When I learned that Marion Osgood was going to Lebanon, I controlled my jealousy by asking her write a story for me about her trip. She did, and here it is. Marion is British, and I have preserved her slightly different spelling of a few words. Also, in case you have not been to London in a while, I will explain that “the Shard” mentioned below is, according to Wikipedia, a 95-storey skyscraper, part of The London Bridge Quarter. It is 1,016 feet high.
I also want readers to know that the publishing house Marion talks about is the one which I was trying to guide through the hazards of civil war and mentioned often in the pages of In Borrowed Houses. In fact I told about efforts to register it under the beautiful name mentioned here. FF
Our Opportunity Is Now!
We had been attending the Sat 7 Conference in Cyprus, and had been updated on their work beaming local-language TV programmes to the minority Christian population throughout the Middle East. We learnt among other things how their programmes are also increasingly well received, albeit covertly, by the majority Muslim population. And now my husband and I had crossed to Lebanon, to visit Sat 7’s new suite of studios, and learn more of their work in this key nation.
Unlike most of the Middle East, Lebanon is mountainous, green, and extensively ‘Christian’. During our visit we saw far more roadside shrines to Mary than we did mosques. Our hotel was actually a Maronite Christian retreat centre, perched high up on the hills above Beirut. We looked down from twice the height of the Shard onto the port and glistening Mediterranean, far below.
Towards the end of our time there we had a spare day, so I had arranged to meet up with Sawsan Tanoury, head of Dar Manhal al Hayat (House of the Source of Life) Publishers, based in Beirut. Other than the Bible Society, Source of Life is the only Evangelical publisher in the whole of Lebanon.
We chatted whilst being shown her offices, after which she suggested we continue our conversation over lunch; with Sawsan driving, we began to lose ourselves in the endless maze of Beirut’s concrete tower-blocks – then finally up, up along precipitous winding roads with dizzy hair-pin bends, high up onto cedar-green hillsides. Here more of the stately Ottoman architecture had been spared the destruction of the Civil War: eventually we arrived at a restaurant in a truly palatial Ottoman building – and sat down to a magnificent Lebanese meze.
Source of Life prioritises local Christian writers – those who actually experienced the Civil War or its after-effects; thus they are writing with the appropriate cultural identity and awareness, albeit in many of the genres with which we would be familiar, such as youth, women’s, Bible study, and theology. ‘Christian’ fiction however is not a popular idea; the only books to have ever broken the mould were the Narnia Chronicles, which sold brilliantly in Arabic.
‘So you are not able to avoid importing and translating?’ I asked.
Sawsan explained it is not always possible to find enough Lebanese writers. If a book is imported and translated it is critically adapted to be relevant to the cultural needs of the community. Additionally Western authors would have to be prepared to subsidise anything they wished to see published in Lebanon. An example of this is a new line in Special Needs Awareness titles.
As the conversation continued, Sawsan grew animated. ‘Our opportunity is now’ she said suddenly; ‘the Syrians are here, in our country, whereas we cannot go to theirs. This opportunity won’t occur again.’ She was warming to the theme which had increasingly impacted our own awareness in the previous few days – that of the refugee crisis.
Many of the refugees who have made their way across the mountains into Lebanon are from the Christian community. Part of our reason for visiting Lebanon was to see first-hand how Sat 7 is touching the lives of these refugees, and we had visited one of the camps in the Bekaa Valley only a day or so earlier. We had sat with them in their tiny temporary homes, enjoyed their coffee, and laughed with them at our few pathetic words of Arabic. We pointed to the television, ubiquitous in every home, and asked about Sat 7. Yes, they received it. Sat 7 has started primary education programmes aimed at the refugee community, to prevent a whole generation missing out on education. This programme goes hand-in-hand with the free Bibles and other literature which Source of Life is distributing among Christians and Muslims in the camps.
Sawsan went on to explain that those they are reaching are mainly women and children, the men either having been killed, or still fighting in the various militias, or already in the West trying to establish themselves so the family can eventually join them.
We negotiated the winding road back down the steep hillsides once more, now with alarming awareness of all we had just eaten; we realised how inspired and challenged we had been, by the work of Sawsan and her publishing house.