Collage of portraits of war dead maps shared despair - and hope

Nahwa al-Muwatiniya youth group travels Lebanon to give statistics a human face
Source: Daily Star staff, 21-11-2006
BEIRUT: It was no ordinary road trip. After an ambitious, three-day tour of the Bekaa Valley and South Lebanon, a white rental van finally came to a stop in the parking lot across from Martyrs Square on Sunday night. Nine tired members of the non-governmental youth group Nahwa al-Muwatiniya piled out of the van, eager to show off the souvenirs they collected during their travels: an oversized map of Lebanon plastered with nearly 100 faces representing a fraction of those who lost their lives during this past summer`s 34 days of war.
The van trip was the result of an idea first hatched at the end of July, when the "Israeli" military was bombarding Lebanon from air, land and sea after Hizbullah captured two "Israeli" soldiers in a border raid on July 12. People were dying - fathers, mothers, children, friends - but all that routinely made the headlines were numbers of the dead, wounded and displaced.
"The reports said 30 people here, 20 there. We wanted to collect the names of these people," says Sonya Day, a member of Nahwa al-Muwatiniya, standing in front of the map of Lebanon. "But it was impossible to get all the names during the war."
Beginning on the second day of the "Israeli" bombardment, Nahwa al-Muwatiniya was active in demonstrating against the war. Its members created banners appealing for justice, participated in candlelight vigils after the attack on Qana and hosted a "Bike for Peace" ride through Beirut - an initiative that took place, coincidentally, on the day the fighting ceased. "Faces for Numbers" is the organization`s most recent project, an attempt to capture the memories of individual people who were killed during the war.
The large map of Lebanon is black, outlined in red and plastered on the side of the white van. The photos on the map are a mosaic ranging from family snapshots and passport photos to glossy portraits already printed and circulated to publicize fallen fighters. Faces of both civilians and fighters are displayed. To the family members left behind, all are martyrs.
"Yeah, at first we were afraid," Day says of the choice not to discriminate between civilians and fighters. The group does not want to send a political message with their map, nor are they taking part in statistical historical preservation. For Nahwa al-Muwatiniya it was about recognizing that every death represents one individual life lost, a life that touches so many others.
"This is a human mission. They were all human" Day says.
Practically speaking, it would be tricky, and perhaps dangerous, to refuse photos of fighters given proudly by family members eager to commemorate their loss of life. One man gave a photo of 11 relatives from Qana. In the middle was a fighter; around him were 10 civilian members of his family, including a 10-month-old child.
As a different kind of compromise, the group would only accept photographs that bore no political symbols, only faces. Images submitted with flags, banners or scarves were edited or cropped so that only a face was added to the map.
"We wanted to touch the human side," says Day, who agrees that in turn she and the others we all touched by their visits to the grieving relatives.
What is most interesting about the snapshots collected is not so much their position on the map but the memories that go with each photo - also collected on video footage, which Nahwa al-Muwatiniya hopes to later edit and release as a documentary on the war.
"It was so touching to hear from these families," says Sally Hamdan, a volunteer with the group and an employee at a Beirut bank. Although she lives in Beirut, this weekend was her first trip to the South ("we drove so close to the border, I saw "Israel"," she says, incredulous).
"The trip gave values to the numbers," Hamdan says. Her strongest memory was in the last village the van visited, where she met an elderly woman named Umm Afif who had lost most of her family, including her grandchildren, during the war.
"I wanted to hug her, I almost did," Hamdan remembers. "It`s not just people that died, it`s these people. We got to know them and their family."
For Day, the image of an orphaned boy in Deir al-Qanoun remains with her. In addition to his parents, the boy lost his sister, an aunt and a cousin.
"He was watching it on the news and didn`t know it was his family," Day recalls.
The "Faces for Numbers" van was warmly received into the 15 Lebanese villages through which it passed. Nahwa al-Muwatiniya contacted the heads of all the municipal councils in advance of the van`s arrival, so some residents had gathered in anticipation of the visit, preparing photos and stories for their guests.
"Especially in the South, they were so happy [that] people came to listen. They were telling us about their lives during the war, how their relatives died," says Day.
Hamdan agrees: "I think it`s important for those who have lost people to talk."
It seems just as beneficial for those who stayed in Beirut, or fled to the mountains like Hamdan, to hear the stories about tragedy on the ground. The weekend road trip was less a memorial to the war than a weekend for groups from different parts of Lebanon to reconnect over their lowest common denominator: their humanity.
Nahwa al-Muwatiniya hopes to market the map of photos as a poster or a billboard to be displayed internationally. The group is in talks with contacts in the Gulf and United Kingdom on how to proceed.
"We felt that the international coverage wasn`t showing the human side of Lebanon as much as in "Israel". We want to connect this message to those who weren`t here," Day explains. The map and the documentary will bridge the gap for those who don`t have the opportunity to travel to the South on their own.
Nahwa al-Muwatiniya had to return the rental van by 9 p.m., but it seems that the memories of those who traveled and collected the names and pictures will last forever.