Connecting the Lebanese Diaspora with Lebanon
by Steve Izma
With two generations between us in Canada and our great-grandparents’ lives in Lebanon, my brother Mike and I felt distant from the “old country.” None of our parents’ generation nor anyone of ours had ever travelled to Lebanon, and our knowledge of Arabic goes only as far as naming the food we grew up eating.
So when our friends Frank and Antoin from Canada’s Bruce Trail Association proposed that we hike the Lebanon Mountain Trail with them, it felt like the time had come to leap back to the Middle East. Mike’s wife Marian and my daughter Amelia joined us, and we arrived in Lebanon in late April for a nine-day trip, mostly spent in the mountains.
Fortunately for us our unfamiliarity with the country didn’t pose a barrier. We contacted Gilbert Moukheiber of 33 North, who arranged all our accommodations, meals, and travel within Lebanon. He laid out a route that included hikes on various parts of the Lebanon Mountain Trail, such as where it traversed the Shouf Cedar Preserve, the Qadisha Valley, and the Horsh Ehden Nature Reserve. In the areas around Bkassine and the section between Jezzine and Aitanit we joined the LMTA north-to-south through-hikers for two of their last few days on the trail.
Our travels in Canada had familiarized us with the wide variety of vegetation across the country’s 5000 kilometres, but the diversity of trees and other vegetation and the sight of flowers in bloom everywhere in such a compressed geographical space made Lebanon a truly unique ecological experience. Up and down the terraced valleys, we were never far from a tree in blossom, and the different levels of altitude meant different stages of tree growth and fruit development.
Along our way we visited many of Lebanon’s historic sites, including Deir el Qamar, Beit ed-Dine, Aanjar, Byblos, numerouse churches and monasteries, the National Museum of Lebanon, the Khalil Gibran museum, and, not to be missed by any visitor to Lebanon, the Roman temples in Baalbek.
In the Horsh Ehden Nature Reserve we joined members of the LMTA to celebrate its relationship with the Bruce Trail Association by planting a cedar tree and hiking along the Bruce Trail friendship section of the Lebanon Mountain Trail.
On our last day in the mountains we reached Bziza, the village from which my father’s parents had emigrated to North America. As we began a conversation with Bziza’s mayor at the ruins of the Roman temple in the village, another man walked up to us. No sooner had I seen his face than I recognized the family genes. Enthusiastically extending my hand to him, said, “Hi, we’re related!”
Nearly in a state of shock, we returned to his home and pieced together the story. Our newly discovered cousin, Peter, is the grandson of Butrus Andari, a brother of my grandmother’s of whom we had not known. In 1962, our grandfather returned to Lebanon from Canada for medical treatment and unexpectedly died in Bziza in the Andari family house. Peter remembered my grandfather well, and showed us the church where the funeral Mass was held as well as the crypt in which he was buried.
Relatives long lost to us welcomed us warmly, but so did the many people we met in the guesthouses and residences we ate and slept in along the trail. I can’t believe our luck at connecting with the LMTA, whose environmental mandate and commitment to a balanced, sustainable natural economy provided us with an opportunity to overcome decades of distance from our family heritage without us feeling like pampered tourists or disconnected spectators of an exotic culture. The trip has been a revelation to us and we’re all eager for a return visit.