We know we are in the right place because there is a hearse in the road at the foot of the apartment building. We don’t need to ask which entrance. It is marked by a man in stiff black, the driver maybe, who stands guard at the bottom of a flight of steps. He is surrounded by half a dozen cellophane-wrapped bouquets which lean awkwardly against the wall. The flowers are real enough but they are grimly preserved, completely sealed behind a plastic cover. They look out of place, spilt on the grey paved floor, an accident.

We step past the driver and without a word begin to climb the stairs. We do not need to ask which floor; we keep going until we reach a door which is open. Motionless black shapes are perched on settees right, left and centre. Blank faces turn towards the door without expectation. No one moves. Finally a member of the family recognises us and steps forward to ease our awkward entry. We are shown into another room and pressed to sit, like the others there, waiting for nothing.

If this were England we wouldn’t be here, not now. We would have sent a card or flowers, made a phone call, kept our distance. We would have waited until the funeral a few days later to pay our respects in person. We feel like intruders, right there in the home of the deceased less than a day after his passing, before the family have fully realised what has happened, when the wound is raw and undressed. Not like the asepticised ceremonies days later, when the pain has been patched up and the lip restiffened. Surely I’m out of place, a stranger to him, among his closest friends and family here with their tangible grief. It’s wrong to see their pain, unnatural. But then death is unnatural, out of place. Like the plastic-covered flowers downstairs.

Perched on the long couch among the grievers, lined up like a row of blackbirds on a telegraph wire, I am ashamed of my denim skirt, not redeemed by my demure long-sleeved black cardigan. All the solemn figures around me are in top-to-toe black. Their hair accessories, their stockings, their scarves. Not a navy coat or a brown handbag in sight.

 I wish I had known where we would end up that day when we left the house. But these things happen quickly here. The body in the bedroom was alive yesterday. This afternoon, after the funeral service, it will be buried. I catch a glimpse from my seat through the open doorway across the hall. He looks mildly uncomfortable, but neat, presentable.

Like his guests, but less gloomy, more composed. But like them, his hands are clasped and he too is waiting… waiting as long as it takes until he is called.

Story time

I read somewhere there were only three municipal libraries in all Beirut. If so, I’ve been very fortunate to live where I do. Not only is there a little park within walking distance, but within the park itself is a tiny gem of a library. It’s a great discovery for my Beirut baby who appreciates the books more than the slide and the swings right now.

Last Saturday we finally got to attend the storytelling (thanks to a tip from my friend M.). Adapting to her audience, which grew to at least a dozen kids over the course of the readings, the librarian began with a picture book in French, and then, apologetically, two stories in Lebanese.

She felt bad speaking her mother tongue, and that of all of the kids present, because it was a language my little one wouldn’t understand, as if she ought to speak a European language, as if it was somehow better.

You come across this a lot in Beirut, and it can make it harder to learn Lebanese in two ways. Firstly people assume they ought to speak French or English with you. Their ease with switching languages has helped me out in many a confused situation, and I particularly appreciated understanding and knowing I was understood in hospital when giving birth. But in everyday life I’d much rather people spoke Lebanese to me and am happy when they do.

Secondly, when you ask people a word in Lebanese, they have a habit of telling you a word they never use. Instead of the everyday word, they tell you the classical Arabic. This has happened to me frequently ever since I arrived in Lebanon. Sometimes they tell you the Lebanese but also the Arabic and you end up confused. They’ll say X, then they’ll correct themselves, “but the real/right word is Y.”

 Now I would love to know both languages and I do believe that you need a certain amount of modern standard Arabic if you want to really understand the Lebanese. Of course, it’s vital for reading or listening to the news. But it’s interesting to see how people are reluctant to offer only Lebanese, to tell you the words they really say, the ones they’ve used in everyday life all their life. When people know I’m learning Lebanese they even greet me with Kayfa halouki. That may be what the books say, but I’d rather people greet me in the same way as they do all the other people in the room. I want to learn to talk like them, not some imaginary character in a book.

