Going Back When Things Are Falling Apart: What Syrian-Lebanese Americans Find When They Visit During Crisis

In the weeks after the 2020 Beirut port explosion, Maya Frem bought a plane ticket. She'd been watching her WhatsApp groups light up with messages from family members — photos of shattered windows, voice notes recorded in the immediate aftermath, the specific kind of chaos that doesn't translate into news graphics. Her cousins were okay. Her aunt's apartment was not.

"People kept asking me why I was going," says Maya, a graphic designer based in Atlanta. "Like, the place just blew up, why are you going toward it? And I couldn't explain it in a way that made logical sense. I just knew I needed to be there."

She spent three weeks in Beirut. She helped her aunt clear debris. She cried a lot. She also ate the best food of her life, she says, at a small place in Gemmayze that had somehow survived with its kitchen intact. She came back to Atlanta a different person in ways she's still sorting out.

The Pull That Doesn't Require Explanation

For Syrian-Lebanese Americans, the impulse to return during times of crisis is not exactly rational, but it's also not irrational. It exists in a category that's harder to name — something between duty, love, and a need to make the abstract concrete. When the news is about a place where your family lives, watching from afar creates a particular kind of helplessness that some people simply can't sustain.

"I was sending money. I was sharing news articles. I was doing all the things you do from here," says Tariq Barakat, a teacher in Detroit whose family is from a village outside Homs. He visited Syria in 2022 despite persistent State Department advisories against travel. "But there's something about actually being in a place that changes your relationship to it. You stop reading about the crisis and you start understanding it."

That shift — from reading to understanding — is something that almost everyone who makes these trips describes. And it's genuinely significant. The gap between knowing that your relatives live without reliable electricity and actually sitting with them through a four-hour power cut is not a small gap.

The Guilt That Comes With the Ticket

But let's be honest about the other thing that comes up, because Syrian-Lebanese Americans who've made these trips are often honest about it themselves: the complicated emotions don't start when you land. They start when you book the flight.

There's a particular guilt that attaches to visiting a place in crisis when you have the ability to leave. You arrive with your American passport and your dollars that stretch further than they should in a collapsed economy. You eat meals that your relatives can barely afford to serve you. You document things on your phone. And then, after a few weeks, you go back to your apartment in Atlanta or Detroit or Los Angeles, and your relatives stay.

"My cousin said something to me that I think about all the time," says Maya. "She said, 'It's nice that you came. It will be nice when you leave too.' Not mean — just true. My being there was both good and a reminder of what she doesn't have."

That tension — between the genuine value of showing up and the complicated privilege of being able to leave — doesn't resolve neatly. It's part of the experience, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Solidarity or Tourism?

Some people in the community are more direct about their skepticism of crisis visits. The question of whether these trips constitute genuine solidarity or a kind of disaster tourism — using someone else's suffering as a backdrop for your own emotional journey — is one that gets raised, sometimes quietly, sometimes not.

"I've seen people post their crisis trip content online and it makes me uncomfortable," says Nour Sleiman, a Lebanese-American writer in New York. "There's a version of it that's very much about the person visiting, not the people they're visiting. Look at me, bearing witness. Look at me, connecting to my roots through rubble."

She's careful to note that she doesn't think everyone who goes is performing. She's gone herself. But she thinks the question of why you're going, and how you're representing it afterward, matters.

"If you go and you help and you come back and you use that experience to actually do something — advocate, donate, educate people — that's one thing," she says. "If you go and you come back with aesthetic grief photos and a temporary profile picture change, that's something else."

This is an uncomfortable line to draw, partly because most people's motivations are genuinely mixed. The person who goes to help their aunt clear rubble also takes photos. The person who goes partly for the experience of going also carries groceries and sits with grieving neighbors. Human motivation is not clean.

What You Bring Back

What seems consistent across almost all accounts of these visits is that the people who make them come back changed in ways that are hard to articulate to people who haven't been.

Tariq describes a persistent dissonance after returning from Syria. "I'd be in the grocery store here, and I'd be thinking about what my family was eating that week. I'd be at a work meeting complaining about something small and I'd feel this — I don't know, this shame isn't the right word. More like a recalibration. Everything looked different."

Maya says something similar. "I was less patient with certain conversations. More patient with other things. I stopped caring about a lot of stuff that I used to care about. And I cared more about the things that actually mattered."

Both of them also describe a deepened relationship with family members — not just an emotional closeness, but a more honest understanding of what those relatives' lives actually look like. The family you know through WhatsApp messages and holiday video calls is a partial picture. Being present fills in the rest.

The Question of Whether to Go

For Syrian-Lebanese Americans who are weighing whether to make one of these trips, there's no universal right answer. The safety considerations are real and serious — both Syria and Lebanon have presented genuine dangers at various points, and no amount of emotional need makes a conflict zone risk-free.

But for those who do go, and come back, the experience seems to do something important: it makes the connection between the diaspora and the homeland less abstract. It transforms "my people are suffering" from a statement into a felt reality. And it tends to produce people who are more committed, more informed, and more honest about what's actually happening — which, in a community that is constantly being asked to explain itself to American neighbors and colleagues, is not nothing.

"I'm a better spokesperson for my community now," says Maya. "Not because I went through something. But because I stopped pretending I understood something I'd only read about."

That might be the most defensible reason to go: not to perform connection, but to actually have it.