Lebanon has always been a forward-thinking political, economic and artistic hub of West Asia, especially when it was the home base of the maritime merchant Phoenicians. For the last several hundred years though, even as far back as a thousand years ago when the Crusaders paid the region a brutal visit, Lebanon has endured conflict after conflict, setbacks, such as a Civil War (1975-1990) in which all of the religious, political and economic class disagreements within Lebanon came to a head, that require the nation to constantly rebuild.

While Israel is still just (literally) a stone's throw across the Southern border, while Hezbollah is a powerful military and political force, while there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Syrian refugees, while there are still long-standing Christian/Sunni/Shia/Druze political and economic divides...Lebanese know their nation has problems, but at the same time so much potential to rise above those problems and thrive.

The primary Lebanese folk dance is the dabke which is centuries old. No one really knows the dabke’s origins, though one tradition explains that the dance began in a region where houses were built of stone walls but had roofs made of wood, straw and dirt. Workers and neighbors would stomp the dirt with their feet to compact it, singing “Let’s go and help.” Who knows…dancing dabke is FUN!