One sunny afternoon in September 2006, my friend Amelia and I hitchhiked from the Lebanese capital of Beirut to the south Lebanese city of Tyre. It was a month after the end of the July War – the 34-day Israeli assault that killed some 1,200 people in Lebanon, the vast majority of them civilians – and swaths of the country had been converted into rubble.
We had thumbed our way to Beirut from Turkey via Syria – the latest in a series of international hitchhiking expeditions that had commenced one evening in 2003 in Greece, when the bus was taking too long and we wanted to get to the bar....
After Lebanon, Amelia and I would continue intermittent hitchhiking excursions for another four years. And while the simple humanity that was extended to us time and again was not always as mind-blowingly ironic as when a Lebanese teenager whose house has just been cluster-bombed invites you to move in with her and her family, one thing was consistently clear: there were a lot of good people in a world that was terribly unjust....READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.