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Then I realized we hadn’t even started work and I was already complaining.
“We’ll get out of these hot clothes once we get to our quarters. Our bedrooms are air-conditioned.”
“We have separate bedrooms?” I’d find out later that the nurses usually shared a room with others, all strangers, so I was lucky to have my own room even if I was alone.
“We have separate rooms. It’s conservative here. They love me,” he said, blushing. “So they’d know if I’d been married.”
“Gotcha. I’ll be on my best behavior,” I said, disappointed.
“You don’t have to be. I’m the one,” he said, squeezing my hand. “You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be. What’s next?”
He looked at me apologetically. “We don’t take any time off, even after that grueling trip. After we drop our clothes, we’ll go to eat and then go right to the clinic to work. You’ll see what I mean when I say how grateful they are for any healthcare.”
At the registration desk, a young woman named Nadia who spoke excellent English took me to my room while a man took Flynn to his. We pushed the heavy cart together down a dark hallway. I checked out Nadia’s size and right away had a selection of the underwear items I’d brought to distribute pegged for her.
“We love Dr. Flynn,” she said, grinning over her shoulder at me. “Is Cindy coming on this trip?”
“Not this time,” I said. “I’m new. In every sense of the word.”
“I bet you’ll do fine.”
She opened the door to my room. I was glad to see it was close to the stairwell. Anxiety set in as I thought of fires in a run-down high-rise in the impoverished area.
When I’d told my parents we were flying into Beirut, they had been so worried about my safety that I hadn’t told them it wasn’t our last stop. Tripoli was much worse. They read the same travel alerts online I read, and currently there was a travel advisory.
The political climate, with different religions vying for power and rampant corruption, had undermined the economy. The electrical grid was in shambles, and the trash and waste system was nonexistent. I had read that the smell was overwhelming, and that was correct. Driving by certain areas of the city, I held my fist to my nose.
Add to that the Syrian and Palestinian refugee crisis with over two million refugees, and the healthcare system had reached crisis level. In 2020, the explosion at the Port of Beirut, considered one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, had left thousands dead and forty percent of the population displaced.
The more I had read, the more determined I had become that it was the right time to go, that the people needed our help. We were going to be in Tripoli for a month. Flynn had been honest with me; there was a travel advisory to Lebanon, and crime, terrorism, and civil unrest were at an all-time high in Tripoli.
Flynn had told me how frustrating it was to only have a finite amount of time and resources to give. He was also limited in the treatment he could administer because he was a plastic surgeon and not a general surgeon.
“You’ll see. We’ll be busy eighteen hours a day, and we won’t make a dent. It’s frustrating. I wish I could do this full-time.”
During dinner, he confided in me a secret he had shared with only his father. He wanted to give up his practice in the US and move to Lebanon.
I couldn’t even fathom that. Selfishly, I wondered why he was even giving me the time of day if he had a dream to leave the US. But I didn’t want to make it about me. Not yet, anyway.
That evening, we were driven to the clinic where we’d work. Buildings were pockmarked with battle scars, a sight that shocked me. Homeless women lined the street with outstretched hands. A group of children begging on the corner in the dark upset me.
“So many homeless people,” I whispered.
“They are mostly Syrians in this area,” he said. “We’re at the edge of the Syrian refugee camp.”
I saw a group of men dressed in military fatigues holding rifles.
“It’s not safe to walk around after dark,” Flynn said, his jaw set. “Don’t go anywhere without me, Bella. Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”
“Of course I won’t.”
“It’s much worse here than it was six months ago.”
He looked disturbed, but I didn’t question him.
The driver pulled up under a portico. The building exterior looked sound compared to the war-scarred buildings that surrounded it. The clean and bright interior reminded me of some of the places in the US that I had gone to as a nursing student. It had its own generator so the undependable electricity wouldn’t affect the work that needed to be done.
