Syrian Lessons

A Syrian friend (and former student of mine) arrived in Beirut today for a week of business journalism training sponsored by an American newswire. At the last minute, the company bizarrely pulled funding for her accommodation, expecting her to pay at least $100 a night for a hotel room from her $200 a month salary (which is about average by Syrian standards.) So she's crashing at my place.

Though the trip is off to a bad start, I still figured she would be excited to run around bad old Beirut, or at least see the sights. This is the first time in her life she has been to Lebanon, even though Damascus is just two hours away by car, and even though she's 28 years old. (This is somewhat like living in New Jersey without ever visiting New York City.) Instead, she moped around the apartment.

Suddenly, I sensed a teaching moment. I've been trying to pass on a few ideas for good journalism and good living to my Syrian students. Two techniques -- which I myself learned in journalism school -- are particularly relevant to someone visiting a new country for the first time. One is called a Beat Note -- a list of story ideas, people to contact, events to attend; it's a way of turning a world of possibilities into a plan for action. The other is called an Airplane Theory. It's the idea or hypothesis you form about a place before you get there (sometimes at the last minute on the airplane) which you begin to test out as soon as you arrive.

So where's your Beat Note and Airplane Theory? I asked my friend. Syrian and Lebanese politics and culture are intimately and sometimes uncomfortably linked, and surely she as a Syrian journalist would want to run off and see the important recent political landmarks herself? The Hizballah protest campgrounds, the bombed out craters in south Beirut leftover from the summer war with Israel, the tomb of Rafik Hariri -- just a few examples that immediately came to mind. "I can't think of anything," she said. "I know there are nightclubs, but I don't want to go to nightclubs."

So as usual, the lesson here is one I have to keep learning myself. People who have lived their entire life in a totalitarian country don't become savvy travelers on their very first foreign junket. They've lived in a world of limited possibilities and limited horizons which they accept because there isn't another choice. When they step out of that darkness, they don't start checking off a To Do List. They blink.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut