, the activists say their acts of remembrance will go on. “We have to continue struggling,” says Marina. “If we go back to our daily lives, they will have died in vain.”

J. J. Gallagher is a freelance writer based in New York. Twitter: @jayjgal

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Blog / Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Frenemies


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | August-September 2014: Frenemies

“Frenemies”: friends with fewer benefits. It’s often an apt term to describe our working lives, where polite interactions mask fierce competition. But it applies to other domains as well: from the love-hate relationships of siblings and lovers, to the tangled web of international relations (take, for example, longtime allies Germany and the US, recently in a bitter spat over American espionage). Yet having a frenemy is not necessarily a bad thing. Musical rivalries produce great songs (see the hit musical Beautiful). One-time political opponents sometimes become the most formidable of allies (see Bush v. Gore veterans/gay-marriage crusaders David Boies and Ted Olson).

In The Fray magazine is looking for profiles, essays, and photo essays that have something to say about friendly rivals, and rival friends. Tell us about the struggles that ensued, and the regrets and resolutions that followed. Tell us about battles between best friends, reluctant enemies, or best and worst selves. 

Please review our submissions guidelines and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN OCTOBER 1, 2014. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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Blog

The Poetry of Pussy Riot: A Review of Words Will Break Cement

By Cornelius Fortune

Journalist Masha Gessen wrote a well-received biography of Russian president Vladimir Putin two years ago. In her new book Words Will Break Cement, she profiles Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk activist group whose members have become the international faces of anti-Putin protest.

In recent years the group has won a global following—including the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney—for their offbeat acts of civil disobedience against the Russian government. One of their best-known protests—a controversial “punk prayer” performance in a Moscow cathedral in 2012—eventually landed three of its members in jail. Gessen, a Russian American journalist and herself a critic of Putin, follows the personal histories of these three members: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya), Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Stanislavovna Samutsevich (Kat). Most of the book was culled from Gessen’s reporting from their trial and her correspondence with Nadya and Maria while they were in prison.

Nadya, we learn, grew up with a love for philosophy. One of her heroes was Anatoly Marchenko, a Soviet dissident who wrote about the experiences of political prisoners in Soviet camps. Bookish Maria long felt herself to be an outsider, and yet, as one of her friends put it, she also “had this idea that she would change the world.” Kat was trained as a computer engineer. Gessen describes her as cerebral, sometimes too much so: “Her word choice was always intentional, but she seemed unaware of images or associations that her words called forth in others, and as a result her speech often served to obscure rather than to illuminate.”

Before Pussy Riot, Nadya was involved with an art collective called Voina (roughly translated as “War”). Formed in 2007, the group used street art to criticize corrupt politicians, police, and clergy, staging colorfully named (if somewhat clumsily executed) protest pieces throughout Russia that involved a wide range of illegality: from vandalizing police vehicles (“F*** the FSB”), to stealing groceries while wearing priestly robes and a police officer’s hat (“Cop in a Priest’s Cassock”). After Voina split in 2009, the faction based in Moscow eventually became Pussy Riot.

What set Pussy Riot apart from their earlier incarnation was their deliberate strategy to steer clear of “Art with a Capital A,” Gessen writes:

Indeed, the fact that it was art should be concealed by a spirit of fun and mischief. Whatever they did should be easily understood, and if it was not, it should be simply explained. It should be as accessible as the Guerrilla Girls and as irreverent as Bikini Kill. If only Russia had something like these groups, or anything of Riot Grrrl culture, or, really, any legacy of twentieth‐century feminism in its cultural background! But it did not. They had to make it up.

Pussy Riot soon developed their own style of protest: donning multicolored balaclavas and playing loud punk rock. Other than that, they seemed to make it up as they went along—storming designer boutiques, practicing on playgrounds, climbing atop buses. Once, they unintentionally set a fashion show on fire, and later called it “Pussy Riot Burns Down Putin’s Glamour.” On another occasion, they performed in Red Square to protest the detainment of three gay activists.

