Souk Part II: The Green Hand

(above: Images of Souk El-Tayeb. Some honey, fresh from the bees in the frame! A bag of organic zaatar--ground thyme with sumac and sesame. Some little flower-shaped cookies in festive packages.)

What, you ask, is the Green Hand? Don't worry--it's not a new militia, disease, or political party. It is a really friendly little NPO/NGO (non-profit/non-governmental organization) that I just learned about today on my return trip to Souk El-Tayeb. I sidled up to a table laden with nice-looking jams and pickles, and was immediately greeted by a very friendly fellow who spoke very good English (he told me his name, but I'm still having a hard time understanding and retaining Arabic names unless they're spelled out for me). At first I thought that he was a very pushy salesperson, which is odd at the Souk, but after chatting for I bit I learned that this was the Green Hand's first time back at the Souk after staying away for a couple years after the 2006 war, and he was just really excited about it. One of the Green Hand's programs is called 'Green Home,' where they train poor families how to make and package crafts and natural food items for sale. All the yummy desserts, jams, dried figs, etc. on their tables at the Souk are the only sources of income for the people who were selling them.
 
Before he started explaining all this to me, Green Hand Guy insisted I sample something that looked like mush with onions on it. He gave me a little dish of the bulgur/goat's milk yogurt/mystery flour mush with some fried onions on top, and some bread to eat it with, and I must say it was excellent. While I was still chowing down, a Green Hand Gal (whose name, which I don't recall, means 'flower' in Arabic) offered to explain what was in all the jars and bottles on their tables. She pointed out pistachio jam, jars of preserved figs, and even some preserved pumpkins! She said that up in the mountains, it is cool enough to grow pumpkins. Who knew?
 
Green Hand Gal is a social worker by day, but spends a lot of her time keeping the Green Hand projects going. She gave me a little printed summary of all their projects. In addition to promoting local, natural, and organic food production, the group is trying to preserve Lebanon's forests, encourage recycling, reduce traffic accidents, and get the Lebanese to stop smoking. They have their work cut out for them, that's all I can say.
 
By this time I had finished the surprisingly tasty mush, and Green Hand Guy immediately handed me two little desserts: one little lump of something like bread dough with a sweet sauce, and one delicious, flaky thing that tasted a bit like baklava. While I inhaled those, he asked what I was doing in Lebanon and I told him about my AUB job. Turns out he has a Master's degree in Organic Chemistry and spends his time helping the farmers to restore their soils to health by using natural additives and encouraging a return to traditional farming practices. Cool!
 
After I'd finished the desserts, GH Gal handed me a tiny cup full of a clear, cold, brownish liquid. I asked what it was, and she said 'just taste it!' I did, and the only thing that came close to describing the taste was molasses diluted with water. But no: it was what you get when you mash up grapes and boil them down to a very sweet, thick, concentrated sludge (which they had in jars), and then reconstitute it. It was very odd. Think raisin-flavored Kool Aid. I asked if there were any additives, and GH Guy said 'Just in the soil,' as the drink itself was pure concentrated grapes.
 
I decided it was time to get out of there before they fed me anything else. I bought a few yummy desserts from one of their 'Green Home' producers, and wandered off to another part of the Souk.
 
Right before I left, I stopped at a different booth and bought a piece of vegetarian kibbeh, which is usually made with bulgur and ground meat. This one was bulgur, veggies, and pomegranate seeds. Yum! I also got two balls of veggie kibbeh (baked inside a sphere of bread) to take home (they did make it home, but didn't last long!) As the lady there was getting my stuff for me, Green Hand Guy appeared from nowhere, snuck up behind her and said to me with a big grin, 'Hey, you're not buying from HER are you?!' Turns out GHGuy and Kibbeh Lady are best buddies from when the Green Hand used to be at the Souk every week before the 2006 war. Kibbeh Lady tried to get him to 'Eat!' and he kept saying 'no, no' and making funny bloated-looking faces at her. They were still goofing around as I paid her. As I turned to walk away, she pressed a paper-wrapped puff pastry filled with veggies into my hand. I ate it slowly as I strolled past the blue-domed mosque and thought about how full I felt after my second visit to the Souk El Tayeb.
 

Good AND Simple?!

I couldn't resist sharing this little tidbit:
 
The university subscribes to Mideastwire, which is a daily round-up of news stories from all over the Middle East (http://www.mideastwire.com). A couple days ago they ran an opinion piece about the US elections that originally appeared in a Saudi Arabian newspaper called  Al-Watan. The article predicts an Obama victory because it imagines that the American people are tired of Bush's policies.
 
The funny thing, though, is how the article characterizes Americans. It says that "the American people are good and simple people who love life." Doesn't that make Americans sound pleasant yet vaguely defective and perhaps mildly menacing, like Lenny in Of Mice and Men or something?
 
I must say, it's really refreshing to see what the US looks like from the outside. But if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my good and simple life. Don't you love it?!
 

