When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
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.
At an early age, I quit high school at 17 and joined the Air Force.
My family moved to Israel when I was eight until I was 10, and then we came back, and my parents split up. I was suddenly in a single-parent home and on scholarship. Fifth grade was such a hard year for me.
My father went to boarding school in Sydney when he was 14.
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.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.
Although I went to college in the United States - Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota - I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut.
My mother was an immigrant from Lebanon to the United States. She came when she was 18 years old in 1920.