Even after the three members were hauled into court for their “punk prayer” at a Moscow cathedral, they remained—poetically—defiant. Plodding in its first half, the book takes off once Gessen gets to the trial, a dramatic media event that crystallized many of the reasons that the young women have become an international phenomenon. In her closing statement, Nadya invoked a quote from the Soviet dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement.”

All three of the women were convicted and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Kat’s sentence was later reduced on appeal. As for Nadya and Maria, Gessen writes, “forty seconds of lip-synching cost them around 660 days behind bars.”

Cornelius Fortune is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Advocate, Citizen Brooklyn, the Chicago Defender, Yahoo News, and other publications.

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Mumbai, India
News

The White Death, Revived

Best of In The Fray 2014. Once thought cured by modern medicine, tuberculosis is making a global comeback. Rampant misuse of antibiotics and broken health-care systems have spawned deadly, drug-resistant strains that are now present in virtually every country.

By Octavio Raygoza
Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Bacteria, the cause of TB
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen that causes TB. NIAID

She looks like a child: a baby face and large, round eyes, long and thin arms that make her seem gawky. When she sees me, her eyes brighten, and she struggles to sit up in her hospital bed. The blanket covering her drops, revealing a frail and gaunt body—a nineteen-year-old’s body. Five feet, four inches, she weighs only eighty pounds.

Sonam Yambhare is dying, and there is little modern medicine can do for her. Two years ago, she contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis in her lungs. The bacteria that cause the disease have destroyed her macrophages, the body’s first defenders against foreign invasion. Constant nausea, loss of appetite, and vomiting—symptoms of the disease—have emaciated her. All medications have been infective. In her weakened state, another serious infection will likely kill her.

Ward Number Eight of the Sewri Tuberculosis Hospital is a silent room with gray concrete walls. It is a world away from the chaotic streets of Mumbai. And it is a world away from the rest of Indian society. With nowhere else to go, neglected and stigmatized TB patients like Yambhare come here—even from towns and villages hundreds of miles away—to wait out the last stages of the disease, sometimes alone.

“Everyone is depressed here,” says Chandge Mokshada, a young doctor on her rounds. In the crumbling ward, dozens of women lay quietly on their beds. There is little chance they will recover, Mokshada says. “We mostly lose our patients.”

One of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases is making a comeback. Two centuries ago, tuberculosis was responsible for a quarter of all deaths in parts of Europe and the US. Known as the “white plague” or “white death” due to the way it blanched the skin, the disease left a deep imprint on the culture. Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about it. Emily Brontë and Henry David Thoreau died from it.

After the development of effective antibiotics in the 1940s, deaths from tuberculosis plummeted. But TB remains a formidable killer in many parts of the world. And in recent years, it has evolved in frightening ways. Its virulent new strains now defy many or all known antibiotics. And while they have ravaged Asian countries in particular, these deadlier forms of the disease are spreading everywhere.

Last month, the World Health Organization released a report about the surge in infectious diseases that are fast becoming untreatable. “A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—is a very real possibility for the 21st century,“ the report read. The WHO singled out drug-resistant tuberculosis as one of the greatest dangers. In 2012, it accounted for 450,000 new cases and 170,000 deaths—that is, less than 4 percent of those newly infected with TB, but 13 percent of those the disease killed. The total number of confirmed cases has grown sevenfold over seven years, with India, China, and Russia accounting for more than half of new infections. (The official statistics also understate the size of the problem, since many of the hardest-hit countries report bogus numbers.)

New strains of TB arise when the old ones are not properly treated. Not taking a full course of antibiotics, for example, can merely weaken, rather than eradicate, the bacteria that cause the disease. The remaining bacteria evolve to adapt to the drug, turning a treatable strain of TB into a resistant one.

