Friends and Fish

There is this really wonderful gentleman that works here at Imam Sadr. He manages the two restaurants that the Foundation owns as income-generating projects. Since our office is next to the accounting department, and he has to submit receipts (etc.) every day, we see him all the time. You can usually hear him coming because he's either singing or whistling or joking with somebody along the way. His name is Ibrahim and every day he stops in on us. At first it was to teach us little bits of Arabic shwei-shwei (little by little). Then he started inviting us to things. The Muslim holiday of Ashura just finished. Ashura is a Shi'a holiday which commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein. For ten days leading up to Ashura, Ryan went with Ibrahim to a special Ashura meeting place called a Husseiniya to listen to the history of Hussein and the Battle at Karbala. Although the lectures were entirely in Arabic, the Sheikh gave Ryan a children's book explaining the holiday so he could generally follow along.

Ryan has also played soccer with Ibrahim twice so far, and Ibrahim had us over for dinner last week. His wife, Zeinab, is super nice (we mostly communicate through smiles and gestures, and a little help from her 20 year old son). Last Saturday we went with them to a banquet (which conveniently took place in our hotel) put on by a youth organization in Southern Lebanon. The organization had hired a nephew? cousin? of Ibrahim's (it's hard to tell exactly how everyone is related - they are from one of the largest families in Tyre) to film two documentaries - one on traffic accidents and one on environmental issues in Tyre. They screened the films and we had a good meal. It's been such a relief to have someone we know is looking out for us and kind of taking us under his wing.

Anyway, the crux of this post was to explain what Ibrahim and Ryan did last night. Ibrahim has a boat and goes out fishing. They were going to go last weekend, but we had this killer storm that made fishing a suicidal venture. So last night Ryan got home from soccer around 9pm and said "We're going fishing!" Evidently they didn't take the boat out (I think the surf was still too rough), but they sat along the shoreline for a couple hours. Didn't catch a single thing. When Ryan got home around midnight he was soaked to the bone. He was wearing four layers on top, and his bottom shirt was wet. They sat there in the dark with the waves just crashing against them, freezing like popsicles. Ibrahim says next time they'll just take the fish with them.



This is an old picture, but you can see where they were fishing along the shore underneath the palm trees on the left.