Expat in lebanon: coping with life in a divided paradise

But its ongoing instability makes Lebanese Republic - in the underside 10 of this year's "Global Peace Index", published by the Economist's Intelligence Unit - a challenging place for its British people residents.

Two and a half years after their reaching, it's the practicalities that dominate life for Nabil Shehadi, a British-Lebanese returnee who is Beirut's only Anglican priest, and his wife Sarah.

One of Sarah's main precedence has been to make sure that the household memorabilia is secure in case a new bout of struggle means they have to flee.

First, she scanned 40 albums of baby and wedding ceremony photos into the computing machine as a back-up; then she sent their most preciously possessions back to the UK.

"We've sent things for safe-keeping for the next 50 years," she says. "capital of Lebanon is not the place to keep these things."

Another trouble has been keeping the balcony garden at their capital of Lebanon apartment - now full of indigenous plants including a small Lebanese cedar - bloom.

"In the first year, we lost 90 per cent of the works because of the 2006 war and the people who were lacrimation it were evacuated," she says.

life in a state where struggle can erupt quite all of a sudden also affects Rev Shehadi's job. Services and bible meetings at of All Saints church have to alteration at short notice, and the fold (of whom about 40 per cent are expats) kept informed.

"The main challenge always is navigating through the uncertainness, and not being too frustrated when things change. One has to be flexible," he says.

Yet neither of them has any doubts that they have made the right decision in moving, with their 14-year-old son Sebastian, to one of the world's hot spots.

"We're very peaceful. We're very happy to be here," says Sarah.

"We've never questioned whether we want to be here or not," agrees her husband. "The only thing that would make me question it would be if there was a total break-down, and we couldn't function any more. I feel it's even more important to be here in times of crisis to support the community."

Someone else who plays a major part in supporting the expat community in times of trouble is British ambassador Frances Guy, whose own arrival, having been postponed by the 2006 war with Israel, took place at the beginning of the political crisis that has been dividing the country for the past 18 months.

"It's quite easy as an expat to be a little bit blasé, perhaps, about the underlying tensions.

The reminders, are very rude, when they happen," she says. "It's very unpredictable, and that makes it difficult to plan things."

"The Brits who are here are on the whole people who have been here quite a while, married to Lebanese and who have lived through the civil war [1975-90] and have seen worse and so are very, very resilient," she adds.

But, up until May, newcomer Diana Batchelor had experienced nothing of Lebanon's tendency to erupt into violence.

The 26-year-year-old arrived last autumn with her fiancé, Jonathan Smith, a teacher at the Lebanese American University. She chose Lebanon because it was the ideal place to take a year out to learn French and Arabic.

She works as a project officer for a small peace-building charity called Umam. "Everyone told me, 'You'll just meet lots of people for lunch, and you'll find a job,'?" she says. "I didn't believe them, but that's exactly how it happened."

The office is in the Shia suburb of Haret Hreik, where Hizbollah have their headquarters. "There's no doubt that they're probably monitoring us quite closely. But there's been no trouble," she says.

But during the conflict in May between government supporters and the Hizbollah-led opposition, which saw over 80 people killed and parts of West Beirut taken over by Hizbollah, Diana experienced Lebanon's dark side first hand.

The couple were in their seventh-floor apartment in Hamra, the central district of Beirut, when armed men burst into their flat and started questioning them.

The worst moment, she says, was when one of the Hizbollah militia - suspicious of potential Israeli spies and, like many Lebanese, unused to map-reading - found a plan of Beirut on a table.

"He was going mad, turning it upside down and saying, 'What is this?'?" she recalls.

"We said, 'It's a tourist map.' And then the guy said, 'Ahlan wa sahlan.'?" That's "welcome" in Arabic.

The pair subsequently learnt that the other apartments in their building had been taken over by fighters for the Future Movement - Hizbollah's sworn enemy.

When they went outside and looked up at their flat, it became clear the block had been the centre of some heavy fighting. "Our windows were the only ones without bullet holes in," she says.

The experience has not affected Diana's desire to stay in Lebanon - but it has changed her perception of the country.

"I felt that the Lebanon I know had disappeared, and it had been replaced by these murderous people that I'd never seen before.

"Then I realised that there weren't two Lebanons. It's probably just the same shopkeeper who, when it comes down to it, is willing to get out his gun and protect his beliefs."

As a leading British journalist in Lebanon and author of an authoritative investigation into the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, Killing Mr Lebanon, Nicholas Blanford is inured to such experiences.

During a six-week holiday in 1993, he spotted the professional potential of a country recovering from a lengthy civil war. He returned the following year with £300 and a suitcase and hasn't looked back since.

"I fell in love with Lebanon completely," he says. "It was the complete contrast of England - chaos, no rules, just emerging out of the civil war. I found it utterly refreshing."

A decade and a half later, having acquired a Lebanese wife, Reem, and two children: Yasmine, six, and three-year-old Alexander, he says he's lost a lot of the conventional ideas about life and family with which he started.

"I think I have a much more liberal outlook than if I'd lived in the UK. It's helped enormously in terms of personal growth," he says. "My children are going to have a much broader cultural outlook than if my wife was English."

He admits that, once he left his carefree bachelor existence behind and started putting down roots, marrying, buying property and putting his children through school, he came up against the bureaucracy and corruption which are part and parcel of the Lebanese system.

"You need to have a certain temperament to survive in a country like Lebanon," he says. "When you plug into the system, you come up against it."

Having a family means that even the hardened war reporter is making contingency plans to relocate, should Lebanon plunge back into full-scale conflict.

"This is still an uncertain country. It's an exciting place to be professionally, but if you're raising a family, and you can't ever be certain that this country isn't going to explode again, that has to be factored in long-term."

"My wife, who has first-hand experience of the civil war, is not keen to see the children go through the same thing. If there was a repeat of the civil war, there's no way I'd be hanging round for 16 years with a family living overseas."

He thinks hard when asked what he would miss if forced to leave. "I would miss the Lebanese - just the everyday chit-chat and warmth and friendliness."

• Alex Klaushofer is the author of 'Paradise divided: a portrait of Lebanon'.