Zahraa

My best memories of Bint Jbeil, where I lived before the war, are of the stairs to the old-style house that my grandfather built. Those stairs carry a lot of memories. I grew up on those stairs; I spent my whole childhood on them. We played there. The stairs have a lot of gates. And we used to draw all over them with chalk. I fell on them so many times, and ruined my legs. 

When the war started, we would sometimes leave Bint Jbeil to go to my grandfather’s house in the al-Jamous area of Beirut and then come back again. But when it intensified on 23 September 2024, we left and didn't come back.

On that day, my cousins and the rest of my family had planned to have dinner at our house and spend the night there together. But the bombing escalated, and by 1:30pm we couldn’t stay anymore. My cousins started to leave, and my pregnant sister tried to get my mother to leave. She didn’t want to. My mother said, “Don’t worry, our house wasn’t hit in 2006, so it won’t be now.” Eventually my father said, “it’s time to go.”

I didn’t take much of anything at all with me. I just took the clothes I had on me, and my nargileh (a water pipe for smoking flavoured tobacco), and we left. When I took the nargileh, my mind just couldn’t process anymore. I didn’t know exactly where we were going or how far it was. I thought I didn’t need to take much, since we would be coming back. 

By 2pm, Bint Jbeil was empty. We packed a few things and called our grandparents in Beirut to tell them we were coming, so they wouldn’t worry about us if phone service went out. 

We got stuck on the road to Beirut. You wouldn’t believe how bad it was on the way. It was so scary. My sister was pregnant and my brother and mother were with us. It was so scary. We left at 3pm and arrived in Beirut at 3am. 

We arrived there at night, but they were already threatening to bomb parts of Beirut. The next day, we left for my aunt’s house in Choueifat, east of Beirut. But they threatened Choueifat, so we packed our things again and went to the mountains at 2am, where my grandfather had found us a house to stay in.

We only spent five days there. The house was overcrowded, so we decided to leave. We found somewhere else to stay, and then my aunt – my mother’s sister – bought a plane ticket to Iraq for her and her kids. She told her brothers that the situation in Lebanon wasn’t liveable. So they bought us tickets to join them. We left on 27 October.

My brother and I didn’t have our passports; we left them at home. We had to go to an office in Hamra, in Beirut, and arrange to fly with other documents.

In some ways, it was nice. I went on a religious pilgrimage to Karbala. I had always wanted to go, but under better circumstances. I tried to make the most of my time visiting shrines, which was something really special.

The prayers came naturally, straight from my heart, like, “God protect the Hezbollah fighters.” One feels safe there, at the shrines. You don’t hear bombs. You don’t hear anything. You are just looking around, visiting, and praying. It’s a feeling you can’t really put into words.

It was just my brother, my mother, and me there. I was separated from the rest of my family. My father and sister stayed behind. My sister didn’t want to leave her husband. And my father said he wanted to stay close to south Lebanon.

My mother’s brother lives in the United States, and he has an Iraqi neighbour in the United States who owns a house in Iraq. She left the housekeys with her sister in Iraq, and she gave them to us. We lived there. With my aunt and her son and two daughters.

We woke up every day to visit a religious shrine, and came back at the end of the day and cooked. We couldn’t find all the ingredients they have in Lebanon, but we adapted. The flavours were different. We went to a mall to eat fast food like they have in Lebanon.