The problem has gotten progressively worse. At one point, health officials believed TB could be eliminated. But in the 1980s, tuberculosis strains emerged that resisted the most common and safe anti-TB drugs. In the past decade, even second-line treatments have become ineffective against certain tough strains that fall under the category of “extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis” (about 10 percent of drug-resistant TB cases). To deal with them, doctors will put patients on more than one of these toxic drugs. Their side effects, however, can be severe, ranging from acne, weight loss, and skin discoloration to hepatitis, depression, and hallucinations.

For the hardest-to-treat strains, doctors are now forced to use so-called third-line drugs, an even more toxic regimen whose effects have yet to be fully tested.

Today, resistant strains can be found virtually everywhere, including the United States and Europe. But perhaps nowhere is the crisis more real than in India. The world’s second most populous country has a quarter of its TB cases—and now, many of the hardest ones to treat. While the number of Indians suffering from the disease has actually gone down in recent years, thanks in part to widespread vaccination, the WHO estimates that in 2012 the country had 21,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB of the lungs—an exponential increase from the few dozen cases the government had been reporting just six years earlier.

India also has the dubious distinction of being one of three countries—Iran and Italy being the others—where certain strains of TB have resisted every drug used against them. Four years ago, Zarir Udwadia, a noted pulmonologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, identified twelve patients suffering from untreatable TB infections. (Three of the twelve have since died; the others have been taken into isolation by the government.) Udwadia and other researchers have described these kinds of cases as “totally drug-resistant.”

The Indian government disputes the categorization, arguing that these strains have not been tested against all of the experimental third-line drugs. Another term, “extremely drug-resistant TB,” gets around the worry of some experts that classifying such a common disease as untreatable may cause panic.

Regardless of what they are called, these hardy strains have the power to push societies back to a time before antibiotics, when the “white plague” was all but unstoppable. “If not contained,” says infectious disease specialist Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, “it poses a big problem to the world.”

In India, those infected with TB tend to be the most vulnerable people in society. Yambhare was born into a low caste. She lived in a cramped apartment, where she shared a room with her mother and two sisters. Every day she took overcrowded trains from her home in the countryside to Mumbai, where she helped her mother clean houses. In other words, her poverty made it far more likely that she would be exposed to TB, which often (though not always) settles in the lungs and can be transmitted through the air.

Two years ago, Yambhare developed a persistent cough. She visited one of the private medical clinics that line the teeming streets of the western suburb of Bandra. There, a doctor diagnosed her with tuberculosis, and Yambhare began taking antibiotics. When her family saw no improvement over two years, they switched doctors. The new doctor prescribed more drugs.

No one bothered to give her a drug-sensitivity test. The test would have revealed what strain of TB she had, and a competent doctor could have then prescribed the correct drug. Instead, the incomplete and inept treatment that Yambhare received gave the bacteria the chance to adapt and become stronger. It soon developed a resistance to all four of the first-line drugs used to treat TB.

In Yambhare’s case and thousands of others, a broken health-care system has made the problem of drug-resistant TB much worse. Hospitals are overcrowded, and the services provided are minimal. So Indians—rich and poor—flock to private doctors. But the slapdash treatment they tend to provide, with laxly administered drugs and inadequate follow-up care, has allowed drug-resistant TB to spread wildly.

Udwadia, the Mumbai pulmonologist, says that many of these doctors are unscrupulous, and most are uninformed. In 2010, he conducted a study in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, one of Asia’s largest and the origin of many of the city’s most severe TB cases. He asked more than a hundred doctors in the area to “write a prescription for a common TB patient.” Only six were able to do it correctly. Half of the doctors he surveyed were practitioners of alternative therapies with no grounding in modern science.

Udwadia argues that India needs a law that will let only designated specialists treat drug-resistant tuberculosis patients. But at the moment the government does not bother keeping detailed records on the many private doctors now operating, much less ensuring they provide adequate care.

“The government has no control over private practitioners,” says an official in the health ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to talk to the media. “They require only once-in-a-lifetime registration, and there is no chance for them to lose their license.”

