Sonia,
a mother, sister, and daughter was born in Beirut, Lebanon during tough times
from the war. She lived in Beirut until the age of 23 where she moved to San
Francisco to live with her two older brothers living a simple life attending
college. Before the actual interview started, we discussed more of her early
childhood school years. As she sits on the couch across me preparing for the
interview, my mother smiles at me, signaling that she’s ready.
I
was born in beautiful Beirut, Lebanon. It’s usually known to be a small Paris.
They considered it as a new European country.
Mainly people living in Lebanon were
average living people. They weren’t rich millionaires or they weren’t poor.
Everybody was considered to be average living situation. I didn’t live in the
city, but the whole country was very small; so the whole Lebanon is basically
considered a small city. I lived with my parents of course, that was their
standard. Everybody would live with their parents until they get married. The
environment, I would say is like your living right in the market in the city
where you had easy access to shopping, to the restaurants, to the beach and to
the mountains, It would take you like only ten minutes to go to the beach and
about ten to fifteen minutes to go to the beach. Everything was close by,
compared to the life in the United States.
The
country itself, all the government members, most of them were Muslims, but the
President was chosen to be a Christian, to the whole country is considered to be
a Christian country. The President at the time in 1978 was Souleymen Frangieh.
Either way, the Muslims outnumbered the Christians, so that’s why they wanted
the government to be a Muslim government. They wanted to elect a Muslim
government so we can have a Muslim government.
During
the whole war with the Muslims and the Christians, freedom of religion was still
somewhat expressed. You had the privilege to be whatever you want to be. It all
depends on what your family’s beliefs are. You cannot be Christian if you are
a Muslim family. You cannot switch to a different faith if you’re a Muslim
because you are automatically Muslim and the rest of your life you will remain
Muslim. Of course the Muslims and the Christians had their own different sectors
of their religion. Then again, the whole government was basically revolved
around religions. Like I said, the majority of the senates and so on were
Muslim, only the president was Christian. So it was like they imposed. They
outnumbered the political world and wanted to have the country as a Muslim
country. It was like a religion intended war, like a revolutions between the two
religions.
My
childhood was a kind of a happy childhood until the war started in 1974.The war
was basically with the Muslims and the Christians, that’s how it began. It was
a chaos. There was a curfew because the war went on for years as you know.
Nobody was allowed to go out. If the soldiers saw anybody leaving their
building, they would get them, interrogate them, and probably take them to some
kind of a “jail” or a “prison you know, they would hold them until they
cleared that person. The situation was very awkward since the buildings were
very close together. On one building there would be the Christians and across
from the street there would be the Muslims holding guns onto the Christians
side. People on the balconies didn’t have the courage to go outside or to be
seen from the windows because if the war soldiers saw them from the building
across, they would fire, they didn’t care; children, women, adult, men, old
people, elderly, nobody.
Different
clubs like the “Hezbaalah”, the “Kehtaayibs”, and the “Ahraas”.
These people in the clubs got their supplies from the Syrians or from people
outside Lebanon. They got their help and supplies from outside and they passed
them on through their club members even if they were fourteen or fifteen years
old since they all carried guns. Our neighbors belonged to one particular club.
Their whole house was full of literally hundreds of different types of guns or
bombs, everything that you can imagine. The poor lady had five sons. Each son
belonged to a different club but they were all Christians. In the end, every
single one of those sons was killed because of a gun shot.
It
was still a democratic country except that we didn’t have freedom of speech
like we have here in America. Over here, you can even curse after the president
and nobody can say anything about it for example. But in Lebanon, certain things
were taboo. You cannot talk about it, even the news people knew their borders.
Everything basically was censored before appearing or before expressing the
news. There were basically three or four radio stations, that’s about it.
There was a certain time of the night, for example eleven ‘o clock at night or
midnight, where all the stations would stop. They would play the national anthem
at night which was right before midnight, and then you would have nothing to
watch or listen to and everybody would go to sleep if not earlier.
As
I am here, I absolutely appreciate the sacrifices my parents had made in order
to give me the proper education throughout the entire war scene and to look
forward to a brighter future.
Interviewed by Araxie Ashkharian