I didn’t have a name for this phenomenon until I came across this article on linguistic prestige. I just drank it up, because a lot of it applies to exactly the situations I encounter in Lebanon.

The cross-reference to diglossia actually notes that those who are “proficient in the high prestige dialect will commonly try to avoid using the vernacular dialect with foreigners and may even deny its existence, even though the vernacular is the only socially appropriate one for them themselves to use when speaking to their relatives and friends.” You can find more on this in my earlier post But how do YOU say it, together with a link to a fascinating essay on so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ dialects.

However, the Lebanese are a contradictory bunch, and the opposite is always true for someone. Interestingly, there exists a kind of ‘covert prestige’ in not speaking classical Arabic well for some Christians who favour learning French  – not just as well as Arabic but instead of it.

Although story-telling sessions are common in libraries around the world as a way to entice children into the world of books, I’m especially happy to have found this little group. Not only do we love it but I can only imagine how unappealing reading would be for Lebanese kids when they first try to read a book to find it’s all written in another dialect (or language, by my standards). Even the most basic vocabulary such as pseiné (cat) changes to qatt, not to mention prepositions, plurals and the syntax. Reading clearly isn’t as favoured a pastime as in other countries, and I figure these kids can use a helping hand.

Jeitaoui Library story-telling is at 11am on Saturdays. You can borrow Arabic, English and French books for just 10,000LL for life. Feel free to post where your favourite libraries are.

Out of space?

Just push ‘em off the cliff

Life without rules leads to all sorts of ingenuity and audacity.

above Beirut

That’s it. The decision is made. In just over a month we’ll be leaving Lebanon on a one-way ticket. The flights are booked. It seems incredibly sudden and yet we’ve been debating this decision for a year now. The fact that it took us so long to come to a conclusion is some indication of how hard a decision it was.

I would have loved to bring up my kids in a country where melons and green almonds are sold off the back of pick-up trucks, where old men sit on the pavement playing backgammon for hours, where you can tell the season by the stalls outside the grocer’s.

I would have loved for them to learn a language I can’t teach them, a language I can attest is difficult to learn late in life, and particularly hard to learn outside the country.

18 months ago we were still thinking of finding a family home out of town, choosing schools, settling for the long-term. We bought a new car, one which could take the battering of the potholes and poor drainage that had us swishing through water a foot deep on the so-called autostrade.

Back then, I remember reading about a westerner living in Lebanon who chose to stay throughout the July 2006 onslaught. Her loyalty was touching. And a lot of what she said made sense to me. Lebanon has come through a lot worse after all, and signs of trouble are permanent fixtures. Conflict is the small talk of Lebanon like the weather is the small talk of the Brits. Living here you realise that gunfights in the street here or there rarely impact your life. And above all, you invest in Lebanon. Easy to do, in such a warm, spontaneous country. Emotionally, your life is here and you belong here more than anywhere else. If July 2006 had happened in 2010, perhaps we would have stayed.

Post-motherhood, that has all changed. Not so much because of the pressure that has been building outside Lebanon’s borders for two years and is now seeping through. But because of a wriggly little being that has a personality and determination all of her own, and is soon to find her dominion of all things knee-high challenged by a sibling.

Back in September, I did a piece for BBC Radio 4 on how to know when it was time to go. We’ve now reached that time.

With small children, you cannot live as permanent tourists. You can’t be ready to up and leave at a moment’s notice. Because we would, leave that is.

Of course lots of people lived through the war with their kids, some by choice, many by necessity. But the difference is they have family here. The people they are closest to will be here for them throughout and to leave Lebanon would be to abandon them.

Not so in our case. If we stay in Lebanon through thick and thin, we won’t be there for our family when they need us and they won’t be there for us. I want my kids to learn three languages and live multicultural lives; to gorge themselves on swollen kaki and bleeding cherries; to have summers so long they welcome the downpour that soaks to the skin in seconds. But more than that I want them to grow up knowing their cousins, to spend time with their grandparents, to build a life and not have it stolen by some cause that could have been foreseen.

