“When you are living with [different kinds of people], you have your very own practical experience, you do not want to pay attention [to] what people notify you about them,” Saliba claimed.
For a nation which is 50 % the dimension of Wales, Lebanon is tremendously various. The country’s inhabitants is break up approximately evenly among Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Christians, and the point out officially recognises 18 different sects. Sectarian divisions played a part in the country’s bloody civil war, and a lot more than 30 decades right after the war ended, many of these divisions stay.
Joelle Rizk, a normal hiker with Liban Trek, recalled that as a woman, she was confined to her personal neighbourhood in East Beirut.
“There was the war – we could not even go to West Beirut,” she stated. Now, on her weekly outings with Moufarege, she finds herself sitting down on hillsides in areas that once would have been off-limitations, chatting with shepherds about the weather and the neighborhood landscape. The experience has motivated in her a new love of her country, Rizk explained.
“I was usually sad that I was born Lebanese, you know, we experienced the war and hardship,” she stated. “And each individual time I travelled, I was so sad when I came back to Lebanon. Now, I am so content that I’m Lebanese. This is all since of the mountaineering.”