some guy in lebanon

My silence on this blog is deafening… that has been with a certain intent. I don’t see any reason to put TWI or myself at risk by blogging extensively about my work or travels, but I figured a brief update wouldn’t hurt.

As some of you might know, I am now living in Frankfurt, Germany, where I am managing a project to deploy ERP software across our supply chain.

As I sit here today writing this, I am in a little town in Switzerland called Zug, which is near Zurich, where our corporate headquarters is located. Our office overlooks Lake Zurich and the train station, and the office, the town, and the surrounding area is a vision of Swiss efficiency (I only reset my watch, and assume that it is correct, when I come to Switzerland).

I drove here from Frankfurt yesterday – a fun trip south which is mostly across the German autobahn… that provides the gut-crunching possibility of “speed-limit-less” travel.

It’s extraordinary how things work out.

And as always, I’m in debted to a good friend for his help. It’s time to take my little Middle Eastern sideshow on the road, leaving Amman, Jordan, for Dubai. I’ll be there in two weeks.

I can’t even begin to thank everyone who has done their very best to get me out of this jam with the Lebanese General Security. Hopefully, come January or February, I’ll be back in Beirut with flying colors, ready to take on the world again.

In the meantime, I must go hibernate, and see what I can see, in that city built on sand they call Dubai. Perhaps I’ll do a little indoor skiing while i’m there…

To my family, and to my friends, thank you so much.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank one more group of people – the employees/owners of Liquid, the coffeeshop and second home of mine on Second Circle, in Amman. Here’s a picture of the store, Ahmad, and me. I would have been infinitely worse off if it wasn’t for this place…

It seems this is it – A final stand was made, and I cannot thank enough those who have tried their very best for me, and those who are still trying.

But it seems that there is no solution to my problem in Lebanon. For reasons I don’t understand, I am not allowed entry, not even to collect my things and empty my bank account. A work permit is the only option, but I cannot make that option work, for now.

So now I’m truly in diaspora… and it’s amazing to know what that feels like. Whatever it is that the Lebanese government assumes I’m up to, at least I know I’m not. I have infinite reasons to be upset, but for some reason, finally, after losing my cool for a few hours, I am strangely at peace with everything.

Thank you Amman for your help – And thank you Lebanon. Hopefully, somehow, I’ll see you soon.

Well well well – It has been an interesting week. For those of you who don’t know, despite having a visa from the Lebanese Consulate in New York, I was refused entry into Lebanon last week, and sent to Amman, Jordan, ostensibly to “think about what I’ve done.” Any city would feel like purgatory under this arrangement, it’s true, but arriving in Amman in the middle of Ramadan, this place feels acutely like the doldrums. Until today, as it is the beginning of Eid and things have returned to normal, there has literally been nothing to do but sleep and eat.

At least I can know tell a heck of a story!

A quick remark – I would like to take this moment to bring to light the pathetic response of the American Embassy in Beirut when I called them to let them know what was going on. Their response, “We can do nothing because Lebanon is a sovereign nation and it’s their call,” was as laughable as it was infuriating.

What a summer. What an extraordinary, incredible, lovely, indescribable summer. Hopefully not too-indescribable, or it would be hard to articulate it in this post…! And now it’s over, and tomorrow I get on a plane and fly back to Beirut. As my business partner Oni Kabir put it to me this evening, “It’s amazing how full circle things feel.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the past year – 365 days ago I was working at the Portland Lobster Company and gearing up to fly to Lebanon, with literally zero plan besides to intern at the Daily Star. I was also painting houses. Hey, don’t knock it – It paid the bills. But I was staring out into a future that I’d no idea how to envision – In 45 days I’d be getting on a plane for Beirut, praying that Nick would, in fact, be at the terminal to receive me (he was).

9 months later I returned to the United States for vacation, initially planning on being here for a 30 days. However, as my grandmother had major surgery over the winter and wouldn’t be in Maine until late August, it was important (and fantastic) to stay for another three weeks to see her. And so my return date morphed to September 11th (I didn’t choose the date).

I did not know my Great Grandfather but in the briefest of senses – When he died I was not even three years old. There are pictures of me with him, and I suppose any ‘memory’ I have of him is clouded by those photographs.

Yet no one can deny the degree to which I unconsciously feel his presence in everything that I do – It was his friendship with Nick’s Great Uncle, Governor Sumner Sewall, that led him to purchase Ropes End in Small Point, leading not only to my long and formative time at the Small Point Club, but also to Nick’s inevitable suggestion that “Lebanon would be a nice place to move to, don’t you think?” And I would like to believe that, if genetics or heritage plays a part in anything, the instinct in my mind that immediately agreed to leave my cushy work-from-home job in consulting for the great unknown on the other side of the world was part and parcel of the instinct that led my grandfather to agree to everything that his family and country asked of him, no matter how bureaucratic (like founding the Federal Aviation Agency) or life-threatening (like dog fighting in bi-planes), and everything in between.

