On Mosquitoes, Days Off, Kids and Water, Code Switching . . . etc

Ibrahim River Vally (driving to the West)



I’ve lived here for so long now, and I STILL  don’t know the place. I had the day off and a friend of a friend took us to his village for a picnic on the Ibrahim River. Yet another day off, you say? Don’t you know? We are more days off than that we work.  But honestly, I need it, if I am to explore this entire country before I die.

We drove to Yahchouch, which is really close to Beirut (some 45 kilometers). That close to Beirut, yet I had never been there. I had been in the neighborhood, but not ‘there’.

Under the waterfall in Yahchouh

Every time I discover a new place in Lebanon, I have to adjust my retirement plans. “No, HERE is where I want to build my house,” I think as I discover yet another new village, or a lovely little mountain road next to a ravine with a river.  And so my retirement home  shifts location on a weekly basis.

Yahchouh means "wounded god" in Aramaic. Legend has it that the Surian god Tammuz (also called Adonis) died in that river named (Ibrahim River), hence the name. (Source). A boar killed the guy, or so they say.

Lounging under the canopy

The Ibrahim River starts in Afqa, and is quite a big river at its source, so somehow I don’t think we were actually picnicking on the Ibrahim River itself, but rather a tributary. It doesn’t matter, because when you organize a picnic with kids, one of the prerequisites is water. This place, in a forest, had a waterfall, and that’s even better than a river, as far as kids are concerned.

Code switching under the waterfall

It is funny to see how these children flip between languages. They all speak a different language at home. Some speak only French or English; a few speak Dutch and others Arabic. At school they add another language, or two, to their repertoire, and when you put them all together, they figure out really quick what to use with whom.  Some need a translator, and often Arabic is the only one that will do the job. So between a French speaking child and an English speaking one, they get the message across through Arabic. Sometimes another child that speaks both will translate. It goes so smoothly. This code switching is quite a phenomenon.

Kids are like lizzards; they play in the water until their lips are purple, and then they crawl on a hot stone to warm up again.

And while the adults were lounging under a canopy of leaves, the kids were in the river, under the waterfall, or building dams. They also had mosquitoes. Big suckers! I’d say about 3 times the size of your average mosquito, and the bite marks they left were as large as a 500 Lira coin, and 3 times as thick. It seems we have some 12 different types of mosquitoes in Lebanon, the culex pipiens  being the most common.  Ah, the science of mosquitoes.



More lounging

Global warming causes certain mosquitoes species to migrate northwards, I read somewhere, taking malaria and dengue fever with them. But then again, malaria and dengue were endemic to Lebanon until the 1950’s when the government launched an eradication program. But there have been cases of malaria in the Metn in 1997, 1999 and 2000, according to this ‘Two Year Survey on Mosquitoes of Lebanon’. And you thought you had to watch out for bombs.  Uhuh, it's the small stuff that will do you in.

Natural shower

In Yahchouh, they found species of the Culex mimeticus and the Culex (maillotia) hortensis. I don’t believe these two are involved in the spread of malaria, although I do have a sore throat right now. Malaria is spread by the female of the anopheles, but we’ve got very few of those (for the moment). What an uplifting post, no?