Homemaking
// A flock of birds burst into the sky at the sound of a massive drill making contact with the bedrock. It bore into the earth until, with the help of a bulldozer, a pit the size of a large house was leveled and cleared. Yellow trucks trundled off site with unwanted stone and back again with steel rods and planks of battered wood. The sound of drilling was replaced with the incessant sound of hammering as the formwork slowly took shape. Columns and walls rose out of the pit to support the slabs at ground level. The slush of poured concrete drew both the irritation and interest of neighbors who’d taken to observing the construction from their balconies.
-- The young construction worker manning the bulldozer waited nervously at the mouth of the pit. What appeared to be a rusted metal disk peeked out of the packed earth he’d been in the process of shifting just moments ago. Officers armed with protective gear confirmed what he’d feared. His excavations for the new villa had unearthed a cluster of active landmines. The young man had not yet been alive to witness the war that had plagued his parents’ south so long ago. And yet there he stood, decades later, at the mercy of it.
// A soldier in a blue helmet led the way through the compound on a bicycle. We followed him in a car down a wide avenue lined on one side with prefabricated houses, and vegetable patches on the other. Young men and women in uniform were bent over in the soil attending to the late summer harvest. Baskets of summer squash were carried across the street, some to be distributed into the homes, others to the food hall. We followed the soldier across row upon row of housing and vegetable fields, breaking every so often to allow for the passage of people and goods. Those not tasked with working in the fields lounged outside their homes amongst collections of statuettes and good luck charms. Little golden buddhas laughed generously from windowsills stringed with bunches of dried red peppers. Colorful patterned fabric gusted by the late afternoon breeze billowed out towards the car, altogether misplaced amongst the earthier tones that decorated the balconies in the village beyond. Friends hummed along to music that echoed out of cellphones, reminiscing together over lyrics that spoke of home, of Indonesia. The land upon which the compound sprawled had been rented out by UNIFIL years ago to host the foreign regiment that continues to patrol the southern border to this day. Years of endless conflict had, conversely, birthed an effort in homemaking, thus grafting a piece of Indonesia into the little Lebanese village.
-- Sadness, silence at seeing broken empty land where a home – the village’s first – once stood. A promise to restore it had fallen through. But maybe it is for the best. What would it have been like to watch others make it theirs? To no longer have a right to the space they had grown up in, lived in, and left?