Lebanon is still more home than anywhere else right now. But we belong elsewhere, somewhere nearer family. I’m just not sure where.

Ps and Qs

First off a few niceties. To catch a waiter’s attention use ‘pleaze’, but if you need to interrupt someone or ask a favour use ‘sorrry’. Roll the ‘r’ again when expressing thanks – ‘merci’ – or enthusiastic thanks ‘merci kteer’. ‘No’ is ‘La2’, the 2 signifying a glottal stop, or in layman’s terms, that funny half-sound that replaces the ‘t’ when most English say ‘football’. A more expressive way to say ‘no’, is to lift your chin and clack your tongue in a loud tut.

Getting around

Taxis can be confusing as they often offer two types of service. If you want a door-to-door ride it’s actually called a ‘taxi’ and will cost you 10,000 LL within town (pink face tax included; 8,000 if you really talk the talk). But if you want to be squeezed in with up to five other passengers and dropped off somewhere near your destination for a mere ‘elfayn’ (or 2,000) you should specify you want ‘servees’, which means ‘don’t try and con me even if I look foreign’. On a busy night or for a longer trip, the driver may counter with ‘serveesayn’, which is double the fee, and acceptable depending on demand.

Lebanese is beautifully simple in many ways. When you’re waiting on the curb and a honking Mercedes, older than you are, pulls up to offer a ‘servees’ ride, no need for elaborate requests. Just ask ‘Hamra?’ or ‘Adlieh?’ or wherever you want to go. If it’s on his way, or he can reconcile it with his other passengers, he’ll pause just long enough for you to scramble in. If he roars off leaving you in a cloud of exhaust, well, that’s a ‘no’. He may or may not bother to tut, but you get the point.

‘Fo2’ doesn’t just mean the preposition ‘up’ it also means the place ‘up’, whatever it may be, so ‘up the hill’, ‘up in the mountain’, ‘our higher altitude home as opposed to our coastal residence’ or simply ‘upstairs’. The opposite (for all options) is ‘taHt’. When out and about you may be offered something you do not wish to accept (eg coffee, shoe polishing and so on), you can politely decline with ‘mara taani’, literally ‘second time’, that is ‘another time’ and also covering the possibility of ‘not now and probably not ever’.

Working ‘barra’, or ‘outside’ does not mean farmwork or roofing, it means working abroad. Bear in mind there are more Lebanese ‘outside’ than there are still living in the country so this is an ever present concept. It can also be a matter of status, as diplomas obtained ‘outside’, or products which have been imported have a perceived edge over their local equivalents.

Being a good guest

Dinner conversation is also useful, as eating is a delightful, frequent and lengthy pastime in Lebanon. ‘SaHtein’ means ‘bon appetit’ or literally ‘two healths’. You should reply ‘Aa-elbak’ (or ‘Aa-elbik to a girl) to wish good health back on their heart for thinking of your belly, but if you forget how, ‘merci’ will do. You will necessarily want to compliment the hostess and tell her that ‘kill shi tayyeb’, everything is delicious, because it always will be. You may wish to use ‘selim dayetik’ to bless her hands for their hard work.

By the time the starter is done, you may be asked various questions which translate literally as ‘Have you put on weight?’ ‘When will you start trying for a baby?’ and ‘Do you digest beans well?’ Don’t be scared. The meaning is, well, literal, but if you wish to take some liberty with the responses feel free. It does make first encounters more fun.

The first surprise was that she wasn’t slow to talk, as it’s widely held that a slight delay is standard for bilingual kids. But when I looked it up, more recent reports suggest there is not necessarily a language delay at all. Which makes sense or I guess pretty much all Indian, most African, and a good many Lebanese kids would all talk “late”. Perhaps a misconception born out of the huge bulk of research being carried out in monolingual cultures?

Of course it’s different if one language comes from the parents and the second from the community. That’s a whole different type of bilingualism. If a child in that situation is assessed when starting school, they’ll be behind the other kids in the community language, but may speak as well or better in their home language.

