Hezbollah art show

My second assignment for The Daily Star took me to a school in one of Beirut’s southern suburbs. I was covering the opening of an art exhibition. I knew the art was produced by children and the event was sponsored by one of Hezbollah’s politicians. I descended into the school’s basement.
From the stairs there was a wide aisle curtains that ran about 50 feet on each side. Bottles of juice and cookies sat in neat circular clusters on tables along each side of the aisle. At the end of the aisle, the curtains turned, enclosing areas of the 5-story school’s enormous basement. To the left, the curtained enclosure was small. It ran to the side of a stage about one-quarter of the room away.
To the right, the curtain turned and ran about 50 feet turning again and running the width of the room, making the shape of an “L” with half it’s base amputated. It created the back wall of the open area with about 500 green plastic chairs placed in rows in front of the stage. I took a seat.
People streamed in, and it became clear the 4 o’clock start time would not be strictly adhered to. I got up and stared counting chairs.
“Hello, can I help you?” a man in a suit asked, smiling at me. I told him I was with the paper and had come for the exhibit. I first assumed he worked there. In fact, he was just an attendee who spoke English and wanted to help the one person there who looked, “different.”
He offered to sit with me. Two aisles divided the seating into four sections. I sat us down in the first row of the back section nearest the stairs. People continued to enter, and the place was filling up. I realized the men were only sitting in the section in front of us. The others were filled with women and children. Women were walking down the aisle past of my friend and I to find seating.
He tapped me on the shoulder and made a “let’s go” gesture, pointing toward seating in the section with all the men.
“I think we’re in the women’s way,” he said, referring, it seemed, to the people walking down the aisle past us with plenty of room to maneuver, not wanting to directly acknowledge the segregation nor find himself sitting in the wrong place.
Soon a man took the stage to recite from the Koran, followed by a small girl reciting a poem and then a man talking about something, presumably just an introduction for the politician who several men stood and bowed for as he walked from his seat in the front row near the middle of the stage.
During the poem, someone who either worked there or was in charge of crowd control came up to talk to my friend. Soon we were standing in the smaller curtained-off where the man kept asking if I had a journalist’s credential card. I handed him the letter addressed “To whom it may concern,” that identified me simply as “the holder of this letter,” an intern.
The man was not satisfied. My friend spoke with him for a while and kept turning back to me asking if I had the card. (He didn’t seem to know what the man was asking for exactly. I knew. It’s the official journalist identification card I can’t seem to get my hands on.)
I pointed to the managing editor’s phone number at the bottom of my letter and told my friend they speak Arabic. We were allowed to take our seats, and the man reappeared in about 10 minutes to give my letter back.
My friend translated some of the politician’s speech but fell silent around the time I heard “Amreeka” mentioned a few times. Later he apologized for his silence, saying he didn’t know the English for everything the politician said.
Onto the art. Organizers opened the curtain along the short base of the “L” and people poured in. I took my time getting in, and my friend started talking to people he knew. He’d offered to help me talk to people, get some information as to what this art exhibition was all about.
As I was walking into the exhibition space, he placed a hand on my shoulder and told me he’d be right back. I saw him briefly in the crowd 10 minutes later as I looked at the giant collection, but then he disappeared. I found no other English speakers and returned to the paper with nothing more than descriptions of children’s art.