Calls for regulation by experts like Udwadia, the official says, are silenced, ridiculed, or ignored. Meanwhile, the government has been accused of underreporting the number of new cases of drug-resistant TB every year. In 2011 the official count was 4,200 cases; the next year, the government began adjusting its figures to resemble the WHO’s estimates, and the number of reported cases quadrupled. (Indian health ministry officials did not respond to emails asking for comment.)

In terms of its anti-TB spending, however, the government has been devoting more resources. In 2013 it budgeted $182 million to fight the epidemic.

Some of this money will go toward upgrading the 103-year-old Sewri hospital, which could use it. In its ward for drug-resistant patients, there is no medical equipment in sight; records are kept in rusted metal cabinets. The most pernicious forms of TB are hitting a health-care infrastructure poorly equipped to deal with them.

Every year, more than eight million people fall ill with tuberculosis. More than a million die from it, placing TB just a notch below AIDS in its globe-spanning lethality. And a whopping one-third of the world’s population has what is called “latent TB”: they are infected by the bacteria, and a tenth of them will go on to develop the disease at some point in their lifetimes. Drug-resistant TB, in other words, is just one part of a global health emergency.

Meanwhile, the problem goes ignored in rich countries. Antibiotic treatments for TB have been so successful there that most people’s experience with the disease today is limited to works of literature: novels and poems with archaic references to “consumption” and TB sanatoriums. But that may change someday soon. In the United States, a hundred new cases of drug-resistant TB are diagnosed every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases of extensively drug-resistant TB have already been reported.

Paul Nunn, the WHO’s TB coordinator, says that these deadly strains have cropped up in certain European countries, too, though the reports have yet to be published. “If the health system of the world fails, the highly resistant strains will replace the old,” he adds. “We’ll see a worsening of the situation if nothing is done.” On the other hand, it may be only when the resistant strains become a major problem in rich countries that the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry will take notice and pour real money into the development of potent new treatments.

Without effective drugs to combat the most resistant strains, doctors may have to revert to remedies from an earlier era. Udwadia recalls his first patient with untreatable TB. Twenty-six years old, she had spent the last five years trying a variety of anti-TB drugs, all of which had failed. As a last resort, she underwent a pneumonectomy, a high-risk medical procedure to remove a lung. The woman later died of complications from the surgery. The procedure had not been used on tuberculosis patients since the introduction of antibiotic treatments six decades ago.

Even though so many people are infected, TB still carries a terrible stigma in Indian culture. “People treat you with disgust,” Yambhare says. As she grew sicker, she became more isolated. Her sisters were told to stay away. Her friends stopped visiting. Finding a partner or even a job was impossible. She sunk into a depression.

Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay for her treatment. Their monthly household income was just $100—not uncommon in a country where one in three people lives on less than $1.25 a day. But the expensive second-line drugs cost $80 a month. And once she began taking them, the side effects kicked in. Her skin became discolored. Her muscles atrophied. Her weight dropped.

Eventually, Yambhare’s family could no longer care for her. They sent her to the Sewri hospital.

When I visit her in the ward, orderlies are carrying out the infected mattresses of previous patients. In a nearby courtyard, they set the mattresses afire.

Yambhare watches the smoke curl past the window near her bed. Below her, in the courtyard, stray dogs fight over bones.

Yambhare turns to me, an eerie shine in her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says through her mask. “I want to go home and help mother.”

Octavio Raygoza is a video journalist who covers sports, news, and culture. Twitter: @olraygoza

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Blog / Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Resistance


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | April 2014: Resistance

Ukraine. Venezuela. Thailand. The Arab Spring. We are living in a time of vibrant protest, captured and magnified by cellphone videos and Twitter feeds. On both the political right and left, grassroots movements have emerged everywhere—including America and Europe—to resist authority and overturn the establishment.

