A Call to the Expatriates

Member of the administrative committee of the League of Volunteer Observers for the Service of Tourism and Summering, and its delegate for publicity and guidance.

Beloved expatriate! O heart of Lebanon, beating with strength, pride, and vigor! O teacher to mankind of the laws of humanity! From you the first stirrings of thought crossed the vast oceans until they settled where you willed and beckoned — and behold, Lebanon stood upon a summit whose lights poured down upon the world, a charter of immortality in the history of existence.

O faithful ones! O sons of Lebanon!

No doubt you remember the country that welcomed you the day you were born. From this good earth, which holds the remains of your fathers and your forefathers, rise beloved calls, and voices orphaned by fate the hour the summons of work called you: you answered it, and left behind you an anguish for the soil of the homeland from which you went abroad, to encircle the inhabited world!

Our brothers! The years fold us away while hopes give us life — beloved hopes that visit the souls of your kinfolk and of those who love you in this country, imploring fate that it might answer and restore to Lebanon the sons of Lebanon. For this land has earned the right to rejoice in your coming, and to embrace soldiers of hers who have spent an age of their lives building homelands for their homeland in those wide regions. It is as though they merited the words of our poet Said Akl:

From the small homeland we roam the earth,
scattering our villages on every shore;
we defy the world, its peoples and its lands,
and build our Lebanon wherever we please.

O you who are near yet far! Lebanon sends you call upon call, worn out with longing and yearning. Answer its call, and turn your noble faces toward it in this year, which it has proclaimed a tourist year in the desire to tighten the bonds between us and you. Brothers, it is the year of the rising generation that does not know the language of its homeland, nor its customs and traditions, because it was born in the lands of exile and grew up and flourished there, unaware that beneath the sky of the East, on the shores of the Mediterranean, lie countries in which civilizations have taken refuge since ancient times.

And how happy I am to address you in the name of the League of Observers — young women and young men who have devoted the most precious of their hours to the service of their homeland in both its halves, the resident and the emigrant. And here is the League — which has enjoyed the sympathy and care of the country's august President and the encouragement of the responsible officials and of the bodies at work within it — about to pursue its mission for the good of Lebanon and for your well-being.

Welcome, then, brothers, and welcome to your coming, O sons of Lebanon!