Crossposted: "intimate dispatch from Beirut"

From one blog, Green Beans and Drool, by a grad student named Jennifer who recently stayed in Beirut (via Juan Cole):

Monday, July 17, 2006: intimate dispatch from Beirut:

Evelyne forwarded an email from her brother, Lucien, who is a humanitarian activist and pastor at an Evangelical church in Beirut..... [photos of the pastor]

This is my translation (from French) of his email:

The sky is blue
The sky is red
The sky is black
It's raining fire
It's raining ashes
It's raining blood
A woman howls in sadness
A little girl is frozen in terror
A child is fixed in horror

Thank you for thinking about us! The country is screaming through the spew of bombs. Officials from all borders cry for vengeance. There is a god with a black beard who claims to speak for God. A commotion as the sorcerer's apprentices cook up all their magic potions. Meanwhile crowds of thousands give way and fold to the suffering of perpetual exile, of destruction without end.

Finally, among these thousands of displaced people, some familiar faces emerged. Thirty people who escaped from the furnace. A ring on the phone informed me - it was my friend Kazem. He told me about his village. Members of his family escaped the disaster and made their way toward Beirut. They were here finally after a long journey, and the visage of the group was hagard. They had hoped to find a place in a hotel somewhere, as they had the means, but they searched in vain.

A second call from the Hajjeh family shook my cell phone. The call was a swoon of sadness, a sinister scream. The 25-year-old husband of Eva, a daughter of the Hajjeh family, had been missing since the morning and was found dead. He had been with an emergency group who was trying to distribute food to displaced families. He was torn apart in the bombing of a nine-floor building in Tyre, a city already martyred a hundred times over -

Sorry. I'm weeping.*

Lucien

* "Sorry je pleure," it reads in the original French.