St. Barbara’s Week (3/12/12-9/12/12)

This week we celebrated St. Barbara’s Day in the homes, which is the Lebanese version of Halloween. We all spent our Sunday night being creative and making some pretty scary masks…I think Julius definitely won the prize for the most frightening mask! So we arrived in Deir el Qamar on Monday with almost all of the girls (100+) waiting for us in the courtyard. They were all given masks to wear and were ready to party! It was a long 1-½ hours with a LOT of dancing! We sang songs, ate sweats, played games, it was all very good fun. On Monday night the physiotherapist in Deir el Salib invited us to a Karaoke fundraising event in a restaurant. We were taught how to dance the Dabke (the traditional Lebanese dance) and were forced to sing some songs. We felt slightly out of place since we were the only ones to sing anything in English and all eyes were on us when we sang… we felt like we were famous…or not…

On Tuesday we went to Deir el Salib and were greeted by some very funny looking boys dressed as girls for St. Barbara’s Day.  Some of the boys (Ghattas, Ayman, Charbel, Nounou, Joseph, Toni, and Georges etc.) were dressed Chabrouh style with all clothes you can find on. The boys were all overjoyed to be able to dress up, listen to loud music and sing and dance with the caretakers, Sr, Manal and us. On Thursday we went to Antelias and had a party for the boys there as well. It wasn’t much different to our usual days in Antelias, consisting of singing, dancing and playing games.

On the weekend some of us went up to Sourat to Dr. Issa’s house and enjoyed a nice weekend in the mountains away from all the cars and the noise of Beirut.

By Aglaë