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It’s been exactly a year since we published our print coverage of The Church in the Middle East. With that in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to finish the incomplete “Diary from the Middle East.”

Meeting Iraqi refugees

My mother’s 3,000 “be careful” admonitions ring through my head as the driver whips through a Lebanese suburb. “Does he know where he’s going?”

I grip the seat belt across my chest as he turns,. The driver jerks his head back and forth, looking for something familiar. The neighborhood is, well, something out of a movie about the Middle East.

My camera bag is in my lap. I’m in the front seat because, culturally, the man is supposed to sit in the front. A Catholic Relief Services worker is in the back seat along with the managing editor of the Michigan Catholic, Marylynn G. Hewit. She’s a third order Franciscan and a previous winner of the Egan Award.

We’re just into our third day on the journey, Oct. 3, 2008. We’d just heard from folks at the Caritas Lebanon about a migrant detention center and a women’s safe house, which reaches out to victims of human trafficking.

The driver has what seems like a argument with someone on the street, then drives on. We pull up and stop next to what looks like a landfill. The driver pops out. He lights a cigarette.

A jovial man wearing an orange t-shirt strolls over. He says something in Arabic, but it’s his face that tells me we’re welcome. I feel like everyone in the neighborhood is watching us.

The man’s home is a one-room apartment in a small, two-building complex. The two run buildings run parallel to each other, with a narrow road bisecting them. They’re longish, maybe 50 yards. If I remember right.

The man leads us into his apartment, stopping every few steps to gesture “come on” with his hands. The first thing that strikes me is that he’s the Lebanese George Costanza. But then I remember, of course, he’s from Iraq.

Catholic family from central Iraq were refugees in Lebanon.

His wife is standing up in their crowded apartment, holding their newest addition. In the crib behind her, an excited boy shakes the railing. I find out that he’s nearly 2, but he’s smaller than my son, who’s younger.

I find out from a caseworker that the child is malnourished. The translations aren’t great — I got a lot of paraphrasing, not direct quotes — but communication is happening.

Clothes are piled up in a corner. There’s a sunken full-size bed at one end of the room, and two cribs. The whole apartment is not much bigger than two office cubicles, so with two journalists and others from Caritas, it’s pretty squashed. The paint is peeling off the walls and there’s no sink or toilet.

The couple, who have six children, has been living at this location for two years. At one point, one of the CRS workers asks him about the United States invasion of Iraq.

“It was meant to happen,” he says without much thought. “If the Americans didn’t do it, the Iranians would have.”

The man served in the Iraqi army, which can make resettlement difficult. He works occasionally in construction, but otherwise is unemployed. He often drinks the money he does make, a caseworker tells us.

We thank the family for their time. There’s a certain sober blanket that falls on us. They pay $100 a month in rent, but they can’t make it alone. They aren’t saints. The man beats his wife; he spends the family’s money on alcohol. But who deserves this?

The next family we visit is in better living conditions. They’re Iraqi Muslims who left Iraq after the family’s youngest son was kidnapped while playing in front of their Baghdad home.

Young boy kidnapped in Iraq. Family payed ransom and he was returned. The family fled the country.

“They phoned me,” the father said. “First they wanted $50,000, then they made it $40,000 on the second phone call.” They had 20 days to sell all their property to get all the money.

This family had more money at their disposal from savings. We sit on couches and there’s a separate room and kitchen. At least five people live here. The daughters — teenagers — speak fluent English and have cell phones.

“When the kidnappers drove up, they opened the car door and left him,” the father said. The boy wasn’t OK, but he healed. He still has nightmares.

“No one wants to leave their country,” the father says. Leaving was a difficult, but they had to. If the insurgents took his son again, they might kill him. When the father says this, he shudders.

Someone, I think it was the CRS rep, asks the family what it was like before the war.

“It was very good. No one killed anyone,” one of the daughters says. “We had electricity. Now there’s not peace. Every time you go home, someone was killed.”

“You don’t know if something will come from the sky and hit your house,” the father says. They recount how dust kicked up by bombs would blow into their house and cover them. They told us how they’d pass severed arms on the road — one of the daughters would see them on her way to school.

“You tell yourself it’s normal,” she says.

“If you want to know the story you should tell,” the mother tells us, “you should tell the American people to help the Iraqi people still in Iraq.”