I took some time today to try and track down a family I interviewed last week. Their father, Kamel, was dieing of cancer, and the family was living in a school in East Beirut being used as a shelter. They moved the day after the ceasefire, and we tracked them to a home in the southern suburbs of the city today. That area was pounded during the fighting here – the explosions from these strikes were the ones that rattled my windows for the first week I was here. Whole buildings are toppled, their floors stacked like pancakes, one on top of the other. We finally tracked them to a small house on a side street, across from a flattened apartment building. The residents there said the family had left – gone home to Nabitiye to bury Kamel, who died Tuesday evening. It wasn’t a surprise – he clearly had only days to live when I saw him last week. But it’s one of the many small tragedies of this war – that a man, terminally ill with cancer, couldn’t get home to his village, and died in a stranger’s home here in Beirut. All over the country this week, people like Kamel’s wife and teenaged sons are on the move, heading home to find out if in fact they have a home to return to.
August 17th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
