Our first destination was Jeita Grotto. This is an impressive stalactite cave about 12 miles north of Beirut. After taking a gondola a short distance up a hill, we entered the upper cave, It was otherworldly, with 25-foot high stalactites and stalagmites in various alien shapes and sizes. The outgrowths look variously like coral or like the folds found on the underside of a portobello mushroom. After walking through the upper cave, we walked down the hill to the lower cave, which can only be explored by boat. Here we floated on crystal clear water with the cave ceiling just feet above our heads in places. The kids kept asking if the cave was real; it was so unlike anything we'd ever seen that the they thought it must be an amusement park creation. http://www.jeitagrotto.com/
After Jeita, we drove another 30 minutes north to the port city of Byblos, a city that claims to be the oldest inhabited city in the world. It is the place where the alphabet was invented and where Phoenician and Roman ruins are ubiquitous. We walked around the souk, had lunch at an open air cafe, and visited the historic Byblos port. The boys, who have been saving Lebanese money in order to buy treats, each purchased small fish fossils, which were unearthed 20km from Byblos. The fish fossils are over 100,000 million years old. Once again, the boys speculated about how one could easily fabricate fake fossils and pawn them off on unsuspecting children. They are such skeptics!
This kids' school continues to be going well. We attended an open house in which we were impressed with the teachers. Our older son has taken to his Arabic teacher, and is already beginning to use fairly elaborate Arabic greetings.
We were surprised to discover that the entire team of teachers, including the art, French, PE, and music teachers, are all incredibly competent. The PE teacher talked about educating kids about eating, sleeping, and healthy emotional well being. He is having the kids research their favorite athletes and writing short stories about make-believe sports and games. Who knew that PE could be more than humiliating?
We have noticed that parenting at the kids' school is far more intense than we've experienced in the States. At the open house and at meetings with teachers, parents assume the tone of interrogators, demanding that the teacher explain how their little prince will move from kindergarten to first grade if he's not already reading Tolstoy (or Gibran, I suppose). The parents, many of whom are incredibly privileged and are paying top dollar for their kids' education, are demanding of the teachers to the point of being almost rude. We've experienced dedicated parents advocating for their children, but this is something different; it's an anxiety that their children won't be ready for the fortune 500 job if their kindergarten stresses fun and emotional well-being over reading and math.
A telling moment occurred in the French teacher's classroom. This was the context in which most of the parents' anxieties emerged most powerfully. The parents wanted to know what French texts their kids would read, how quickly they would write in French, and how rigorous could the teacher become. I am just beginning to understand the extent to which certain classes of Lebanese embrace their Francophilia. France, to some, is not a colonial power, but is the guarantor of European acceptance. Having children become expert French speakers is about much more than language acquisition; it is about social mobility and, especially for Christian Lebanese, about affirming European roots to Lebanese nationalism.
While the parents we've seen have high demands for the school, we've also noticed that much of the actual "parenting" takes place by"helpers," "maids," and live-in domestic workers. These women are migrants primarily from the Philippians and Ethiopia, who work and send remittances to their home country.
Domestic labor and nannies are not unheard of in the U.S., but the Lebanese domestic labor scene compares, in many ways, to the era of the Jim Crow South. Domestic workers are part of the family in that they care for the children, do the shopping, cleaning, and cooking. But they have no rights in public and enter Lebanon only at the whim of their sponsor/employer.
It's not uncommon to see a mother at the park watching her child and its nanny on the playground. When the child has a snack, the domestic worker will turn her back to the family, as if doing so makes her invisible. There's a strange intimacy in that the migrant woman is part of the family unit, but there's also a clear barrier, as she is expected to become invisible during tender moments between parent and child. These sorts of relations are not unique to Lebanon, of course.
 |
| Phoenician and Roman ruins |
 |
| Phoenician |
 |
| Spice market |
 |
| Spice market |
 |
 |
| Romans, of course |
