Mona Khalil

Khalil was born and spent the formative years of her childhood in the Nigerian city of Lagos, when the West African country was still a colony and protectorate ruled by the British Empire.[1] Her parents were diaspora Lebanese with a Shia Muslim background originating from Jabal Amil.[2] Many families from that area had escaped mass-poverty caused by systematic discrimination from the imperial Ottoman rulers against the Twelver Shia Muslim inhabitants between the late 19th century[3] and the 1920s, when the five Ottoman provinces constituting modern-day Lebanon came under the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, by migrating to Western Africa.[4]

In a 2017 oral history interview for the Storytellers Project of the Beirut-based feminist Knowledge Workshop (KW) Khalil described her mother as a "society woman" who did not care much about her children. Khalil stresses that she instead had a very close relationship with her nanny, developed a profound love for nature and always felt in her own identity more Nigerian than Lebanese.[1]

Mansouri beach in 2019, with a view on the Ladder of Tyre.

Hence, she suffered badly, especially due to the separation from her nanny, when at the age of seven years she had to move to Lebanon together with her young sister. Khalil attended the US-American Beirut Evangelical School for Girls and felt discriminated there, since she mainly spoke Nigerian English and only poor Arabic. In contrast, Khalil spent happy childhood days during weekends and vacations at her family's farm with a beach house in the coastal village of Mansouri, about 95 kilometers south of Beirut and just a few kilometers south of the ancient port city of Tyre. The area was mainly inhabited by Palestinians who had fled from their homeland in the context of the 1948 Nakba.[1]

According to her own account, Khalil got married at the age of 21 years under the pressure of her family to lead a bourgeois life and had a child.[1]

Shortly after the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in early 1975, Khalil fled from Lebanon[5] because of an "incident".[1] She found refuge in the Netherlands where she worked in a museum[6] as a porcelain restorer.[7] During her time in Europe, Khalil also acquired the citizenship of the United Kingdom, which she was entitled to because of being born in Nigeria when it was still a British colony.[1]

In 1982, Khalil was devastated by a psychological trauma due the death of her only child in the Ionian Sea off Corfu. The young boy was snorkeling for starfish and run over by the drunk driver of a speedboat.[1] In HIMA – a 2021 short documentary by filmmaker Giulia Franchi – Khalil describes this cruel stroke of fate as a turning point in her life:

« You don't have a choice : either, be yourself and live your life, or kill yourself and finish with this. So my way of thinking is compelety different than my family's way of thinking. They all wanted me to be someone who I am not. I was married, I had a child, I did shut up for a long time, until I lost him. When I lost him... that was it. I woke up. »[8]

Khalil (right) and her longtime associate Habiba Fayed in 2019.

In the KW-interview, Khalil elaborates that she went through extensive psychiatric treatment and psychotherapy in the Netherlands which she credits with saving her life. At the same time, Khalil stresses, she vowed to limit herself to only do things in her life that would bring her joy. She left her husband and developed the dream to return to Mansouri, the place of her happy childhood days.[1] In the meantime, she and her siblings[9] inherited from their grandmother the family's beachfront farm in Mansouri, which had been abandoned since the 1982 Lebanon War, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Southern Lebanon.[7]

Khalil (center) and Fayed (right) releasing hatchlings on the beach in August 2019.

Above: two turtle hatchlings crawling towards the sea at sunset.

In 1999, after a quarter of a century, Khalil returned for the first time to Lebanon for a visit of her family's homeland. She also went with a friend to see her estate in Mansouri, which was very close to the buffer zone that was still under Israeli occupation at the time.[7] One moonless night during that stay, the two women had a chance encounter on the beach with a green sea turtle laying eggs in the sand.[10] Upon learning that the beach was one of the very few remaining nesting sites in Lebanon for the endangered species as well as for the loggerhead sea turtle, which is classified as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Khalil decided to commit herself to the cause of protecting these animals and their habitat.[7]

In early 2000, Khalil moved from the Netherlands to Mansouri. Three months later, the IDF and their allies of the South Lebanon Army withdrew from the nearby buffer zone.[11] Ironically, Khalil reasons, the Israeli occupation had kept the area untouched.[12] She teamed up with her friend Habiba Fayed, who shares her passion for conservationism, and they soon opened a bed-and-breakfast in the house, which Khalil's grandfather had built in the 1970s, to finance their environmentalist efforts through ecotourism. They painted the facades in orange colour and called it the "Orange House" in honor of Khalil's former Dutch refuge.[7] In an interview with The Daily Star Khalil stressed that the place is also Dutch in its social tolerance:

« People come because here it's a very private place. It's a place that nobody is going to judge them, so long as they respect the nature. Homosexuals, lesbians, whatever – nobody will judge them here. »[12]

Over three years, Khalil and Fayed were trained by scientists from the Athens-based NGO Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles (MEDASSET) to establish a monitoring programme, collect data and protect the turtles' nests.[11] A major task for Khalil, Fayed, their guests and volunteer assistants has been to keep the beach clean, especially from plastic waste that lands on the shore. In the beginning, much of that pollution seemed to come from the nearby headquarters of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). However, that problem was mitigated in close cooperation with the peacekeepers.[7]

A bigger problem was that on the one hand, people began partying on the beach again, leaving rubbish and stealing eggs or even hatchlings. Even worse, fishermen returned with destructive methods like close-meshed nets, dynamite and poison fishing. Khalil's efforts to stop them made her unpopular with some locals, who tried to burn down her house. She recounts even being shot at. Yet after a few years, Khalil managed to get such harmful practices stopped.[12]

The abandoned rail tracks at the gate to the Orange House.

When the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War started in July 2006, the turtle nesting season, which starts in May and ends in October, was in full swing. Therefore, Khalil and Fayed stayed for three days[9] and asked Hezbollah fighters to leave the shore. However, after an Israeli air strike destroyed a neighbour's house, they fled for safety and only returned as a UN-brokered ceasefire went into effect in mid-August. Two rooms of the Orange House were destroyed by Israeli bombardments, but luckily the beach was spared from direct pollution caused by the Jiyeh power station oil spill. Khalil further wrote that despite the war, some 5,000 hatchlings from 70 loggerheads and 9 green turtle nests made it to the sea that year,[13] noting that it was the best season since the start of the project, because the fighting kept people away from the beach.[9]

In 2008, Mansouri's 1.4 kilometers of sandy beach were officially recognized by the local municipality as a hima - a "community protected zone" – because of its diverse natural features and as turtle nesting grounds.[14] And in 2015 it became clear that Mansouri beach was also a historical heritage site when a winter storm laid bare a set of historical artifacts that consisted of a mosaic, pottery and glassware.[15] Nevertheless, the hima has – from a conservation standpoint – faced another threat since 2017 from sewage, light and noise pollution, when construction of a private luxury resort started at the neighbouring beach to the South.[14]

In 2019, authorities put a tax of 10 million Lebanese pounds – then the equivalent of US$400 – on Khalil for crossing with her car the public railway line[16] – which had been abandoned in 1975.[17]

When the COVID-19 pandemic left the beach of Mansouri deserted and the adjacent luxury resort closed, Khalil and her team saw a record number of 20 nests of the endangered green sea turtles.[18]

In the interview with The Daily Star Khalil concluded:

« This place is my heaven on earth to me. There is no other heaven for me, this is it. »[12]