Thank You, Qatar

All Sunday, most everyone I ran into seemed to be rushing to a television or already sitting in front of one.

They were following the election and swearing in of Gen. Michel Suleiman as the Lebanese President. Of course, the big news is all over the place, but I wanted to tell you about a report that you might not have seen.

A little before midnight, my Aunt Alia, Uncle Zoo and I were in our pajamas, still watching news roundups of the election when, in the middle of a report, a music video started playing.

First, there were beautiful shots of the ski slopes in Lebanon and the beaches in Beirut. Then, as footage of Qatar’s emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and Prime Minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani played, a chorus of male voices sang triumphantly.

“Zoo, what are they singing?” I said.

“What?” he said, growing wearier by the minute as my de-facto translator.

“What are the words of this song?”

Zoo said the song thanked Qatar’s leaders for their work, brokering peace in Lebanon after an 18 month political standoff following the 2005 assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the recent outbreak of violence in Beirut which threatened to erupt into something much bigger, with regional implications.

Ahh. It was beginning to make sense. There was more footage: Leaders of various political factions boarding a plane for five days of negotiations in Doha, a still photo of a map of the Persian Gulf and Qatar with Doha clearly marked, a montage of one of the two Qatari leaders walking around Beirut, Suleiman and one of the Qatari leaders embracing one another.

So, a little out of left field for an average Western viewer, right? When was the last time CNN wrote a song about the November elections, cut some emotional footage of the candidates and had Lou Dobbs, Anderson Cooper and Candy Crowley sing their hearts out? What potential! Of course, our election, as I see it, is much less precarious, relatively speaking. OK and I guess, technically, the video wasn’t really a news report, but an opinion piece.

But I have to say that it seemed to capture something accurate about the tone of the day, at least among the people whom I observed in Damascus. Even without understanding any words beyond ‘Doha’ and ‘Qatar’, it was easy to sense the emotion behind the piece. It tapped into parts of my brain that I don’t normally equate with news digestion - kind of like if you woke up one morning and your newspaper suddenly had scratch and sniff qualities. I wasn’t reading or watching the news. I was feeling it and it seemed to jibe with reality.

Maybe these kinds of videos are a regular occurrence on television here and speak more largely about the way folks here understand and express themselves. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a video montage on a Sunday night? I don’t know yet and I guess I’ll find out soon enough. I’m also curious to figure out who comes up with these songs on the fly. Is there an on-call news chorus that runs into the studio to sing every time something major happens? Are they hiring?

I will try to find the video for you!

Mystery Meecrob

There’s nothing like starting a 90-plus degree day in Damascus with a good vomit.

Ah yes. Only two days into my magical mystery tour, I came down with a serious bacterial infection from something I ate or drank and spent the next 24 hours perched over a trash can, wondering whether I would live another day. The magic was definitely gone.

I should have known better. Most Americans who come to Syria, from what I’ve been told, come down with this kind of illness sooner or later because we aren’t accustomed to the bacteria in the water here. On both of my two previous trips, I’d spent at least one day over a bucket after stupidly eating raw vegetables washed in this water or drinking soda with ice made from the water.

This time, I even had a little booklet from the nice VNA nurse in Monterey who gave me my immunizations, telling me exactly how to avoid this sort of thing. Or at least try.

Instead, I spent my first days following Zoo around Damascus' beautiful Souk Hamidia and eating ice cream (which may or may not have contained tap water!) covered in pistachio nuts, chowing down on foul, a hot, garlicy bean stew with (drumroll) raw parsley and brushing my teeth with water from the bathroom sink.

Even without my carelessness, I’m pretty sure this would have happened sooner or later. It’s just hard to think about the cause and effect of invisible bacteria when it’s really hot outside and you are thirsty. Or when your family puts familiar, delicious Arabic food in front of you and says “Eat! Eat!”

However, this particular episode of Traveller’s Illness or whatever we want to call it went far beyond my previous experiences in terms of discomfort, disgustingness and the sheer staying power of this bacteria.

After 10 hours of vomiting – including a period of time in which I believe I was hallucinating, another spent curled up in a writhing ball, throwing cups of water on myself as I watched CNN to pretend everything was OK, and one very expensive phone call home to my mom in which we concluded that this was a ‘character building experience’ – my aunt, helpless to stop this purgathon, tried to lie down with me in bed and put her hand on my bare back. She suddenly snapped to her feet.

