I was 12 when my parents told me we were moving to Lebanon. I remember thinking, 'Leba-who?' I had absolutely no concept of the place.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.
My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.
I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.
I was practically born in Cameroon; my family moved there when I was two weeks old.
The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.
I always traveled. I left Cameroon when I was 11 years old. I lived in the USA, in Switzerland.
Well, I grew up between Holland and Israel and then moved to France when I was eleven.
We moved to Gambia from Sweden when I was six years old because my dad was from there. It was definitely a culture shock.
Beirut is where I was born and raised.
When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.