Welcome to this site.

Welcome to my backtothemed site. It chronicles a journey I took back in time in the spring of 2006 to the land of my birth: Cyprus. Cyprus is nestled in a crook of the Eastern Mediterraean, south of Turkey and west of Syria. I was born in a small, company hospital in March 1954 to American parents. My father worked for an American copper mining company based in the foothills of the Troodos mountain range, just above the Solia Valley (valley of the sun). My siblings and I grew up intimately connected to the land and the people of this idyllic, sun-drenched island. We left this area to attend college in the United States, but our parents stayed behind. Then when Turkey invaded in 1974, they, too departed. I have not been back since.

This trip was an opportunity to reconnect with my original homeland, with the intention of determining if I could ever return to live. I also travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, where I had attended junior high and high school. The American Community School was celebrating their centennial during the year between June 2005 and June 2006. I thought this would be a chance to revisit a country that I had lived in, but not really fully explored. (We were very sheltered as boarding school students.) Times were tumultuous back then. I was soon to find out that they are tumultuous still.

I hope you enjoy reading about my experiences and my reactions as I navigated my way around Aphrodite's birth place and the cradle of civilization that is the levant ( Lebanon). Perhaps you can understand the feelings I had as I explored things familiar and unfamiliar, and the feelings I have had since returning, watching a country I loved being suddenly destroyed. Again.