Still within a few years both languages will be “native” and (in most countries) a few years later still the community language will be dominant unless efforts are made to build on the home language. Especially if the child never learns how to write in the home language, a problem compounded if the two languages are written in different alphabets.

In Lebanon this doesn’t really apply. Here the community speaks not one but several languages. You can play this one of two ways. Either parents can use it to reinforce the home language or to contrast with it since they can opt for schooling in French or English. So parents can, to a degree, “choose” a community language. Many Christian Lebanese kids grow up with French only learning Lebanese dialect as a second language, with classical Arabic coming a poor third or fourth. In Achrafieh the default mode is to speak French to any kids … even if you speak Lebanese with their parents. It especially makes me giggle when Filipina maids sing French nursery rhymes to my daughter.

Of course at 19 months, the community language – whatever it may be – has only a very minor role since she is not at nursery. Since daddy telecommutes, she gets a lot of time with both of us.  So balancing the influence of English against French is fairly simple.  However, we do speak more English between ourselves than French and that clearly shows in her vocabulary. By the end of 18 months she used about 50 French words compared to 70 English words, apart from 25 “neutral” words, such as names, Lebanese words and words which sound the same in both languages.

However you could also put it down to my mild obsession with language, which makes me more pedagogical whereas daddy is more playful! At any rate she’s learning both ways. She’s at ease translating words between the two languages. If she points and says “pawapluie” I only have to ask, “How does mummy say it?” and she responds “umbwella”.

Another surprise for me was that once my Beirut baby learns a word in one language she isn’t slower to learn it in the second language. Her first words were all for different things, not French AND English for the same thing (eg cat and chat) and it seemed to be a case of whether I got there first, or my husband did. But now the crossover of her two vocabularies is almost total. I thought that once the need was filled there would be less motivation to learn the equivalent word, but it actually comes quicker, as if the hard part is nailing the concept and getting a label on it, but then adding alternative names to the same notion is easy. Has anybody else found this?

We don’t know where we will end up living, so for now we are aiming for a good balance of the two languages at home. With time we’d appreciate an extra boost for French from the community to fight the international dominance of English. Ideally we’d also have the chance for our daughter to learn Lebanese in the playground when starting school, and literary Arabic a bit later in class.

Some parents focus so much on English or French that their kids find learning written Arabic a big chore, but if we were to leave Lebanon this is one major opportunity my Beirut baby would miss out on, as neither of us are able to teach her properly ourselves.

Jumping the pipes

Buy one, get one free

It’s rare I can actually understand billboards in Arabic. It’s a bit like humour I guess, it demands more than my basic conversational level. So I was quite happy to finally work an easy one out.

Literally it means “[One] TV on you, and the second on us” – that is, Buy one TV get one free. Naive ascetic that I am, I commented to my better half that it would work well if you paired up with a friend. Don’t be silly, he told me, Most people want an extra TV for the bedroom, sometimes several. Then he told me about the electrician we had round recently to fix some bits and pieces. The electrician had wanted to sell us a TV with a mirrored screen. When the telly’s off it just looks like a mirror. Which sounds all right as a way to disguise it when not in use. But he was selling it as an ideal installation for not just the living room but also the bathroom. Great for when you’re shaving, he said. Now it seems to me if you can’t do without television while you brush your teeth or shave, then you have a bigger problem than finding a decorative technique to hide your fear of being alone with your thoughts!

It’s true that there was no telly in my house when I was little, and by coincidence the same applies for my husband. Neither of our parents made rules about watching it at friends’ or relatives’ homes though. I guess I can be quite puritanical about telly for small kids. When the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)  says babies under two shouldn’t watch TV at all, I agree. And when I read an article in a Lebanese mother and baby magazine citing these guidelines but then suggesting they are impossible to apply and that every mum needs an occasional break like when they are making dinner or having a shower (so twice every day?), I’m flabbergasted. Especially as these magazines are addressed at a middle class readership almost all of whom have a live-in maid, whether or not the mother works. Ever wish there were more hours in the day?  That’s an extra 60 hours’ of labour a week doing housework, errands and keeping your kids entertained when they are tired and ratty. Not to mention the benefit of extended family when it comes to getting the odd babysitting stint or a tupperware of dinner, which have to be two of the top perks for Mediterranean families.

