We wrote the first version of this piece in late October 2024, during the war. We are two graduate students, Sami and Rawan, and their professor, Livia. We were not able to focus on the learning we should have been doing at university, like reading and writing. But we had a continued feeling that we were learning nevertheless. We learned practical things, like moving homes, installing toilets, sleeping on mattresses, and dealing with neighbors. We learned to record worlds that were quickly disappearing and new worlds that were emerging. We learned to wait. This piece stages the three-person discussion we had when we first tried to verbalize what kinds of things we were learning.

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Livia: It was October 19, 2024, and I had not seen the graduate students in a month. That day, they were in the department waiting to attend Rawan’s thesis proposal defense. I saw Rawan with her friend Sami and invited them to my office for an impromptu advising session. I asked them how they were doing in their class work, but felt my question was empty as they replied, “Fine thank you, how are you?” We had lived through a disorienting month of the escalation of war, during which I had heard from each of them and learned that all had been displaced. I also had moved apartments three times in Hamra and often wondered whether I could remain in Beirut for another of its crises. All that, and yet all I asked was: “how are your classes”? Then I tried again: “The city is being bombed. We can’t tell what will happen. Let’s talk about learning, what kinds of things we are learning in the meantime. I moved three times in the past month. I put some belongings in my office, some in friends’ apartments, and am living out of a suitcase.”

Sami: Oh, I moved four times and across geographies. On September 20, the Israeli army bombed a building in Hay El Abyad, in Dahieh, the neighborhood where my family and my maternal aunt’s family lived. I was at AUB when I heard about the bombing. My family told me not to go home. Our households, my mother’s and maternal aunts’, were split across two houses across the city. I joined my maternal aunt’s family to spend the night in an old neighbor’s apartment on the airport road. We laid mattresses on the floor in the living room for the men and laid others in the bedroom for the women. We slept our first night outside the walls of our home.

The next day, Saturday, I returned home. I found my parents unpacking things they had packed up the night before. We had returned. Monday, the 23^rd of September, the day people call the great displacement, there was an escalation of Israeli airstrikes on the South and villagers migrated to Beirut and the North. I went to class that day to fill in attendance requirements. After class, my maternal cousin called and said I shouldn’t go home. Instead, his family, my mother, my sister and I would go to his paternal aunt’s, Raghda. Her place is in El Hersh near Sabra and Chatila in the informal settlements on the outskirts of Dahiye. Aunt Raghda had an empty apartment that she was constructing for her son who was engaged to be married. The men would sleep in the apartment under construction and the women would stay with Aunt Raghda. The apartment under construction had two rooms, a balcony and one window that overlooked Aunt Raghda’s living room. A man from the neighborhood showed us how to connect electrical wires, then how to install a bathroom. We cleaned the house. We were learning how to make bare cement rooms livable.

That afternoon, my maternal cousin’s friend agreed to lend us the house he was renting in Aramoun al-Day’a, a village with a Druze majority about 10 miles south-west of Beirut. Here too, we were three families, my own, my maternal aunt’s, and my paternal uncle’s. Here, the house was well-equipped with running water, solar power, Wi-Fi, and kitchen appliances. But a few days later, the neighbors communicated to us through the landlord that we should leave. Perhaps it was fear, perhaps annoyance. In any case, we were already uncomfortable, since my cousin’s friend had refused to take money for rent.

A week later, we vacated that house and rented a house nearby. This house was on the fourth floor. It had no furniture and no elevator. We moved the many things we had accumulated into this new house. At some point after our first displacement, we had learned the schedule of bombings: mornings were the safest, afternoons were risky, and nights were dangerous. Thus, in the mornings, my cousins returned to our houses to fetch a UPS, four batteries, pots, pans, and sheets. We installed house number four and kept a low profile because of neighbors.

Rawan: Dahiye, where I resided before the expansion of the war into Beirut, is home to me. It is the social world into which I was born. I went to AUB when I was 17, and began spending most of my time in Hamra. I felt I was part of that social world too. These two worlds were dissimilar, and I learned to navigate them differently. I held each world at a distance from the other in my imagination, and acted differently in each.

On Monday, the 23^rd of September, the day of the great displacement, I left Simba, my cat, at home in Dahiye. My mother and I wanted to take him, but we had packed our car to the brim. No space was left, and we had no home to take him to. A few days later, I drove back to Dahiye, alone. I was shocked to see my neighborhood. It was empty and quiet. I parked my car at a distance. In case of a bombing, at least one of us would survive. I took a few breaths to calm myself. I ran inside our house (apartment?) and picked up Simba. As I was leaving my building, I noticed packed suitcases at the entrance with no one around. To whom did they belong? A neighbor, perhaps? Why had they been left behind? It was uncanny. I ran to the car and drove.

After that, I moved four times and then settled in a studio in Caracas, near Hamra. My mother and I lived there together, until it became too small to fit us and our tense relationship. My mother went to her parents’ house in her hometown, Jiyyeh. But when tension there with her own parents gets out of hand, she returns to the studio.

As I started to get used to my new location, I was taken aback when I bumped into my neighbors from Dahiye, in Hamra. I discovered that many of them had moved here too. Suddenly my two worlds were merging and clashing. It felt strange to be smoking a cigarette on Bliss Street and to be greeted by my neighbor. My Dahiye neighbors don’t know that I smoke, or that I have tattoos. I don’t know how to dress or act anymore. Hamra and Dahiye were my two separate worlds, and now they were forcibly merged. The bombs were destroying social worlds and constructing new ones. I did not know how to navigate this new world. I needed to learn.

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All of us laughed at the dilemmas. What are we learning in the meantime?

We didn’t name what it was we were learning, but we had an inner sense that we were learning, each on our own, together, differently, and in our conversations together as well. We learned practical things like moving houses, installing toilets, and living with new neighbors. We tried to remember and to mentally reconstruct worlds that had disappeared, while at the same time constructing new spaces for ourselves in the world [new worlds??]. We tried to record the craziness of the new before it was wiped out—either by war or by becoming ordinary. We learned to wait. It was a kind of forced fieldwork, as Rawan and Sami called it. We felt we were learning and changing. We had a visceral sense that the world around us, and our relationship to the world, were changing. We were experiencing the world outside of our habituated ways and we needed new kinds of attunement to the world.

The ceasefire came into effect on November 27, 2024. Sami went back to his house. Rawan moved into a new house in Achrafieh: her house in Dahiye was no longer livable. Livia moved into a new house as well. We are back to classes, reading, writing and university work. What we did, how we lived, and what we learned during the war seems strangely inaccessible now.