Lebanon
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The Woman Behind the Walls
As dusk falls in the new downtown Beirut a woman in what appears to be a cross between a horse and a hippopotamus costume is playing pied piper to a throng of children who run after her, pulling on her tail. The warm air is just beginning to cool after the intense heat of the day. Friends and parents watch and clap their hands to the beat of the music pumping from scratchy speakers above their heads. Up and down the block, Lebanon's finest and most urban are buying costume jewelry hawked by street vendors, stopping for a glass of fresh lemonade and a hot dog, or checking out one of the artisans' stores that have suddenly cropped up in the arched doorways of the city that was once known more for flying bullets than trapeze artists.
Nearly a decade after the end of a 15-year civil war that shattered Lebanon, rows of spanking new structures among still bombed-out buildings illustrates the attempt of the Lebanese to start anew. The most glamorous reconstruction is in the town's center, spoking out in several blocks from an already reconstructed clock tower. Roads wide enough for a couple of tanks to travel abreast separate dun-colored buildings that combine the French-colonial old Beirut with the soaring arches of the Middle East. A close inspection reveals pock marks in most of the buildings, not, as one might suspect, designed to look "authentic" or old, but left-over bullet scrapes from a war that the Beirutis are trying to forget.
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Anne Sengès and Jessie Deeter