Category Archives: Lebanon

Crest Arabia: Spread a Smile?

Crest Arabia has recently launchedan online campaign called “Spread The Smile.”

Some of you may remember a campaign centered around “smiles” by Crest last year, where we had to vote for some of our female friends in their quest to be voted as person with the best smile. But no matter, the premise this year is quite different and more engaging: Instead of voting for the prettiest smile, you’d be voting for the person who made you smile the most, be it because of a joke they posted, a picture or even a video.

Upon liking their page and checking the leaderboard, I was surprised to see that almost none of the top-voted entries are actually creative. Most of them are pictures of babies looking cute. And what’s worse, none are funny.

I had to dig among the videos and pictures to find ones that made me smile. When it came to the text submissions, the corniness shone through. There’s one submission, with over 2000 votes, which goes like this:

“i wanna tell you a story
simply……. smile to everyone
no thing deserve ..smile ….life is short and at the same time it’s so good 🙂 :)”

If you think this is straight out of a tweet by Elissa, it’s highly possible she might have said it as some point.

Among other text entries, you have one with over 1730 votes that says: “Go east go west Oral B and Crest are the BEST” – what are we now, first graders?

Come on people, is this the best you can do?

The campaign is creative, to be honest. The involvement in it that I’ve seen so far? Pitiful.

If you think you can do better you can still enter the competition, which ends on March 31st. You might as well come up with a Lebanese Meme and submit it, it’ll still be better than the stuff getting votes, regardless of how overdone you think memes have become.

You can check out the Crest Arabia Facebook page here and the Spread The Smile competition here.

The Batroun – Tannourine Highway

Back in 2000, I used to go on trips to Tannourine with a friend and complain about the constant works taking place on the roads leading there.

“It’s for a good thing,” the man always told me. I never knew what he meant until very recently. I only realized the importance of the full scope of the project at hand yesterday when it took me ten minutes to get from my hometown to Tannourine, using the newly opened section of the Batroun-Tannourine Highway, the part extending from the town of Bejdarfel to Assia.

Easier commute, easier ambulance trips, easier impromptu road trips…. You name it.

We, as Lebanese, always nag about the dismal state of our infrastructure. So it’s nice to highlight something good for a change. And this is definitely on the advanced side. Instead of working on already existing roads, they’ve created new ones in valleys and mountains to cut distances short. And the effort put in the highway shows.

There’s still a little more work that needs to be done on some of the newly finished sections: put up lanes and fix some asphalt-related issues, but overall, it is a great drive. At some points, with the towering mountains around you all full of snow, you feel like you’ve been taken out of the stereotype image you have of Lebanon and to some section of the Italian alps. It is absolutely breathtaking.

Batroun’s MPs have been working hard to get the highway plans underway and hopefully their enthusiasm and the highway will be properly maintained. The final stretch of the project extending from my hometown, Ebrine, to Batroun will start soon.

The newly finished part, just outside the town of Bejdarfel

Just outside my best friend's hometown: Boxmaya. Apparently you can go to Al Koura from here as well. I had no idea.

The older part of the highway

I bet Fairuz would be happy that her trip from Hamlaya to Tannourine is rendered much shorter now.

The Lebanese Help: An Ethiopian Maid Beaten Up In Front of her Embassy

After initiating a new section on this blog called The Lebanese Help, the details of which you can check out here, LBC has procured a video of an Ethiopian maid being beaten up in front of her embassy by a Lebanese man.

I won’t comment on the content of the video. I’ll just leave you to judge.

The whole anti-racism movement in Lebanon is so weak it grasps at straws, even if it’s a harmless comedy skit. We also tend to get up in a fit the moment something like this video surfaces. We never see the maids as people who are coming here because they really have to, not because they want to.

We think with our $150 we can own them. We think with the miserable salary we give them, we can silence them.

But the maids have a story. And I will tell it. Those who will read them, good on you. Those who don’t, you’ll find company in darkness.

The Hurdles Facing Lebanese Women Today – Happy International Women’s Day?

This is a guest post by Agnès Semaan, a current law student at the Université Saint–Esprit de Kaslik (USEK). You can follow her on twitter here.

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I’ll start this article by sharing with you some of what I learned at law school:

1) If you want to cheat on your wife, do it with many girls not just one long-term extra marital affair or simply don’t bring your mistress home because only then can a man be trialed for adultery.

2) I learned that if my rapist married me, his crime would be nullified.

3) I learned that I cannot sue my husband if he raped me.

4) I learned that if I want my children to be Lebanese, I better marry a Lebanese because that’s the only way for my children to get my nationality.

I’m not a Feminazi. I’m just someone who noticed how this day lost its political flavor. The International Women’s Day is not about forwarding some cheesy Whatsapp message to all your girlfriends wishing them a nice day, It’s a day that honors the work of the Suffragettes that campaigned for women’s right to vote and most of all to remind us that inequities still need to be redressed.

And it is here that I address the following:

 

1 – Nationality

Why nationality is needed is quite simple: if you don’t have the Lebanese nationality you must continuously secure residency and work permits that enable you to live and work legally in Lebanon and you are not granted access to public education and other services at the same low fees that Lebanese citizens do.

Here’s a fun fact: an Ottoman law allowed women to naturalize their children, as in grant full citizenship rights, when born on Ottoman soil regardless of the spouse’s nationality.