Class Notes

Notable moments in the classroom:
 
Early in the semester, my students had many insightful and challenging questions about the Pilgrims, Puritans, and colonial America. They wanted to talk about the colonists' impacts on the Native Americans and on the ecosystem, wanted to know all about their religious beliefs, and about the financial and legal contexts of colonization. In the midst of all this sophisticated conversation, I showed them a map and pointed out the locations of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. One student then asked, "And where is this 'Virginia'?" I had to take a step back and remember that the geography of the eastern seaboard is not burned into their memories, as it is mine. As I explained that Virginia was much further south, I enjoyed the reminder that we are not all approaching the subject matter from the same backgrounds.
 
Similarly, after working through a few sections of Jonathan Edwards's sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" with a student in my office, she said it was starting to make more sense to her. She said she'd go home and re-read it, and was confident that she'd then have a better understanding of it, "Inshallah" (which loosely translates to "If Allah wills it.") I couldn't help but wonder whether Allah would indeed want her to make sense of the Calvinist fire and brimstone, and what Jonathan Edwards would think if he'd heard our conversation!
 
Most recently, I astutely observed in my 3pm class that the lights always go out for about a minute while I'm taking attendance. The students very patiently explained to me that the power goes off in the city every day from 3 to 6pm, and that it just takes a minute for the University's generators to kick in. They told me that the whole country has regular outages, but not all at the same time. It sounded like all of Beirut was without power from 3 to 6 (as well as a period in the morning), but the times may differ by neighborhood, I'm not sure. In any case, I'm certainly learning new lessons every day--ones that probably seem incredibly basic to my students. 

Ruins

On the way to Souk el Tayeb, my colleague and I talked about the fact that once you start noticing bullet holes in Beirut, you see them everywhere. I told her about seeing a bullet hole in the hood of a parked car, which looked in perfect condition otherwise. We noticed lots of holes in some rolling metal doors covering closed shops, and also the distinctive spray patterns that bullets left in some crumbling buildings. It was easy at first to think that the buildings were just rotting away in the damp heat, victims of entropy, but when you looked closely, it was clear that they had some help.

It's a shame, too, because some of the war-damaged buildings clearly used to be beautiful.

Some of the buildings, though, (such as this former hotel) almost have more character as bombed-out hulks.

But there are some older ruins here, too. Right in the middle of a pretty modern-looking part of the city are the ruins of some Roman baths. This photo shows some of the columns in the foreground, and in the background are some arches.

Off in the distance you can see a mosque, a church, and the omni-present cranes that are slowly changing Beirut's bombed-out ruins into modern office and apartment buildings. Luckily, they're leaving the Roman ruins as they are.

Souk El Tayeb

This morning my colleague Cleo and I took a walk in the warm October sunshine to Beirut's first (and possibly only) organic farmers' market: Souk El Tayeb. Finding it was a bit of a challenge, as the roads on our maps didn't quite seem to match up to the roads in real life. Not to mention the fact that 'Martyrs' Square,' which seemed like it would be a prominent landmark, isn't a square and didn't have any obvious martyrs in it, so it wasn't much help.

Also very unhelpful were the maps the city put up on street corners. They all had an icon that said 'Vous Etes Ici/You are Here' in the key, but not on the map itself. Very odd.

There also were lots of police barricades and big gaggles of beret-wearing, gun-toting policemen/soldiers. It seemed like they were mostly just chatting with one another, though, and letting their rifles dangle casually from their shoulders, like guitars. They didn't pay any attention to Cleo or me.

Just as we started to despair of ever finding the souk (which means 'market' in Arabic), we rounded a corner, darted across a busy street, and there it was!

We entered the ring of white tents, and the first things I saw were...bagels! Just when I had given up ever finding bagels in this city, there they were, at a bakery booth in the market. Alongside some amazing-looking rosemary-olive bread, chocolate-orange cake, and apple tart were four plain bagels. I asked if that was all they had (it was) and said I'd take them all. The woman at the booth said in an American-sounding accent, 'just don't tell anyone they're a Jewish delicacy!' We laughed, and headed to the next booth.

Cleo and I both marveled at the very low prices of the beautiful organic produce. For instance, I bought four apples and maybe three handfuls of gorgeous cherry tomatoes, and it cost the equivalent of about 75 cents. Then I picked out four small green peppers at another booth, and the guy just waved me away when I tried to pay. Wow!

The neat thing about Souk El Tayeb is that it seems to be very committed to social justice and environmentally friendly farming practices. They have a neat website (http://www.soukeltayeb.org/), which explains that 'tayeb' means 'good,' as in tasting good, as in being of good character, and as in being full of life. The market is certainly all three.

The other neat thing is that it happens every week, which means that there may be more bagels in my future!