“Feh fever! Feh fever!” she said. “Dania, we are going to hospital. Change clothes.”

“Hospital?” I said, flailing my arms around and trying to make the sound of an ambulance.

“No. No,” she said, as she went to talk to my uncle.

Oh my. I was honestly relieved to seek professional attention. I had never been in this much pain before or lost this many fluids in such hot weather as far as I could remember. I mean, I was pretty sure I was hearing voices at one point. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene in “The Secret Garden” when young Mary wanders around her family’s house in India on a hot summer morning, only to find her dead parents around a table of gorgeous-looking food that had apparently killed them. This was bad. But I was also scared about what was going to happen next. Where were we going? What would they do to me? Was this illness as bad as it felt?

I had never had to see a doctor in Syria before, but a cousin and a friend who both had the misfortune to need one had had IVs put in their arms to replace their fluids. Eww. Just behind snakes, I think IVs are my worst nightmare. Eww eww eww!

There was no ambulance. The “hospital”, which was truly more a ‘Doctors on Duty’ than a hospital, was right across the street from my aunt and uncle’s apartment. My aunt and I walked slowly around the corner and right into a florescent room with cots and curtains, and a young boy who seemed to have a broken arm and was crying and wandering around. A male nurse ushered me to a cot and a young doctor in scrubs appeared.

“Am I going to die?” I joked, realizing too late that this was not a time for humor. My aunt shook her head.

The doctor smiled, but didn’t seem to register what I was saying. This was not a good sign.

Through my aunt’s translation and several theatrical gestures, I tried to explain what had been happening just across the street, all day long. He and my aunt continued to talk a little in Arabic and then he listened to my stomach with a stethoscope.

“Blood,” he seemed to conclude when he was finished.

“What!?” I asked.

Then, he said something to my aunt.

“Is there blood?” my aunt said.

“You mean when I vomit?” I said, putting my hands on my stomach, sticking my tongue out and gurgling. “No! No!”

They both seemed to process this fact. Then, the doctor listened with his stethoscope under my arms. I was becoming a bit suspicious of all this stethoscope work.

“Do you smoke?”

“No,” I said emphatically.

He moved to the other underarm.

“Are you married?”

“No,” I said, laughing. Was this 20 Questions or what?

Finally, he took my temperature.

“Thirty-eight and five,” he said. “Thiry-eight and half.”

“What is that in Fahrenheit?” I asked.

No one seemed to know. I knew that 33 C was definitely over 90 F. And I also knew, or at least I thought I remembered that 41C was something like 120F…I recalled seeing a weather report for Saudi Arabia in the summertime, seeing 41 degrees and knowing, somehow, that it was 120F. So I had a fever somewhere between 90F and 120F. This was that crucial moment we’d mindlessly prepared for in seventh grade math, converting our Celciuses and Fahrenheits, and I was bombing out!

I saw the doctor rattling an IV bag over my head. Luckily, he was only moving for the blood pressure machine. One more test and he made his final decision.

“Two injections,” he said.

“So this,” I said, making my vomit gesture again, “no more?”

“Yes,” he said.

Alright. I’d take that trade: Two shots to stop the vom. No prob.

“Can I have them here?” I said, pulling up my shirt sleeve.

“No,” he said.

“In your bottom,” my aunt explained.

Just feet away, the male nurse started loading up the shots. The needles were as long as toothpicks, distracting me enough so that I was easily coerced into dropping trou to get the shots, whatever anti-vom magical miracle they contained. How awkward to toss away your insides and reveal your outsides all in one day.

My aunt and I walked slowly back home. Her knees were aching and you can guess which part of my body hurt. I didn’t feel that much better, but I just hoped that even if the shots were salt water, even if there wasn’t some opposite version of ipecac, that the power of the placebo would work.

Unfortunately, the evening was spent much like the morning and the afternoon, huddled over the trash can, tossing and turning in a warm bed and having strange dreams about Cherie and Tony Blair. At one point, I tried to mentally think my way out of the illness. Maybe it was thinking about vomit that was making me vomit? I tried to think about something pleasant, but even dashing through a field of green grass in England turned into the memory of our family dog, Scout, eating grass after she barfed. Somewhere around 3 AM, I was resigned to spend the rest of my life barfing every hour and I finally passed out.