Of course I’m biased given my upbringing, which is why I was interested to see this mother’s take on it, as she’s a self-confessed former TV addict. Many people feel TV is a good way for kids to learn extra languages. Her kids are trilingual and manage fine with just occasional online videos like on YouTube. I particularly like the way she concludes: “If they get to watch three of these videos, they think I’m very kind and generous, but they will last no more than 20 minutes in total!”

The irony is, I’m actually considering finding some Lebanese soap as a way to practice my Arabic while Beirut baby is safely in bed. Since I’m stuck indoors at nap time anyway, and Lebanese dialect can’t easily be studied on paper like a written language can, maybe a daily series could help. Anyone know of a lunchtime soap, especially one of those repetitive ones with exaggerated characters where you could almost guess the dialogue on mute?  Because that’s more or less what I’ll be doing.

Here in Lebanon it isn’t much of a change from the norm but still an evening power outage in the past would have led to dinner out and long conversations over dessert about the intricacies of Lebanese dining habits or hosting etiquette and likely a couple of posts, maybe even one worth sending off to those nice people at the BBC who have always been quick to air a good piece. Now it just leads to me cooking dinner by candle light, baby in arms, trying not to trip over her “toys” (tupperwares) spread across the floor. And above all trying not to singe her on the matches, gas stove or candles.

But I still love thunder storms, and so does my Beirut baby. The proof is, the lightning-thunder sequence now has a third step. It goes Flash…Boom…”encore!” How to tell my baby that if I could control the weather then I’d also have the lights turn back on…

fridge magnets

One of my lovely readers recently alerted me to the fact that my blog was listed among the top 101 blogs in Lebanon on thewebsite of a couple of funny Norwegians who aim to get famous here in the Leb. I can’t say I blushed with pride. They really scraped the barrel to pull up that many blogs in the first place. But I was happy to learn that I was “already famous”. In fact this rather tickled me as I’m sure all my readers came across this blog by pure chance. Apart from my family, of course, who got press ganged into it.

Still it’s just as well I don’t have to keep climbing that celebrity ladder.  I’m not sure how I’d fit it in. Lately I seem to spend my days passing from room to room at a half trot, bent double to scoop up the blocks, rings, stacking cups and you name it that pretty much carpet the house . This week I threw the first big invitation in a long time. I made a whole batch of chocolate cherry cupcakes with a fridge magnet stuck to the bottom of my foot because I didn’t have time to peel it off.

When people ask what kind of impact the “situation” is having on us, I tend to say not much. Because Lebanon is the queen of life going on. Try throwing a bawling spewing vulnerable little bundle into the house that learns new tricks and new demands every day (and night). Now that’s what you call an impact.

But actually the increasing tension in the region has changed my days a fair bit, as it spurred me to action on two quite major fronts which have eaten up more of my time since the latest assassination. First, we’ve know that while a warzone might be fine for the childless footloose fancy-free types we once were, now we want a plan B for when it blows. A serious family-friendly plan B please. I cannot bear the idea of leaving Lebanon, but the way things are it demands serious consideration.

Second, if there were one thing worse than leaving Lebanon, it would be leaving after several years here having NOT LEARNED THE LANGUAGE. Yes I understand a lot and can hold very basic conversations, yes I can decipher signs so I know where parking is mamnou3 (everywhere and nowhere). But that isn’t the same thing as talking the talk. Will I become like those wonderfully naive Americans I used to cross paths with in Paris who tell you – I understand French, I just don’t speak much… and need help to buy their metro tickets.

So…my Beirut baby’s precious nap-times (now reduced to one short stint a day) are dedicated to these two goals. Any kind of concentration at any other moment of the day is impossible. If you’ve got any tips on learning the lingo on a tight schedule, comments are open.