Food

Today was a great day for learning about -- and eating! -- Lebanese food. This morning the student group Slow Food Beirut hosted a 'traditional Lebanese breakfast,' or 'Terwi2a Libnaniyeh.' Food producers from ten different Lebanese farms, bakeries, and apiaries set up booths on campus and sold their products and answered questions about traditional Lebanese food production. Most of the food was certified organic and really yummy, though some of it was unfamiliar, if not downright mystifying. Luckily, there was a short film playing in one of the campus buildings that explained what some of the food was and interviewed the bakers/farmers/beekeepers. And it had English subtitles!

One of the neat aspects of Lebanese cooking is the dome-shaped griddle called a 'saj' on which sandwiches are made. A lot of street vendors and snack shops have them. They'll throw a piece of flatbread on the saj, add some cheese and maybe some veggies, and then wait until the cheese melts to roll it up and fold it.

The sandwich (or manouchi) I had today, though, was not done on a saj. It was a wonderful labneh (thick plain yogurt) sandwich with basil, olives, cucumber and tomatoes. Oh, and it also had a special ingredient sprinkled on it: zaatar. I learned from the film that zaatar is a blend of thyme, toasted sumac and sesame seeds, and salt. I liked it so much that I bought a bag of it from a farmer who grows organic thyme. Maybe I'll start making my own labneh sandwiches!

Zaatar is also baked inside these handbag-shaped loaves of bread. The loop on top makes it easy to store them or carry them on a pole or stick.

Another highlight of the event was getting to sample some cedar honey from an apiary in the mountains of Lebanon. It tasted sweet, of course, but also had an unusual flavor that probably came from the cedar pollen. It was really good.

I should mention that the men in black robes and white headcoverings are Druze, which is an intriguing and somewhat mysterious religion I don't really know very much about yet.

For dessert (as if the honey weren't dessert enough), I had a mwaraka. It was SO good! The dough is filo-type pastry dough, and it's filled with nuts, sugar, rose water and orange blossom water. The film showed them being made. The bakers roll the filling up in the dough so it doesn't drip out during baking and make a mess. They then have a long dough tube which they coil up and bake. Yum!

To cap off my day of food, I went to a lecture titled 'What is Ottoman Cuisine, and What is the Mediterranean?' by Sami Zubaida. It was a really interesting examination of the intersections of empire and cuisine. Professor Zubaida basically said that 'Ottoman cuisine' was a result of empire forcibly bringing together the very different local cuisines of different counties and regions. The more recent hype about the 'Mediterranean diet' is thanks to savvy marketing by olive oil trade groups and others. Did you know that up until fairly recently in the Middle East, olive oil was mostly used for lighting and soap, and that butter was the preferred cooking fat? Or that the tomato was regarded with suspicion and not part of people's diets here until the early twentieth century? Neither did I! The upshot is that countries of the Mediterranean and the former Ottoman empire are much more heterogeneous than most people realize. Of course, there is also a big difference between the foods eaten by rich people and poor people in all countries.

In other gastro-political news, today a Lebanese group said it is suing Israel for marketing hummus as an Israeli dish. A member of the Lebanese group said of the Israelis: "It is not enough they are stealing our land, they are also stealing our civilization and our cuisine." Hummus is a big deal!

Most importantly, I have so far suffered no ill effects from eating all this fine local food. My digestive system may finally be turning Lebanese after all!

Eid Walk

Today is the last day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan. Eid begins with the sighting of the crescent moon--not its change of phase, mind you, but its sighting. This means that there is some ambiguity about when the holiday begins, as from what I understand there is not always agreement about when the crescent becomes visible. The holiday seems to have started on Tuesday, so the moon must have showed up on Monday night. However, I read that there are some who think that the holiday started on Wednesday. The upshot is that campus has been closed on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and will re-open for classes on Friday. I wonder how attendance will be.

I decided to take a break from my course prep and take a nice long morning walk to make the most of the last day off. I walked through neighborhoods I'd never visited before and got thoroughly lost wandering down some narrow, labyrinthine streets. There was one particularly interesting area tucked away near a highway overpass. I saw several older women in hijab carrying shopping bags and walking slowly out of what looked like to be a maze of alleys, so I went to see where they were coming from. Underneath the overpass and in some alleys radiating out from it were little fruit, bread, and grocery stands. The weren't selling anything terribly unusual, but their unexpected location made them seem like a great surprise. As I was checking it out, a really loud 'bang!' sounded from around the corner. I about jumped out of my skin, but no one else reacted at all. I'm assuming it must've just been a super-loud Eid firecracker, or surely someone would have flinched just a little, despite the legendary Lebanese cool about such things.

Anyway, here are some photos I took along the way today.

The blue-domed Mosque against the blue sky is the place where former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was cremated.

The rest are just buildings that caught my eye--some Ottoman-era,

some very modern.

All the buildings in these photos are intact. It just seemed like too nice a day to photograph civil war-era rubble. Maybe another time, after Eid is over.