When I came to, Mousliyah, my aunt and uncle’s Indonesian housekeeper, who is also 27, was laying a tray on the table by my bed: Potatoes, small pieces of garlic and a can of 7UP.

My aunt soon followed, a hopeful look on her face, wanting to know how the night had gone. I had to bring back the now tired gesture.

“Blaugh! Blaugh!” I mimed towards the trash can by my bed.

A look of horror came over my aunt’s face: I had left a trash can of vomit by the side of my bed.

“Mee-crobs! Mee-crobs!” she screamed. “Mousilyah!”

Her thinking – and I have no way to prove her wrong – was that the ‘microbes’ from the vomit would get into the air in the room and reinfect me. My thinking was that I was too weak to think clearly, let alone traipse around to an unknown disposal location with a bucket of puke.

Mousilyah, to whom I will be forever indebted, grabbed the can and skittered out of the room, while I tried head off the talk about ‘meecrob’. This discussion was beginning to get bubonic on me and I just wanted to close my eyes. So I did.

I am happy to report that 10 7UPs, two potatoes, two pieces of Arabic bread, lots of plain yoghurt and several antibiotics later, the curse of the mystery meecrob seems to have come to an end. They say that once you get this first episode out of the way, you start to get used to the bacteria and usually don’t get sick again.

I’m not chancing it: I’ve adopted a new anti-meecrob policy and it hasn’t been pleasant to enact. I completely offended a lunch hostess on Sunday, refusing to eat anything but bread and yoghurt at her fancy dining table. I’ve spent the last two nights boiling water, stashing it in Perrier bottles and hiding them in refrigerator compartments, while Mousilyah watches Turkish soap operas dubbed in Arabic and laughs at me. Finally, I’m coming to terms with the fact that my near future does not include my most favorite meal, salad, and that I might need to consider brushing my teeth without water.

These are drastic measures for sure, but if the meecrob can fly, so will I.

Arriving in Damascus

I left Heathrow Airport on Tuesday evening (May 22), headed for Damascus, via Ankara. It was only at the terminal where the plane waited that I was able to catch my breath after dragging luggage through the London Underground and realize these were my last minutes in the west.

Of course, I've been thinking about this trip for a long time, so it's not like I hadn't really imagined what it would be like in Syria. I had prepared to leave the comforts around me – namely my family, my friends and the pleasures of readily available cell phone and internet connections and large cups of good coffee.

But now the trip was actually happening and I started to panic. All I could hear around me was Arabic and Turkish. Beyond 'hello', 'how are you?' and 'where is the bathroom' – oh and the numbers one through 10 – I would have no means to communicate when I landed in Damascus. Only then, looking around at all the people in line to board, did it occur to me that I didn't even know how to say 'I don't speak Arabic'. What the hell had I been thinking, not learning more Arabic before I left?

I tried to distract myself as we took off, reading the recently released autobiography of Cherie Blair, the wife of the former British Prime Minister, (I never knew I cared about her!) when a passenger across the aisle from me started throwing a fit.

"I don't want to sit with him!" he told the young stewardess, pointing at the man next to him. "I will not sit with him!"

The man in question had just shown me the time on his watch – he seemed nice enough. I couldn't imagine to what this other man was objecting so I offered to trade seats.

Instead, the difficult passenger was seated next to me in an empty seat and immediately started to chat. Where was I going? What was I doing? Why Syria?

His name was Nizar. He was a businessman with a family in Irvine, headed to Damascus, where he had grown up, to check in on two apartments he was renting to students and visit his family. He reminded me of the Godfather, with puffy eyes, a huge gold ring and a very deep voice. Moments into our conversation, just like one of my uncles or my father might do, Nizar offered some unsolicited advice.

"I am going to tell you something," he said, after I explained what I was doing in Syria.

"Do not compare here and there. Only say, 'This is what they do here. This is what they do there.' Just watch."

He paused, as though to let his wisdom weigh heavy on me. I nodded in agreement. Then, he jumped up.

