Wadi al Sitt (The Lady's Valley)
The road to Wadi al Sitt is being enlarged which suggests more people will be passing through. One of the men working on the road asks us not to take his picture "if my father sees this, he will think that his son doesn't know how to do anything else than build stone walls."
Further on an entire family from Beirut is illegally picking fruits and vegetables from the fields. Since they made it all the way to the mountain why not come back with a bag full of fresh produce?
The bucolic scenes continue in the nearby village where Christians and Druze live together. Plastered on a wall is a large poster of the Christian leader General Michel Aoun who recently returned from exile. Down the road a family is making tomato sauce or rather, the father is making the sauce while his wife and son are playing rackets on their terrace. In the background church bells start to ring.
Knaissé
Knaissé is a small village above Richmaya which counts according to its villagers 13 people during the winter and 150 to 200 in the summer. This didn't stop anyone from building a very big, ultra modern church; as if its size was necessary to re-affirm the Christian presence in the village.
Biré: the children's village
Mass is about to start when we arrive. The children acting as if they own the place squabble to get a go at ringing the bell. If one looks closely though there are also quite a few old and elegant people hugging the walls or sitting on their porches. The absence of any real jobs in the mountain forces working age people to head to the cities. As someone said, "this is a great place if you want to be a Buddhist monk but apart from that there's not much to do. '' The deserted silk factories that pepper the mountain remind us of the economic reality. Rural exodus has been depleting the mountain ever since the end of the Nineteenth Century and until today, nothing has reversed the phenomenon. |
