By Crissy Solh

Guest Writer

The salty air, like the realization that she was back in Beirut, both complemented the nostalgia and stung as it penetrated her senses.  Looking off the coast she identified with the waves crashing against the shore only to be swept back into the inviting Mediterranean.  Their movement mimicked her tidal affection for this fated city. Read the full story

By Afif Nimer Hussain

From afar, my eyes were drawn to that familiar vital orange color in my memory. I realized immediately what I was looking at. Suddenly I found myself in front of a pile of Jaffa’s oranges! It was summer of 1982, I was stroll through a Sunday market in Amsterdam during a short visit to the city to attend an all-Europe convention of the Palestinian graduates, I,  myself  was just graduated as a medical Doctor from the University of  Padova-Italy and about to return to Lebanon. The plan was to get married to my fiancé, A’bir, Who was working as a nurse for the Red Crescent in the Shatila refugee camp near Beirut. We were marrying at the end of summer. My mother was waiting anxiously, I was the youngest and the last one of her nine children to get married, then, her self-imposed duty of getting all of us          granted our high education and starting our own family,  will be completed, a burden that she had to carry alone since father’s sudden death 15 years ago. Read the full story