Lucien Bodard

A great journalist - 'Lulu le Chinois'. Lucien Bodard was born in China, loved Asia, and knew how to tell stories about it, both in his books and in his articles in France-Soir.

For Cats...

Gift of Play / Cadeau de jeu | Aviva Community Fund

This is how we want this schoolyard to be - whereas so far, it is just a concrete jungle. Please help us to realize our dreams and vote for this project. This is the only thing we ask for - your vote.

There are two days left to vote for this project, here. On behalf of the kids, thank you!

Is this how the world sees us? Hope not...

Youth and New Media in the Middle-East

This is a most interesting study on the use of new media in 3 countries in the Middle-East (Lebanon, Jordan, UAE). The author is Jad Melki of the American University of Beirut (AUB). Remember his name!

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Youth and media in the Middle East

Lebanon again, and Syria

I have been back in Amsterdam for a while now - almost a month, come to think of it! And life is so hectic again - no time to tell all there is to tell about the rest of Lebanon, and about Syria, where I travelled with my son Jonas.

But the least I can do is to share the pictures with you. So here are some more pictures of Lebanon... and you will find the others if you scroll down this page. The captions - in sofar as they don't exist yet - will follow as soon as possible...

More Lebanon pictures:



And more:



And the first Syria album:



And the second:



And the third and last:




That's it, folks! For the time being...

Quiet days in Beirut

This is my third day in Beirut - the second full day. I have been very busy walking (and running!) up and down the Corniche - for in Rome, do as the Romans do. And then, I had to get to know the area - Ain al-Mreisseh, just west of downtown. I wondered about the derelict buildings, scattered among the new, extremely posh and often gated high-rise buildings. Well, they ARE remnants of the civil war, twenty years after it officially ended. Downtown, everything is spic and span - but all around, hmmm...

This war, still so present in the city, and so (apparently) absent from the minds of all the people I met. I seldom met such friendly, open people - they seem so peaceful... And yet, they have been killing one another for fifteen years. When I ask them, they have no explanation. And yet, one factor - apart from all the others, international and national - seems obvious: their community system. This is the basis of the whole society, everything is divided along the lines of religion and ethnicity. Their communities are much more fenced off than those in, say, Belgium. Today, in the newspaper The Daily Star, I read about the election of the Beirut Order of Physicians' chairman. And I was smiling ironically about what I perceived to be the 'provincialism' of this city - only a local newspaper would have published a news item like this on the front page, I thought. And then I started reading the article, and my mouth fell open. Because even the doctors here choose their chairman according to religious criteria, or rather, the different candidates were backed by the different parliamentary alliances. And it stated seriously that, ever since its beginnings in 1946, only two Muslims had been elected at the head of the Beirut Order of Physicians, whereas more than half its members are Muslims. And The Daily Star writes: 'Several parties have been debating the issue of rotating the post of the head of the order between Muslims ans Christians each term. Such a policy is adopted by the Syndicate of Engineers.

Really...