It’s October 1, 2024. It’s war again, and this time right at the heel of a genocide that Israel has been perpetrating for nearly one year, and for over 75 years before that. Once again, the ethnonationalist occupier to our south bombs and decimates the parts of Lebanon that it deems Hizbullah strongholds. This time, too, the devastation is colossal. Even more so this time. Entire villages are wiped out. More than 1.5 million people are displaced from their homes. How fast the calamity sparks local civil actors into rescue response.

Sifting through the day’s crop of bloody-horror-rubble images on my phone, from Palestine and now from Lebanon’s presumed all-Shia communities and neighborhoods, I find posts calling for volunteers to join humanitarian drives. I join a WhatsApp group run by organizations (new or established), grassroots initiatives and independent individuals, all busy as hell liaising to procure basic necessities for the displaced. They bring shelter to those homeless and medicine to the ailing, sharing suppliers for affordable mattresses and blankets, and turning community and commercial kitchens into assembly-lines for warm meals, sandwiches, packed snacks, water, and food and hygiene parcels for delivery to those taking refuge in public institutions or private buildings, and to those improvising shacks on Beirut’s filthy sidewalks, leafy medians, and destitute public squares.

My family and I are theoretically not under any direct threat of death or displacement—so far. Early on, we ran the geographic and demographic analysis of our house’s location and decided that it fell outside probable target parameters. We promptly told the girls as much. They came to us, with the request to do something meaningful in solidarity with the displaced. We encouraged them. In so doing, we agreed, we would participate in the collective action available to us and hopefully maintain our dwindling faith in humanity. It would be similar to volunteering that we had done in solidarity with those displaced during the July War of 2006, when Israel also selectively pummeled Shia communities in South Lebanon and in Beirut’s Southern Suburb. My first daughter was one then; my second didn’t yet exist.

We got on the schedule of a community kitchen and humanitarian rescue center that had set up in rapid response to the Beirut Blast of August 4, 2020. We had all but forgotten that bit of government-sponsored warfare on its own people, hadn’t we? That was the time when chemical toxins, abandoned in a warehouse for years under dubious and dangerous conditions, ignited Beirut’s commercial port, setting off the third largest non-nuclear explosion in human history (after Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and sending ripples of destruction through the heart of a bustling part of the capital. That section of the city was not being targeted now. Our first thought at hearing the phenomenal blast had been: Israeli strike. My eldest daughter, then 14 years and 10 months old, was less than half a kilometer away from the port. She survived unscathed, physically—unbelievably, thankfully, mercifully. Phone lines had been cut. It took us two hours to reach her. They felt like twenty hours. My soul aged twenty years that day.

We enter the community kitchen from the back entrance. Friendly faces, smiles, greetings. Jokes fly among the twenty-plus people. Some stand in production lines at long stainless-steel tables, with enormous metallic tubs and cooking pots stowed beneath. Other people maneuver gingerly between labor chains, moving this or that from here to there. Over the din of dishwashing jets, clanking and chatter, up-beat music plays from a speaker on a shelf above the industrial lemon squeezer. I wash my hands at an outdoor sink and ask where I should start. They hand me an apron, show me the hairnets and latex gloves, and set me to work opening large loaves of Arabic flatbreads into two. It is general prep for eventual sandwich-making tomorrow. Working alongside other women and men, young and old, serious and jovial, we’re told to stack the open discs, 50 discs a bag, to count up to a total of 450, and then stop and report. A couple of people have already started. I introduce myself and begin. I have to make sure the one side doesn’t rip. There’s always one side of Arabic bread that’s thinner, scantier and tears more easily. The other browner side is more complete and easier to line across the middle with hummus, labneh, cheese or spam, topped with a vegetable garnish, and a drizzle of olive oil perhaps, before being pinched closed at one end and rolled up into a hearty bride.[1]

By my third shift, I’d learned a few names while chopping cucumbers, squeezing lemons, stacking empty plastic meal-boxes. I had stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers, scooping hot meals into those boxes, or lidding, packing and stacking them in large cartons; or filling large plastic bags with dozens of paper-wrapped sandwiches. Careful to keep proper count! An order of 250 is ready over here, 300 over there; for delivery to this or that school or university shelter. Someone wasn’t lidding boxes as fast as the other guy was serving the portions; another was rolling sandwiches faster than her neighbor could wrap them. I observe and assess where I might be needed, where a gap from distraction, fatigue, or shortage stands open, and there I plug myself in and get busy, mostly in silence. Others seem to do the same. Others look more established, regular, perhaps old friends or new lovers, and still others are in charge. That’s too much mujaddara per portion—guys, one ladleful and a half only . . . there’s too little salad in that bowl—bring it back here! General prep for tomorrow: cut cucumbers in straight rings for salad, but cut pickles at an angle for sandwiches. Who can come take over the wrapping over here please? Someone somewhere, camouflaged in this unceremonious order—or may be still unbeknownst to me—was keeping count, fielding requests and enquiries, calculating costs, receiving and rerouting funds and donations, updating orders. That person might also have been chopping onions and shoveling them into a colossal stainless pot for the next stew.

I’m focused, here. Cutting straight, or at an angle. Getting faster at opening Arabic loaves, finding a system for keeping count, learning to wrap sandwiches like a bloody pro—with paper flick at the end an’ all! Time to clean the surface before the next production line needs to start. We’re running out of pickles over here. Ok good, he went to get some. Sigh, the girls are going this evening to their friend in Ain Saadeh, a town in the hills above Greater Beirut, and theoretically out of harm’s way. But I’m worried about the way there. They should avoid the route through Mkalles Roundabout. It’s less than a kilometer from the target area. Yet, the Israelis have also been bombing unexpected places, striking any displaced people and their families who they proclaim are associated with Hizbullah—wherever they may be. Precision rockets have hit non-descript cars on crowded thoroughfares in mostly Christian areas, and random houses or flats in remote villages in mostly Druze areas. My girls could happen to be passing by or in the car behind! Would they—would she—survive unscathed this time? Do I make them stay home? They’ve been looking forward to this all week. Do we stay cooped up at home or believe our own assessment of what route is safe-ish and which more perilous? The sheer risk! The paralyzing fear. And. Still cutting, tearing, rolling, or boxing. The music starts to blare. A frown gathers on my brow, my breath becomes shallow, my neck muscles tighten. Hey you, come back, stay mindful! Take in that yogic breath, bounce your shoulders back and forth a little, tilt your head right and left. Stay here in the now. Stay well to withstand. To overcome, stay on task. To make food for the displaced. To make good of a terrible time. Though of course, this whole bit is but one act in a protracted epic of wars and displacements and devastation and food-making. Is it destined to recede to the background like the others? Some weeks on, the WhatsApp posts calling for volunteers will dwindle, the chatgroups will run dry, the momentum will slow, fatigue will set in. Meanwhile, the police will have displaced the displaced from the streets.

Notes

[1] Bride in classical Arabic is ‘arūs, which people in the Levant also use to call a flatbread wrap with a variety of cold and hot fillings.