I can go on and on about how not being able, as a woman, to pass your nationality to your children weakens the woman’s status and role because she’s not treated as an equal citizen; thus contradicting the Lebanese constitution, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). But let’s face it, it comes down to the Palestinians and the right of return. Some lawmakers are against this in order to protect Palestinians’ right to return to Palestine (UN General Assembly resolution 194). So since that’s the case, why are we not worried about Palestinian women who get married to Lebanese men?!

2 – Penal code

Lebanon must amend discriminatory laws to ensure conformity with CEDAW and international standards like the international Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995. The sanctity of the private home, guaranteed in our constitution, should not be a getaway in affairs of sexual domestic violence because marital rape is still rape and it definitely needs legal recognition (art. 503 and 504). However, this law needs to have a safety net for the husbands because they will be abused if the law is overprotective and over cautious because otherwise one will be able to blackmail their spouse using the prerogative bestowed by this law upon them. Many reforms must be made to the criminal law for the simple reason that it’s not acceptable that a rapist not be prosecuted and his conviction be nullified if he marries the victim (art.522) and that a man will only be tried for adultery if he has extra-marital sex in the conjugal home or if he has a long-term extra-marital relationship along with a much softer sentence than a woman would get in such circumstances (articles 478, 488 and 489)?

3 – Inheritance

Current status: an absolute failure.

It’s 2012 and a Muslim girl still gets half of what her brother inherits. I can’t even begin to describe how dreadful this law is. Every single word in the formulation of that law is insulting and to go into every detail would make this post extremely long and repulsive. The Christian personal status law, although better, still fails in different areas mainly with all the “smartassery” there, such as the implied notion that Muslims cannot inherit from Christians. What we need is an optional civil law, point à la ligne.

4 – Elections and the quota

Yes. Women should not be limited in a certain number of candidates. Why can’t all the 128 deputies in parliament be females? It’s a viable question and absolutely rightful to be asked. But let’s not get carried away in our wishful, foolishly optimistic thinking: Half a loaf of bread is better than no bread at all, and this is an effective way to encourage women to run for elections. So that’s why we should at least start by ratifying a women’s quota bill before 2013.

5 – The women?

Why do we find time to complain about traffic, politicians, watch a soccer game going on in some European country and get carried away, change our display picture on blackberry 20 times per day, tweet about Christian Louboutin’s new collection, comment “hayete kom t belle!”on EVERY.SINGLE.PICTURE. but we can’t find time to address the previously mentioned issues? Rights are not given, they are taken and that’s why we need to raise our voices to make ourselves heard in a sea of male politicians who quench our voices simply by them outnumbering us in every way possible. It is here that I find that women are the main hurdle facing women. We tend to be cynical with regards to each other, pessimistic about each other assuming power, that we believe the best options out there are not really women. And the cycle repeats itself, leading to more and more marginalization of this half of the Lebanese society.

I’ll finish by saying this: it’s not hard to change laws. Get a bunch of influential women into parliament and you’re well underway. Our greatest challenge here is not changing the laws but changing Lebanese mentalities. Ratifying new laws might be the first step in that direction. Until next year, here’s hoping my fellow Lebanese women that we’ll see some change.

 

The Lebanese Help

As I was sitting with some family members who were visiting my mother after a recent surgery, the issue of the “help” in Lebanon came up.

I sat and listened as the “grown-ups” spoke about the maids that entered their homes and left. One of my family members, however, had never had a maid. With her turning 40 and an increasing backache, she was considering the idea – especially with one being available at her disposal the moment she says yes to her sister’s offer.

But that woman was worried. The cause of her anxiety? She only had one bathroom at her house and God forbid the maid uses the same bathroom she uses.

I snapped.

I never thought the passages present in the book, The Help, would actually pop up in such dramatic fashion in a Lebanese society. I never thought for a moment the bathroom issue was actually an issue in Lebanon. Aren’t those maids cleaning the bathroom to begin with? Aren’t we, in 2012, at a level of culture and knowledge that is sufficient to know that, unlike popular belief, those maids are not bringing in with them a ton of foreign viruses the like of which Lebanon has never seen before?

I replied to my family member. I was strict and somewhat rude in my reply. I think she was offended but I didn’t care. I knew Lebanese society was racist but you never think it goes on in your family until it actually takes place in front of you.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Flash forward a few days later, I was having dinner with a couple of friends my age. And if you thought the older generation, with its minimal contact early in life with “the help,” may be justified somewhat in the racist ideas that swirl through their heads, then what “excuse” could you come up with when a twenty two year old agrees with my 40 year old family member about the bathroom issue? The justification given was: but they are “dirty.”

And it is then that the need for a Lebanese version of The Help became obvious to me. Many people had spoken about how that book, and movie, were very relevant to our society today. Most of those people had thought about that only fleetingly, for the few moments after having finished the book or the movie. Some had even blogged about its relevance

But then I thought, why not have an online version of The Help, adopted to Lebanese society, that tells stories of the maids that come to our homes, before something bad happens to them and their story becomes top news and activists get outraged at the injustice in our society when it comes to “the help.”

If you have your own maid story you want to share, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll start with telling the story of one of the maids that came into our home really soon.