I’ve had conversations with various members of my family, as well as people who knew him, trying to get to the heart of the man – It’s as if I have a ghost that haunts me, determining an extraordinary amount of my life and my decisions. Well if I am to be haunted, I suppose there are far worse ghosts to do the haunting!

And just when I felt that following in his footsteps might have led me right off a cliff (see my last post), two things happened.

Two weeks in the United States – and already Lebanon feels like a ghostly place, a world that seems to have been swept away like a dream, groggily whipped clean and evidenced only be sleepy eyes and the strong need to brush ones teeth.

And I am left feeling like an alien, strangely unkempt and unused to 24-hour electricity, highspeed internet, and unknowing stares as I try to approximate Lebanon to those who ask “Where have you been?” – I find that my Middle Eastern home is a place of course that that is as alien to those here, as I was to it last November.

“Yikes,” is a usual exclamation, followed by the type of face one makes when the milk has gone sour. “What’s it like?” Of course there is no reasonable explanation – “It’s fantastic,” illicits the same ‘sour milk’ response as before.

Two weeks in America feels more abroad than two months abroad – I find that I am clinging not to myself, but to the self I was before I left. Or worse, to the self I was years ago – as if a thirteen hours on a plane is enough to bring about a pubescent attitude about everything, and a sort of general anesthesia, or worse, a full pathology, marked first, by devolution and second, by amnesia.

Even my writing is clearly suffering – who writes ‘anesthesia’ and ‘amnesia’ in the same sentence?!

So, it’s almost been three month in Beirut. How time goes by in a flash! I won’t forget it… so, to recap, here are some things I’ve learned about myself in the past 87 days.

You’ll find a deck of pictures from my trip to the Cedar Reserve in Shouf, Lebanon, here: http://williamcurtisdonovan.com/photos/?album=1&gallery=10 – the first half of the gallery is of pictures on the way from Beirut to the Reserve, with some amazing pictures of the Shouf area where Karma is from. There will be a second gallery shortly [...]

Leaving Portland – headed by car to New York. I fly out of JFK tomorrow evening… I arrive in Lebanon mid-day Monday EST, or around 9:30PM local time. HOPEFULLY, Nick will be at the airport to pick me up (hint hint)… Not really interested in sounding dramatic, so instead I’ll leave you with this wonderful [...]

Update: Please note that this is a follow-up article to a previous post, “The Coming American Diaspora.” To begin what is really an extended diatribe, consider this quote from Nathan Gardels’ interview with George Soros on Friday: U.S. influence will wane. It has already declined. For the past 25 years, we have been running a [...]

Update: Also read “Part 2 of the American Diaspora – Economic Consequences of the Bailout” which is currently a top-ranked article on Google for the keywords “American Diaspora”! I can’t believe I wrote this in early October… guess I had a little foresight, eh? People ask me why I’m leaving the country – why I’m [...]

Thanks to the generocity of Marc Sirois (perhaps because of all the whiskey I bought him last October?), I will offically be leaving the US for Beirut on November 2nd (which is like 5 weeks from now…). I will begin my time there as an intern for the Daily Star, but there is a pretty [...]

Crazyness. We arrived in DC a few days ago – we survied the car trip (Plain, Zeke, Leigh, me, and all our stuff in the tiny little car), and have spent the passed few days sleeping and partying. Patriots lost last night, which was horrible, but other than that things have been great. Leaving for [...]

Woke up at 2, went to Boston and got Leigh, had dinner with my Grandmother, sleepy sleepy… night!

I have spent the past 24 hours doing absolutely nothing. I did, however, manage to play “Race for the Heisman” on NCAA 06′ for XBox, and I took Virginia Tech to the Rose Bowl, beating USC, and won the Heisman as a freshman. My life is a wasteland. Luckily, Leigh will be arriving sometime on [...]

Ok, so I was having too much fun to post last night, so I’ll recap: Yesterday I had to get a Hep A shot for Jordan, and get my eyes checked. That’s it. That’s all I did. It’s vacation – Leave me alone. Last night Zach “Tiny” Cutler and that funny girl he hangs out [...]

Whatup gang, I’m gonna use this Blog as best I can to keep everyone up to date on my trip to Jordan. I’m starting it now though in order to capture the madness of the next two weeks. And oh yes, it will be madness. More to come…