..Like Drawings Hanging on A Wire

I am not someone political. Anyone who knows me would firmly justify that. Neither am I someone who understands politics or is even interested in it. I can assure you that i am never included in political discussions while sitting with friends or family. However, i can say that i am someone who knows how bad politics can destroy a nation, and how war over politics can easily destroy a childhood. 

With all the political events recently taking place, it has become impossible to not attempt understanding my country's situation. But in the midst of this attempt, i couldn't block the images that bombarded my memory of my first encounter with "bad" politics.. 

I was barely four years old during the civil war in Lebanon. At such a young age, i was oblivious to the reasons behind the conflict in my country, but i was well aware that it wasn't something "good". I will never forget the small room which kept us safe during that war. Though rather tiny in width and length, it sheltered practically all the members of my family. That room, almost the size of a walk-in closet, is all i remember of the war that took place in 1988. As a child, my memory of the entire civil war lies in that sole basement of my grandparents' building in Ashrafieh.

The blasts and the bombings were quite horrific but somehow they don't cling to my memory like that small shelter room. If i close my eyes right now, i can easily picture myself sitting there on a wooden chair, drawing with my wax coloring pens, pictures of bunnies and flowers. I used to have a small notepad bound with white empty sheets, which i would forcefully fill out with colorful pictures of places little children dream of, while all hell broke loose outside.
But coloring and drawing my beautiful masterpieces was not the best part of the activity. The best part was how after completing each drawing, mom would stick them with tape to a dangling wire that elongated above our heads. And just as she would,  i would look up with my big eyes, and think of my next drawing, with the goal of filling the entire wire with my colors. What should i draw next? No wasting time, i would quickly open a new page in my little notepad, and color away. I'd hope, with all my heart, that my next drawing would be just as pretty as my last one, so that mom would just as well do me the honor of attaching it to the wire.

I was still very young, I barely knew what was happening beyond the shelter’s walls but i nevertheless always felt scared. I would glance at my parents, their twisted faces with blank, empty eyes. Eyes empty of hope and yet desperately clinging to some sort of faith. I would turn towards my two older cousins, hear them sob in their mother’s lap, as she placed her hands softly yet firmly over their ears in hope of blocking out, obstructing the blasts and the gunfire which would resonate every moment or so. I would search for my grandmother, find her in the corner, praying the rosary..her eyes closed, as her voice trembled with every murmur of prayer. I was very young at the time but i was not merely another chair in the room. I felt every speck of fear that vibrated in my father’s veins, i tasted every tear that rolled down my mother’s cheek and i heard every cry that wailed outside my protective walls. And the smell... i can still smell the dampness that evaporated from the walls. That poignant aura that accompanied every breath we took.

The war was, well, simply put.. horrible. But at the age of four, i was distracted by my coloring pens and my paper. I was distracted by the simple obsession of coloring as many pictures as i could so that the entire wire elongated above me would hold my treasures, my drawings.. my hope of better places with yellow suns and pink bunnies. I was preoccupied with sharpening my pencils before going to sleep, and returning them all in my pink pencil case.. i survived the civil war because of my crayons.

While training in the counseling clinic, it used to baffle me how children, who had been through horrifying experiences, such as trauma and abuse, were able to overcome such adversities in one way or another and lead happy satisfying lives. "Such resilience", as i'd read in textbook after textbook, "appears to be more common in young children than in adults". People wonder why i ended up working with children instead of adults, in terms of psychological assistance. Well.. because children are flexible, they are malleable, open to change. They believe in the unbelievable, they have hope in the hopeless.. and.. they can turn little things, like hasty drawings hanging on damp shelter walls, into bulletproof jackets.