Last week in Damascus, I accompanied a teenage Iraqi friend — the sister-in-law of a former translator of mine — as she enrolled in a private school for girls in the Old City. The occasion should have been cause for celebration. Zamzam and her family are refugees from Baghdad, where for over a year it’s been too dangerous for her to attend school. And because they’d arrived in Syria about three weeks before, they’d missed the beginning of term. But the school we visited that day made an exception for her case, and now she might dare to think again about studying medicine and becoming a doctor. Not only that, but under Syrian law, families with a child enrolled in school are legally entitled to live in the country. So theoretically they won’t have to worry about being deported.

But the day was an excruciating one for Zamzam, a 17 year-old, a refugee, a New Girl. She bristled when the headmaster lectured her from behind his grand desk in an ornate turn-of-the-century Ottoman reception room. “This is a good school,” he said. “You have to do what your told.” Later, I stood with her in the school courtyard filled with a busy swirl of girls wearing gray smock-like uniforms and playing games under a mural of the Pink Panther and a portrait of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. I had hoped that what little glamor I have as a tall foreign journalist might rub off on Zamzam and make her adjustment to the new school a little easier. But an unsympathetic crone, clearly the school disciplinarian, practically cackled, “No make-up and no jewelry,” as she pointed at Zamzam’s simple gold necklace and her bit of blush. Once we had left the building, Zamzam blurted out: “I’m a smart girl, why should I have to beg to go to school? If they are mean to me I’ll just bomb them.”

When I told Zamzam never to say that again, she explained that all her friends in Baghdad talk that way now. Apparently, American teen-speak standards such as “Whatever!” or “Talk to the hand!” translate into Iraqi as “Shut up or I’ll cut your head off!”

If this sounds as horrible to you as it does to me, think about what other options you have when are young and defenseless and Iraqi and when militias regularly dump headless bodies into your street. What else can you do but turn death and dismemberment into a sick joke? What other options do you have than to take semantic control of the situation and say “I’m going to bomb you!” or “I’m going to cut your head off!” when in fact the reality is that you are the one whose days are numbered?

Clearly Baghdad humor is going to be lost on most of us, but perhaps it is we who are tone deaf not Iraqis like Zamzam. There is an humanitarian crisis on our hands that we’ve done much to create and little to solve. A couple million displaced inside Iraq. A million in Syria. A million more in Jordan. More on the way every day. So what’s more dangerous, raw truth or polite conversation and denial?

I’d like to think that life is going to get better for Zamzam and her family now that they’ve left Iraq, now that they’ve rented an apartment in Damascus, now that she’s in school. But Zamzam’s doubtful. “It’s going to happen here too,” she said. “Just wait.”

US Ambassador Feltman with with Lebanese-American Evacuees Last Summer

I went up to the American embassy yesterday to add more pages to my passport, and absent-minded as I am, was surprised to find it closed for Washington’s Birthday. Of course, it’s appropriate that State Department facilities abroad honor our first president, but all these holidays make it hard to do work. The embassy also shuts down on major events related to Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian sects, and there are a lot of them. If Lebanon had many Jews, the embassy would probably never open.

Still, I don’t envy the members of the foreign service who are posted to Lebanon or begrudge them their days off. What should be a dream assignment — arguably the most beautiful and most westernized Arab country in the Middle East — must at times feel like a white-collar prison sentence thanks to the strict security measures that govern embassy operations. While the rest of us paint Beirut red, they live and work in glorified trailer park conditions in a heavily fortified hilltop compound in a sleepy Christian suburb north of the city, which they can’t leave without advanced notice and armed bodyguards.

The reason for such precaution is Hizballah, the Lebanese Shia Muslim political party which until September 11 had killed more Americans than any other non-state actor. A suicide car bomber linked to a Hizballah faction blew up the old American embassy in West Beirut back in 1983. And though the organization has matured since then, and though many American journalists and aid workers and average citizens regularly visit Hizballah territory and meet with Hizballah members without incident, officials at the American embassy say that the Party of God is actively planning to do them harm, and would if they could.

But all that security must have an effect on the embassy’s ability to promote American interests and formulate policy in Lebanon. Not only is the embassy legally barred from talking to Hizballah — perhaps the most important player in Lebanese politics — one wonders what other parts of society they can’t easily reach while they are stuck in their Green Zone Lite. The net result is that American diplomats in Lebanon, as the most visible representatives of the US, bear the blame for policies that they have less and less of a role in developing (especially under this administration.)

This was clear when the American embassy began evacuating American citizens in last summer’s war with Israel, and the American press was hounding US Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman about why the State Department tried to make evacuees sign a promissory note for the cost of transportation. While it did seem strange that the American government wanted to charge money for an evacuation from a country it was helping to bomb (the US was speed delivering smart munitions to Israel at the time) the mess was hardly Feltman’s fault. All the shots were being phoned in from Washington.

Today when I returned to the embassy to take care of my paperwork, I found myself again feeling sympathetic towards the embassy staff. They have been busy of late with passport applications and consular services for all the Lebanese who have or want American citizenship and who are trying to get themselves out of the country during this time of political crisis. There are about 20,000 people in the country with American citizenship, many of whom have minimal connection to any of the 50 states, who may not own or rent property or pay taxes. One suspects that there are some who’ve never even been to America.

If I were Lebanese, I too would be doing anything possible to get my family out of here. But as I waited in line at American Citizen Serivices, the behavior of one family irked me, that of a father who was getting passports for his three teenage children but who hadn’t renewed his own since 1993. The kids were being kids, smart-aleky and self-consciously cool, the son wearing blue jeans hanging past his ass and a big smirk. I wanted to tell him to pull up his pants and take this process a little more seriously. I thought for the moment of Iraq, and of all the Iraqis who’d worked for the American Army and the American government as translators or advisors or drivers and who now faced all manner of threats and violence but who have been still been denied asylum by our government. They deserve a US passport a thousand times more than this pip-squeak, and for that matter, a thousand times more than me.

–Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Photo by Newsha Tavakolian

The only Valentine I received yesterday from a member of the female persuasion was a telephone call from a 13 year-old Shia girl from south Beirut named Fatima.

I’d met Fatima and her family last summer during the war with Israel when they were living as refugees with some twenty other people in a public school classroom not far from where I live. The family — besides her parents she also has a younger brother — had impressed me by being religious but totally apolitical. Young Fatima in particular seemed endowed with an old soul. “We don’t believe in politics and we don’t believe in war,” she told me. “We pray and we fast and we believe in God.”

So today, I stopped by their home in an apartment block with intermittent town electricity. The father rents a mini-bus which he uses to make some money ferrying school kids and commuters around the working-class suburbs. It’s about as much he can hope for these days. Fatima, who is the best student in her school, wants to be a lawyer and write poetry.

And it turns out she had written a poem for me, which she read by the light of a florescent storm lantern.

“Is there anything more beautiful than the name ‘Andrew the American’?
It is straight like an arrow that shoots though bodies.
It exists in all religions as a golden symbol that shakes the ages.
Have sympathy on me and my poems,
Maybe you’ll see me as a human being,
And look at me as a sister.”

–Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut