Today, July 10, an article of great interest to me, and surely to Lebanese Americans and every friend of Lebanon, came somehow into my mailbox. Written by Dr. George T. Cody, executive director of the American Task Force for Lebanon, the article deals with the power level story of the most painful period of my life, told in my memoir from a worm’s eye view.
My story about this actually begins on Jan 26, 1987, when Lebanese radio stations broadcast reports that the U.S. State Department would order all Americans to leave Lebanon and I refused to believe it. Cody’s report begins two days later when George Schultz actually invalidated American passports for travel to Lebanon.
I got the news that day from the BBC. Quoting from In Borrowed Houses, page 271, it happened like this: “At 6:00 a.m., as I was drinking coffee in bed, the voice from London told me. The reality was simple, simple like a wall falling, tipping and slamming down flat. As though I had to throw the weight off my body, I jumped to my feet and stood there. Later, overcome by grief, I would be perplexed that I could stand, that I had not cried out, that I could walk into the kitchen and say to Wayne, ‘Did you hear it?’ But for the next hour I stumbled around my kitchen, not knowing how to prepare breakfast. I misplaced the spatula. I burst into tears. I went upstairs three times to get my coat.”
Already for twelve years, an alien civilian in the middle of a civil war, I had been learning what it meant to be powerless and now I had to face a new lesson. My own passport did not belong to me. It belonged to the American State Department, who could tell me where I could use it. On the other hand, I did have a certain amount of freedom. Though the State Department could tell me where to use their documents; it could not tell me where I could go. I was in a trap, like a prisoner in a small cell, but I was free to walk from one wall to the next and back.
The mission board that paid my salary also had something to say about what I could do, but unlike the State Department, they were sympathetic with my purposes. If I could find a way to do it without my passport, they would agree to my going to Lebanon. With their permission, I lived on the island of Cyprus, rode ferries back and forth across the water and spent one quarter of my life, only two weeks at a time, in Lebanon.
This victory came at great expense. In fact my stress level increased, because I was in much more danger than I had been while living among friends in my little stone house in Beit Meri. On that boat I was truly vulnerable, had anyone cared to kidnap me. It would have been so easy for me to get on board in one port and never appear at the other. And while doing my work in Lebanon I lived under the caution to be very careful not to get involved in anything that would call the embassy’s attention to me, because then they might feel obligated to do something about this rebellious woman whom they did not want there.
And then it happened that one morning in Cyprus I received a message by phone, telling me about the sudden unlikely appearance in Lebanon of something our family longed for. A baby boy had been found in a damaged and abandoned building; if I came soon I should be able to adopt him. I went. And I stayed more than two months, because after I adopted the baby there were complications with the paper work enabling me to leave the country with him. I certainly couldn’t leave without him! Finally, my problems reached an impossible point, a conundrum that no one could solve except the American consul. But how could I, present in the country in defiance of the law, go to see the consul? Through the intervention of an influential Lebanese friend, I learned that the consul knew I was in Lebanon, even knew exactly where I was and was willing to help me. I never saw his face, nor he mine, but he performed a kind deed in my behalf. So far as I could see, he did this without leaving any paper trail, and until today I have been very careful not to put this in writing for public consumption.
The story of bringing home this baby would fill a book and is not in my memoir at all, though I did mention the mostly spiritual hardship of this period. I also tell in my epilogue that it was years after our retirement in California when the State Department lifted the ban against travel to Lebanon. Today I learned from Dr. Cody’s article how the efforts of the ATFL were significant in accomplishing that, and I offer a word of thanks to them, to the friends of Lebanon in the American Congress and to then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who announced on July 30, 1997, that she would let the ban lapse on July 31. Her explanation later was, “It was the right thing to do.”
The baby I brought to America in September 1993 was re-adopted in Virginia by my daughter Jan, becoming my grandson, Samuel Fuller Carruthers. In March 2013 we took him to Lebanon where he saw the place where he was miraculously found and met the man who found him. This spring Samuel graduated from Radford University where he has been admitted to graduate school. Dr. Cody’s article, which inspired me to write this post, was published on July 9, Samuel’s 22nd birthday.
My life has its share of bitter memories, sprinkled throughout with amazing gifts. Today I write out of a grateful heart.