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- The Friday market in Shehat is divided into sections for livestock, fruits, vegetables, equipment and pigeons. Pigeons are a surprisingly popular hobby with the market, rivaling Cairo’s in size, even though the local area has only a small fraction of Cairo’s population. Many other hobbies such as soccer, music and movies were systematically suppressed by the government out of fear of any cult of personality that could rival Gaddafi. Soccer games were announced using just numbers, songs had to include references to Gaddafi, and artists that became too successful were given posts overseas.
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- Derna, a city famous for the large number of fighters that traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan now sends many of it’s young men to fight on the front in Libya. Many people describe the lack of freedom, opportunity, and government abuse as pushing the youth toward violent international jihads and now the trend has changed.
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- The main square in Beida is filled each night with soccer games, music, and plays commemorating the revolution.
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- At a house on the edge of Shehat neighbors the doors often stay open and neighbors constantly visit and help each other. Electricity is cut for a few hours every day, water deliveries have stopped giving credit, and hard currency has stopped circulating. The former government payed monthly sums to unemployed and underemployed.
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- At just 15 years old, this man fought beside Omar Mukhtar in a previous revolution in the green mountains.
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- The wall of a community room in Derna’s main mosque commemorates locals that have been killed by Gaddafi’s forces throughout the city’s long history of rebellion. It includes the photos of political prisoners who died in a prison massacre, soldiers that were shot for refusing orders, rebels from a 1996 uprising, and the latest youth that died on the street in Derna, and at the front. Derna is infamous for sending many fighters to Iraq and Afghanistan, but now the flow has stopped as youth go to Libya’s front and say that they have hope in the future in Derna and have no reason to leave anymore.
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- It’s hard to comprehend the number of foreigners that make up Libya’s workforce. Like in the gulf emirates oil money has been used to hire workers from near and far to staff everything from technical jobs in the oil fields to hard labor on farms. When fighting broke out these workers quickly became refugees and quickly left.
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- A long ways from any fighting, children in the small sea village of Sosa swim in the quiet port. The village has a large hotel built beside an archeological site, but tourism has dried up with the outbreak of fighting.
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- At one time Libya’s largest export was scrap metal from world war battles. Even today the remains of massive battles slowly rust away near Tobruk.
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- Outside Beida a farmer works with his family to water their pear and peach orchard. Libya had a large population of immigrant workers from the middle east and eastern asia, but the revolution forced many of them to return home.
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- The archaeological ruins of Shehat are impressive evidence of the Cyrenaica civilization that predated Islam in Northern Africa. With no tourists around, it has once again returned to the locals as a park for picnickers and school groups.
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- A bull roams freely in the woods near the Shehat Archeological Site Libya, the Green Mountains are a large fertile area in eastern Libya characterized by rolling hills and farms.
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- On the edge of Sosa children play a game of dodging waves and swimming in the surf.
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- A conference for women’s issues in the future constitution is one of the few places to hear dissenting voices about how women are treated by the government. There are many highly educated women in Libya, one group of professors sayed their masters level classes were 90% female. But it is hard for women to get jobs outside of the house or the country.
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- Most of eastern Libya suffers from rolling blackouts of a few hours each day. A few businesses, like this photos studio in Tobruk have set up generators to continue working throughout the day. Rumors about ships with new shipments of gas for power-plants are common and usually incorrect.
Before the revolution the common definition of Libya consisted of one word — “Gaddafi.” Now it consists of “Gaddafi & rebellion.” Since I rushed in with other journalists in February, the images have only reinforced this simple definition, but of course, Libya’s history and psyche is much more complex than the glorified war images we see.
So now I have returned to try and learn more and explore the small towns in the peaceful eastern Libya.
For a country at war the east is surprisingly secure and unified on the surface and as far down as I could dig. But the effects of the war are still felt every day with funerals, a lack of hard currency and electricity cuts.
Each crisis comes on the individual level, from the farmer that can’t reach his normal markets in Tripoli to the father that can’t find a hospital to treat his daughter’s rare illness.