MISSED ME?

I've neglected this blog for a couple of weeks because I started blogging in Romanian and it kinda caught me. You know, explaining in Romanian what living in Lebanon and adjusting here means to a journalist my age. It turned out nice, but it needs lots of work and it's taking quite some time to update.
The last couple of weeks have been more active than my first days here. I filmed a report at the Lebanese Red Cross, a center in Dahieh, the widely feared Hezbollah stronghold. It felt quite normal to me, but, hey, that's just my opinion. Rana, a journalist friend of mine, was amazed. “You went there? In your first week here? I don’t have the courage to go there so easily.” Well, Romania is not that important and I'm not that BBC star reporter to be watched very closely. And speaking about BBC, one of the reporters who had been to Beirut wrote and e-mail to me saying I should be careful in the Red Cross Center in Dahyieh because it had been threatened by a terrorist group. Thanks, Steve. Apparently it was not the same center.


The story with the volunteers in Mreygeh center in Dayieh turned out really nice. Of course, it needed more filming. It took me three weeks to get the approval from the Central Headquarters. The Press Office Chief called me and asked me for a meeting in order to "discuss" my project. Ok, fine. I went. He kept me there for an hour or so, asked me questions about who I work for and what exactly I want to do and then showed me his own work - pictures of the war in 2006. Pretty nice pictures. And at the end he told me that I have the permission to film in the ambulance, the ambulance in the street and pretty much all. And of course the interviews and inside the Center. Somebody should have called me in a couple of days. That was a week ago. Actually, it seems to me like ages ago. Nobody called. So I sent back home the footage I already got from the Mreygeh center.

It was pretty wonderful. I really loved filming that story and talking to those young people. I come from Romania, where 20 year old kids don't think about volunteering in the Red Cross. Far from them the thought of doing anything like it. Clubs, dancing, music and that's pretty much all the youth in Romania think about.

I met here, in Beirut, a bunch of kids who dug people from ruins of the houses bombed in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Houssein, one of them, had asthma. But he went to Qana, in southern Lebanon to help people. He found his own pictures all over the internet two years ago. And he still has them on his computer. One of the pictures was of his house. “I went there to take a shower and I came back to the center. And the next morning my house wasn’t there anymore. It was bombed.”




The other Houssein, a 23 year old fresh engineering school graduate, was 21 during the war. He was in the South in a refugee center. But he had to dig out people trapped under the rubble of the houses bombed in southern Beirut. “We were trying to give them oxygen. But some of them didn’t make it”. I felt like talking to an old person, yet he was just 23. And he was so well acquainted to death and accepted it so easily.

And then there was Bassam Mokdad.




THE Bassam Mokdad. The Red Cross volunteer who was all over Reuters and AP during the war. The volunteer who has been in the Red Cross for 23 years. The guy who spent half and hour separating the body of a mother from the child she had been embracing in the bombardment. And he told me the story so easily and so naturally. As if what he had done was so natural. I think we still have footage in the TV station Archive back home with him among the rubble at Qana.

And after all the struggle and after saving and losing people under the rubble, while hearing the bombs falling, they stayed in the center and tried to have dinner while one of them was playing the guitar. “We had to stay human and still feel we are alive”, Houssein, the 27 year old with asthma, told me while showing me the pictures on his laptop.

The younger Houssein showed me the ambulances. Very well equipped. Oxygen masks, medical kit with everything in it. And of course, helmets and bullet proof vests. A must in Lebanon. And then he showed me where an ambulance was hit by a airplane. An ambulance from Zahle, a Christian town in Bekaa Valley. “ We had painted the cross on the top of the ambulance, so that they could see it clearly from the helicopter or the planes. But they bombed it. And they hit right in the middles of the Red Cross. It was on purpose, you see. A volunteer died and 7 were wounded”.