03/07/2026
If there’s one thing you read and watch today, let it be Ruwan Teodros her deeply moving work from Lebanon. Please show it a little love ❤️🩹
Yet another summer arrives, and the sounds of Lebanon don’t change. Neither does the heartbreak.
I walk around Beirut and see evidence of this war in so many places. In the hotel across from my home, there are entire families staying in one room. One family brought their cat, who I see sleeping on the balcony from time to time.
The fatigue on people’s faces, and derelict buildings filled with people who have fled their homes. Children playing together, fathers and mothers sitting on mismatched chairs together, waiting.
Waiting to return home. Waiting for the drones overhead to stop humming. Sometimes you tune out the metallic buzz of the killer bird that can kill on a whim. Other times, you become acutely aware of your own mortality.
Every day, I read different stories and see images of people whose homes have been destroyed and their loved ones who have been killed. I read about daughters losing their fathers, who held their hands as they took their first steps. I read about a pregnant mother, a nurse, killed with her entire family.
Death and destruction is everywhere, from Dahye to the south to the Bekaa, I can hardly catch my breath as I watch people lose everything their families spent decades building.
On the other hand, I see acts of extraordinary strength. I see people vow to return to their destroyed homes, to rebuild, even if they have to live in tents on their own land. I see families rushing home, mattresses strapped to the roof of their cars, while Israeli tanks roll through their villages, flattening the flowers beneath them. I see a man risking his life to bring a piece of chocolate to Tabshour, the donkey he was displaced away from. I mourn Mona Khalil, the environmentalist who refused to abandon her home in Mansouri—or the turtles she had spent her life protecting—and was killed for it.
I see death everywhere, and yet I also see life. Between the ruins and the waiting, between grief and fear, life continues to bloom in the smallest and most defiant ways.
