Extremaduran lives in Lebanon

Antonio Armero, a journalist from Hoy (Badajoz) writes: " In the military headquarters Miguel de Cervantes´  in Marjayoun (Lebanon) there is a report to be found on every corner. The working premise has been to attempt to show how the 425 army members from the Mechanized Brigade Extremadura XI live there, as they are usually based in Bótoa (Badajoz) but are in Lebanon since the middle of November and will come back between the 15th and 24th of May. The idea is to explain at what time they wake up, what they eat, how they relate amongst themselves, what kind of work they do and in which context it develops and up to what point they assume risky situations, etc."

“If you understand what is happening in Lebanon then it is because you know nothing about the country. Nico Lupo, a Catalonian freelance journalist who has been living in Beirut for 2 years, told me that this is a sentence sometimes used by journalists in the area to summarize the reality they are trying to explain on a daily basis. It is a complex situation we try to summarize —too much, really— in the first report titled “425 Extremadurians guard the blue line”. It is written with the idea of situating the reader without going into more depth. From that point onwards, the following pieces have tried to meetthe challenge of telling how those who pass their days in the headquarter Cervantes live.”

“At the same time, on the website we have been publishing photo albums about the life at the headquarters, as a complement to a blog (7 days in Lebanon) with an informal tone, conceived as a space to collect details about exactly that: daily life.  And, finally, next to the blog we set up a window that gathered what we were saying through Twitter, including the reactions, mostly signed by the military personnel’s families. A work that occupied the day from the beginning to the end and that has been, personally and professionally, as intense as it has been interesting.”

A newspaper, small as it may be also travels up to where “its people” live. Even though “its people” are more than 3000 kilometers away. This is the coverage, with a sadly unexpected ending, of those days in Lebanon.