We want to hear your stories of resistance: from powerful mass movements to personal relationships. We are seeking profiles, personal essays, and photo essays of individuals and groups who have stood up to power—triumphantly or tragically, honorably or hypocritically. Describe the ways that people have organized and inspired each other to overcome tough odds. On a smaller level, tell us about how you or someone else fought back against domestic violence, bullying, a hostile work environment, or other kinds of intimidation. Importantly, show us how that single case has something to say about larger issues and broader struggles.

Please review our submissions guidelines and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN MAY 1, 2014. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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The village of Hasroun, with its signature red roofs, in the Qadisha Valley region.
Beirut
Commentary

Tourism in a Time of War

People warned me not to go. Government advisories declared “avoid all travel.” But I ran off and fell in love with Lebanon anyway.

Story and photos by Alexis Lai
The Bekaa Valley with tents in the foreground
The Bekaa Valley and the shelters of Syrians (not necessarily refugees) who work in the adjoining fields.

Please, please, please cancel your ticket. It doesn’t matter how much it costs,” implored the beefy man serving our table at a local Lebanese restaurant in Hong Kong. “If you want to eat Lebanese food, just come here.”

I had just told him I was embarking on a two-week trip to his native country at the end of September — a revelation that seemed to have triggered in him the beginnings of a heart attack.

“But I want to go to Lebanon,” I said.

“There are snipers!” he insisted, aghast.

“What snipers?” I asked.

“Hezbollah! My friend in Byblos is afraid to leave his house!” I also risked being kidnapped by desperate Syrian refugees, he warned.

The next day, I woke up to reports that the US State Department had ordered its nonessential diplomats to evacuate Lebanon. The Obama administration and Congress were weighing punitive military strikes on neighboring Syria for using chemical weapons. The US had already slapped the country with an “avoid all nonessential travel” warning, which was later upgraded to “avoid all travel.” In the Lebanon sections of online travel forums, numerous threads were devoted to variations of the same question: “Is it safe to visit?”

I wondered if I was being reckless, but I was committed to my trip — not only financially, but emotionally. I had lived and traveled widely in North America, Europe, and Asia, but I had never visited the Middle East. Now in my late twenties, I thought it was time to change that. Surely, there had to be more to the Middle East than the dominant narrative in news reports of a dangerous, war-torn region, ridden with sectarian conflict, a bomb or bullet just around the corner.

With only two weeks of vacation, I thought visiting Lebanon, a relatively small country, would give me the chance to see a lot. I also felt a certain affinity for Lebanon that I didn’t for other places in the Middle East. Perhaps it had started with the delicious moudardara I’d discovered a decade ago in Toronto. I wanted to experience a culture celebrated for its sophistication, and see its storied capital, Beirut.

 

Lebanon's number of visitors has plummeted since the start of the Syrian civil war

Lebanon has not shaken the violent image it acquired from its bloody 1975-1990 civil war between Christian and Muslim militias, which drew in various outside groups, including the armed forces of Israel and Syria. More recently, Beirut was devastated by a month-long war in 2006 between Lebanon’s Shia militant group Hezbollah and the Israeli military.

Tourism had recovered quickly in the years after the Israel-Hezbollah War, reaching a peak of more than two million visitors in 2010, according to the ministry of tourism. The New York Times hailed Beirut as one of the top places to visit in the world: “The capital of Lebanon is poised to reclaim its title as the Paris of the Middle East.” Yet 2011 brought another calamity: the civil war in Syria, a country that shares deep ties and a porous border with Lebanon. The number of visitors has since plummeted — and was falling further when I arrived last September.

I knew from news reports that the Syrian civil war had spilled over into Lebanon, in the form of hundreds of thousands of refugees and bombs targeting both the pro-Syria Hezbollah movement and its critics. (The internal situation in Lebanon has long been influenced by its neighbor: Syrian armed forces occupied Lebanon during and after its civil war, and were only ousted by the Cedar Revolution triggered by the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.) I had an eye out for all these dangers.