"Oh!" he said. "One more thing you should know. Your family, they will try to find you a husband. Don't be angry about this. Just enjoy, OK?"

Grrreat. Well, at 27, as the oldest female cousin in my family that is not married and having traveled to Syria twice before only to attend weddings for my cousins, I had counted on this. I made sure that my dad called ahead, several times, to explain that I was not in search of a husband. I was coming to try my hand at reporting. Still, I was sure the topic would come up more than once in conversation and was actually a little curious to see what kinds of men my relatives, who know very little about me, would pick out. Men with moustaches? Students who spoke a little English? Doctors? Actors? What exactly was their standard? Anyhow, maybe simply to comfort myself, I imagined it would be like my own Mr. Universe contest, only I wouldn't really have to worry about who would win because I wasn't looking. Ha!

We landed in Damascus at 5 AM. The sun rose over a patchwork of beige and browns as we touched down and deplaned. I walked down the corridor of the sparsely decorated airport, wondering where I would find my Uncle Zuhair (pronounced "zoo-hair"), who was supposed to meet me. We hadn't discussed a place and now a man in a military uniform was asking me questions in Arabic.

"Do you speak English?" I said, feeling really stupid.

He pointed towards a sign that said 'Passports and Customs'.

OK. I probably needed to get my passport stamped before I would see Zuhair. That made sense. I was on the escalator, trying to find my passport in my messy purse, when another man in a uniform approached me.

"Dania Akkad?" he asked.

I nodded my head and he motioned with his finger for me to follow him. I was a little surprised he had been able to pick me out so quickly from the group of people coming off the plane . . . and then I started to wonder why he had picked me out. Had my uncle sent him? Or was I about to have some problems?

After a short discussion between the man and two others who looked at my passport and photocopies of my dad's Syrian passport, my parents' marriage license and my birth certificate, they stamped my passport and the man took me down another hallway.

"Everything OK?" I asked him, trailing behind. "Where is Zuhair? Where is my uncle?"

He didn't answer and we kept walking until we reached the conveyor belt where suitcases were coming off the plane. I kept bumping into people and saying "Scusie". Why was I speaking Italian? So strange. Anyhow, he motioned to a man with a cart and left me. This seemed like a good sign. Zuhair had to be somewhere near and, sure enough, once the luggage had arrived and I sailed through customs – which entailed answering whether I had any cell phones or any 'GBS', which I took to mean 'GPS units' – we turned a corner and there was Uncle Zuhair.

"Welcome! Welcome!" he said, giving me a big hug.

I hadn't seen Uncle Zuhair since my dad and I had traveled to Damascus in 2003 for Zuhair's daughter, Rana's, wedding. My dad's oldest living brother looked the same: A skinny, shorter version of my dad. After all of my panicking on the plane, it was reassuring to be with a familiar person, especially someone who looked like my dad who has been by my side on every other trip to the Middle East.

The Damascus airport is about 20 minutes from the city, so Zoo (as I call him) and I drove into town. We talked about how our family was doing, about the difference in the weather from London and Damascus (It was in the low 50s in London and the low 90s in Damascus) and about the US elections. He said he was for Obama.

When we reached the city, I was surprised by how polluted, dry and dusty it is. I don't mean to be negative about Damascus straight off, but that was my first impression this trip. I'm sure I will find a lot of beauty here, but straight off, it wasn't some place that I would describe as pretty. There are tall, anonymous buildings all around the city and little greenery, except for the minarets of mosques that are lit up at night and make the nightscape twinkle in greens. Even at 5:30 AM, it was hotter than any day I'd experienced in my life in Monterey.

And as I've found in past trips to Syria, the heat soon took hold and I fell asleep as morning prayers were sung from the minarets all over the city.

Welcome to D-Tour

The first thing most people say when I tell them I’m going to Syria is “Be careful.”

No one ever explains exactly what that means; but by the way they hold my shoulders and look at me as though we may never see each other again, I suppose they are imagining some cross between a bombing, a beheading and a twist on the film “Not Without My Daughter”.

Which is, of course, exactly why I want to go.

Call me crazy, but there just have to be some better things to associate with the country where half of my family lives than violence and hatred.

But when you label a country as a member of the junior varsity axis of evil, I can understand why it’s difficult for people to feel warm and fuzzy when you tell them that you are heading there.

