House in the Village

Since another Dutch blogger is writing about some of the cultural differences between Holland and Lebanon, I’ll add my two cents to it.

What took me forever to comprehend in Lebanon is the concept of two houses. Every Lebanese has two houses: a house in the village and an apartment in the city.

Where I come from, the possession of two houses indicates major bucks. Nobody has two houses. Maybe, when moving ahead in your career and your kids are out of university, you can afford yourself a minor hovel somewhere up north, or a dilapidated farm shed in the south of France. But not a ‘house’ house.
Yet in Lebanon everyone has two houses. They live most of the year in the apartment in Beirut, but will spend weekends in the house. And in July and August – when the humidity is at its highest and schools are closed – most people will pack up and head for their village house. A lot of these houses are in the mountains (if you are thinking Alps, its more like foothills). The house is usually in the ancestral village.

This ancestral village was another thing I had never heard of before. In Holland you come from the town that you were born in, or grew up in. Although 95% of my friends were born and raised right here in Beirut, no one is actually ‘from’ Beirut. They all say they are from Sidon, or Tripoli, or somewhere up in Zghrarta or down in Arab Salim, even though they never really actually lived there, apart from those two summer months of course. The weirdest thing is that they are even registered there. So when election time comes, or they need an official birth certificate, they physically have to go to that town in order to vote, or get the paperwork down.

The remainder of a chocolate paste sandwich

When someone explained that to me once, I finally understood why Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem to be counted. For years and years, while sitting in church during the Christmas mass, I’d always wondered why bother walk all the way to Bethlehem to get counted? It was the ancestral village thing.

I canned the village house concept in this family. I’m a city girl. I can deal with vipers, rats, mice, roaches, scorpions and other irate wildlife, but the spiders were way too big to even consider spending summers up in the village. And besides, this slugging luggage up every Friday evening, and dragging it down again on Sunday evening was not my idea of spending relaxing weekends.
But ‘jiddo’ (Grandpa in Arabic) still has his house, and the kids have a wonderful time there. This weekend they were weeding the garden. You can see my kids are city kids; a little grass gets them going all over the place.