Three children wearing school backpacks in Tyre
Children leaving a mosque in Tyre. They pleaded for a photo, posed earnestly, and then examined the result carefully before scampering away.

But I ended up not thinking as much about my personal safety as I’d thought I would. I found myself dwelling instead on the beauty around me. I immediately fell in love with the country’s signature palette of colors. Verdant fields carpeted the Bekaa Valley that borders Syria, brimming with apples, wine grapes, and cannabis. Majestic homes constructed with yellow-white stones gleamed in the affluent south-central village of Deir el Qamar. Sun-faded red roofs dotted the rugged mountains of the Qadisha Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Most striking was Lebanon’s gorgeous shade of blue. I saw it time and time again in the Mediterranean Sea, most memorably from my hotel balcony in the venerable port city of Byblos, where the waters shimmered brilliantly in the sunlight, the shore silent except for the crashing of the waves. I saw it in the sky, too — during my trip to the Roman ruins of the eastern city of Baalbek, it was the glorious backdrop to the six restored pillars of the Temple of Jupiter. There I sat down on a rock and savored the view.

The six pillars against the blue sky
The six restored pillars of the Temple of Jupiter in the ancient Romans ruins of Baalbek.

Reputed to be a Hezbollah stronghold, Baalbek was singled out for an “avoid all travel” warning in advisories issued by the UK and Canada. But I did not run into problems there or anywhere else along the clockwise loop I made around Lebanon. In fact, aside from clusters of soldiers outfitted in berets and camouflage in some parts of the country — most visibly in downtown Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern coastal city of Tyre — nothing I saw on my trip suggested that Lebanon was facing any kind of threat.

Children playing near pigeons in Beirut's Place de l’Étoile
Children play around the Place de l’Étoile in downtown Beirut.

In Beirut, life seemed to go on as usual. Children played with toys around the clock tower in the Place de l’Étoile downtown. Joggers lined the Corniche waterfront promenade. The fashionable set congregated at cafes along Zaitunay Bay. Students, with their arms wrapped around textbooks, strolled along the streets near the American University of Beirut campus.

Even the security checkpoints set up throughout the Bekaa Valley were essentially speed bumps: soldiers usually waved my driver past without a word. I had to show my passport only once.

I was surprised to be the only traveler at most of the major tourist attractions I visited and the homestays and hotels where I roomed. I enjoyed having museums, ancient ruins, and wineries all to myself, but it was sobering to think what the deserted places meant for the many people whose livelihoods depended on tourism. Following a huge drop in visitors during the summer season, hotels in the Beirut area laid off a quarter of their employees last year, the As-Safir newspaper reported. Seasonal hotel workers were hit even harder, with more than 70 percent of them — 14,000 people, most of them college students — losing their jobs.

In the eastern town of Zahlé, along the famous Berdawni Valley strip, strings of lights twinkled in vain, the many outdoor cafés bereft of diners and full of idle waiters in bow ties. As I ate breakfast alone at my hotel, the staff dutifully laid out silverware at the dozens of empty tables in the restaurant, their labor an empty exercise.

As I traveled around Lebanon, I unwittingly became a celebrity of sorts, drawing surprise and appreciation from locals baffled as to why a young Chinese woman would choose to visit at this time — let alone on her own. People would often go out of their way to help me, eager to make sure I had a pleasant experience in their country.

“Thank you for visiting Lebanon. Thank you for visiting our museum,” the curator of the Beirut National Museum said to me. The staff had referred me to her when I asked in English for directions to my next destination. She was shocked to learn I was visiting the country for fun and didn’t know a single person. She insisted on walking out with me to help me flag a shared taxi. “I don’t want you to have a bad experience and get ripped off,” she explained, proceeding to give the driver stern instructions in Arabic.