There just aren’t a lot of stories coming out about average, everyday Syrians to whom we can relate and that’s one thing I hope to offer you here.

I hope to introduce you to Syria’s barbers, plumbers and backgammon fanatics, tell you the latest jokes people are exchanging on the street and find out what folks halfway around the world dream about at night.

More than violence, I fear serious food poisoning, inadvertently offending my Aunt Leyla by forgetting to call the minute my plane lands and, in the company of my beautiful and sophisticated cousins, looking like the complete slob that I am.

The irony, perhaps, of all of this is that I know as well as anyone that the Middle East can be a dangerous place: In November 2005, my cousin Rima and my uncle Moustapha were killed during an orchestrated bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan.

And that brings me to tell you about another reason I’m going to Syria.

I was in the Herald newsroom that morning of the attack, walked right past the television where the news was breaking and never imagined that the incident, halfway around the world, had any connection to my family.

Several hours later, after a phone tree of calls from friends and relatives who saw my cousin and uncle named as victims of the attack on Al-Jazeera reports, I sat in silence with my parents at our home in Carmel, watching CNN replay a video of the inside of one of the hotels for several hours.

Days later CNN was playing what was to me a much more disturbing video: A woman in a headscarf and long robe walking in front of the camera, opening her long coat to reveal an explosive belt.

Her name was Sajida Al-Rishawi. Several days before the attacks, she and her husband had allegedly come to Amman, rented an apartment and practiced detonating the explosive belts they would wear into the hotel lobbies.

Only her belt hadn’t exploded.

Now she was in Jordanian custody and CNN was playing the short clip of her over and over again. It looked as though she was pacing and repeatedly opening her coat to reveal the explosives.

More disturbing than the belt was the expression on her face. She looked emotionless.

As the days passed, we learned from news reports that Sajida’s relatives and friends had been killed by American soldiers in Iraq. The reports suggested that this was her motivation to attack these hotels that were frequented by Westerners.

In some way, it should have been easy to cast Sajida aside as some confused, backwards and violent person out for revenge.

But I couldn’t help feeling curious about this woman in the explosive belt, just one year older than my cousin whom she had been willing to kill.

What had her life been like up until the moment she reached the hotels? Had she gone to school? Did she have young children like my cousin? There were a lot of questions I had, but I think really the main question was what brings someone to kill strangers?

It was a question that I was ruminating for the next two years and one that was still rolling around in my head when two other key events happened.

Less than a year after the attacks, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida operative who apparently orchestrated the Amman attacks, was killed in a US airstrike.

A friend sent an email, suggesting that I must feel relief to learn that he had been killed. But I felt only distress that he had been killed in a surprise attack much the same way he had sent operatives to kill my relatives. No cause seemed to be advanced, no deeper meaning was found in my relatives’ deaths with this airstrike.

Several months later, I heard news that my high school friend, Nate, a Marine serving in Iraq, had been killed by a roadside bomb in the al-Anbar Province. I had lost touch with Nate after college, but I was incredibly upset to hear the news of his death and found it difficult to keep from falling apart when we buried him on a wintry hillside in Reno.

Nate’s death felt like the last straw. What was the meaning of all of this destruction, of these Arab, American and Arab-American deaths?

There seemed to be no winning or losing, only raised stakes, greater misunderstanding and more sadness. My thoughts remained with the very puzzling Sajida.

Labeling her as a terrorist or calling what her alleged cohorts had done a tragedy didn’t answer any of the questions I had about how or why this had happened.

And to me, the labels were only numbing and smacked of the same kind of broad-brush thinking that led to these tragedies in the first place. The question remained: Who was this woman?

So, pushed by what seem to be the most poignant events in my life so far, I have decided to follow through on an idea I had right after my cousin and uncle were killed and I am on a mission to try to talk with Sajida who is in a Jordanian prison, awaiting execution.

I’m also on a mission to experience and write about average, everyday life in Syria as well as get to know my family a little bit better.

This is the best antidote I can offer in response to impersonal acts of violence and dry, lifeless accounts from halfway around the world that seem to only make us stranger to one another. I only hope you will find these stories as compelling as I will in finding and sharing them with you.