The First Year in Lebanon

The first year in Lebanon was not easy.

The customs of the area were completely different from those of Australia. I had been brought up on the philosophy that “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” and I tried very hard to apply this in my new situation. Once I had recovered from the shock that I was trapped in Lebanon for the foreseeable future, I decided to try and learn Arabic and to get tho know the people.

I was on fairly good terms with my sister-in-law, Siham, but I never really got on with Michel’s brother, Farouk. He was a few years younger than Michel, did not speak English very well, and was a lazy hypochondriac who appeared never to have done a good day’s work in his life. He owned a clothing store in the nearby town, Jounieh, and was a fussy pedantic bustard, in my view. He was a martinet in the house. Whenever we had eggs, that is, every morning, he would come and sniff the bench top after we (Siham and I) had cleaned up, to see if there was still the smell of eggs on the marble bench top. I disliked him intensely. All my years of living in a large family had not prepared me for the aggravation I got from him and Michel over housework in their house.

I found Michel’s mother’s brother and his wife, Youssef and Marie Zogaib, and their large family, more to my liking and I ended up spending time there every day. I slowly became on eof the family and it is at their place that I learned my Arabic. One of the elder girls, Katia, was a dressmaker, and after a while I was able to sit and sew for her, hemming and doing those odd jobs that a seamstress can do for the dressmaker. In return I was allowed to have the left over material to make clothes for my daughter.

I surprised Katia very early on, the first summer I was there. I was just out of my sick bed, and had a lovely piece of material, and I grabbed the tape measure, measured Elizabeth on the fly and proceeded to cut the cloth directly from the measurements, as was my want – I was an experienced dressmaker by that time after all those years sewing for myself at home. Katia was gob smacked. She couldn’t draft a pattern from scratch; she could only alter an existing pattern. She was deeply envious.

I also learned to cook Arabic style at the Zogaibs. I turned out to be such a good cook that Farouk sent his wife upstairs to my place (we had moved up in the summer after I arrived) to learn to cook Arabic style! It must have been mortifying for her to have her husband consider me a better cook than she was, but in all fairness she was not very good. I was able to master a very difficult dish, called shish barak, in one go. I know I was good at cooking because I had a lot of knowledge of the chemistry behind the food, but they were not to know that. Shish barak was a complicated dish which was little minced meat pies suspended in a yoghurt sauce. The sauce was stabilised with egg white, and if not done properly it curdled. I had experience of curdling so I found it easy. I was the talk of the village, as some women never mastered the dish.

In most ways I was the model housewife, I could knit, sew, crochet, cook, learned Arabic very quickly and was a good mother. One benefit of living in Lebanon which I missed when we returned to Australia was that Michel knew he couldn’t get away with anything there; he knew if I spoke of being unhappy because of some thing he did or said there would be repercussions from the Zogaibs, so he behaved himself fairly well. I never knew his Issa relatives, and mixed almost entirely with the Zogaibs and the women across the road from us, Isabel. She was also a dressmaker and we often discussed sewing. Her daughter Claude was grown and married with two small boys, a few years older than Elizabeth and they often came over to play with her. Their cousin, Isabel’s sister’s son, Nabil, also used to come and play at times. Little did we know they would marry twenty odd years later. I spent a lot of time with Isabel. She was considered a little different by the others in the village but I liked her a lot. Her husband Milad was a bit of a slug and was quiet and reserved and barely spoke to me, but he seemed a nice man.

There was an English girl in a neighbouring village who was put in contact with me that summer: she had a child around the same age as my own, and was married to a Lebanese man who was away a lot. She was a hairdresser by trade. In ordinary times we would not have been friends, but as she was the only English speaking person in the neighbourhood we became friends and saw each other about once a week. .

In the spring of 1975 Michel built a flat on the roof of the old stone cottage that was his and Farouk’s childhood home. Most of the building occurred while I was sick with glandular fever. When we first arrived, there was a room built on the roof for us, and we had to come down to bath etc. This was demolished to make way for the flat and we moved into the room once occupied by my mother-in-law. The original cottage had very thick stone walls and had two bedrooms, a sitting and dining room and a kitchen with a toilet off it. There was not bathroom. The toilet was fairly recent and emptied into a sullage tank out the back. The cottage was next to the channel that carried the River Kalb (Dog River) down to the sea, bout 3-4 hundred metres away. We got our water from this channel and from the tank on the roof which collected rain water, and in the summer the channel would dry up. The flat upstairs was made of reinforced concrete and had tiled floors with an open plan living and dining area and two bedrooms with a bathroom in between the bedrooms. The bathroom was especially modern for the area and had a toilet, a chip heater for the shower, and a bidet, which was a new thing for me. The kitchen was large and the bench tops were of marble and were especially made to fit my height. I did enjoy the large kitchen and the tiled floors, and they were easy to keep clean.

My one problem with all this was the lack of flyscreens: the mosquitoes were truly terrible and as I was allergic to their bites I suffered every evening from painful hives. We slept with mosquito nets however this did not stop me from being continuously bitten. I dreaded sundown because I could not escape them. You could not close off the house; it was too hot for that. The summer was one long dry spell, and in fact there was not rain from the beginning of the summer until autumn. The word for winter, shitti, is the same word for rain, so that will show you what the weather was like: summer hot and very dry, winter cold and wet.