On a couple occasions, complete strangers went out of their way to drive me around. When I walked into a donut shop in Beirut asking for directions, a friendly university student offered me a ride home in her car. We ended up meeting for dinner a few days later, both of us eager to swap thoughts and impressions about Lebanon. Later on, I found myself in a teeming crowd at the headquarters of a cell-phone service provider, waiting to register my phone for a local SIM card but utterly confused about what I needed to do. The well-manicured middle-aged woman standing next to me took me under her wing. She explained the process, helped me cut the line, and then drove me across town to my next stop.

South of Beirut, in the ancient coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre, I also depended on the kindness of strangers to help me find my way. Whether it was a small boy at a shop where I bought a bottle of water, a sunglasses vendor, or a shabbily dressed man with a bicycle, the locals I approached would drop what they were doing and walk me to my destination.

When I jaywalked — unavoidable in the big cities — normally aggressive drivers would slow down when they spotted me. And the drivers of shared taxis seemed to know about my existence before I had even stepped foot in their cars. “I’ve seen you before walking around,” they told me on more than one occasion.

“I’ve become ‘famous’ in Lebanon,” I joked to Jamil, my elderly homestay host in Beirut, when I called him from the airport to say goodbye.

The startling blue of the Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea, as seen from the coastal city of Tyre.

My story is not intended to minimize the real crisis that Syrians and their neighbors in the Middle East are facing. According to the United Nations, there are now 2.3 million Syrian refugees in the region. The largest group — more than 800,000 — are in Lebanon. Recent bombings in Beirut and Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, are widely seen as retribution for Hezbollah’s support of the Syrian government. Attacks have also been directed at those opposed to Hezbollah: last month, a car bomb killed the former Lebanese finance minister Mohamad Chatah and six others in downtown Beirut. Chatah was a fierce critic of the Syrian government and Hezbollah.

Yet it’s easy to let stories of violence reported in the media narrow our view of a place. In Lebanon, there is incredible beauty and tranquility to be found, even if conflict smolders around it. And there are people eager to share that beauty, as I learned from the generous locals I met.

It is also worth remembering how far Lebanon has come since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War and the civil war that ended just over twenty years ago. Given its troubled history, it is surprising just how many tourists the country was drawing before the Syrian civil war began. Feted in the Western press, Lebanon seemed on the path to becoming a cultural and economic hub of the Middle East once again.

Alexis Lai standing on a mountain trail
Hiking in the Qannoubine Valley. Photo by Rami Al Semaani

That is the renaissance that locals like Jamil hope will bloom once the latest proxy crisis ends. Jamil has lived through all of Lebanon’s recent travails, including the civil war. The violence has exacted a price from his family: in the living room of his home is a photo of a slain nephew, a rose placed before the frame. Yet Jamil remains a staunch advocate of visiting Lebanon, waving off any security concerns. He dismissed the dangers that the waiter in Hong Kong had warned me about, furious at what he viewed as foolish and irresponsible remarks by a fellow countryman. When I told him I planned to visit Baalbek, he told me not to worry: “The closest you’ll get to Hezbollah is someone trying to sell you a T-shirt.”

Then and now, when I think of Lebanon, I don’t think of war. What comes to my mind is that beautiful shade of Mediterranean blue, the pristine silence of the mountains, the delicious apple I picked from a tree while camping with some new friends above the village of Hasroun. In a country renowned for war, I found peace.

Alexis Lai is a journalist based in Hong Kong. Her work has been published by CNN.com, the Wall Street Journal, and Radio Television Hong Kong, among others. Raised in Canada, she has lived in six countries and traveled in more than twenty. Twitter: @alexisklai Site: http://www.about.me/alexislai

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Call for Submissions: Forgiveness

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In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | January 2014: Forgiveness

Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in prison before leading South Africa out of apartheid as its first black president, championed forgiveness as a means for the country to heal – but not without first using truth to hold perpetrators accountable and reconcile long-segregated communities. Across societies and racial groups, in workplaces and families, reconciliation seems the trickiest bridge to cross, involving the long span of history and the thin skin of pride. And yet forgiveness, a chorus of religious and ethical traditions tell us, is essential.

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