A chocolate bar is just a chocolate bar? Like so many Lebanese of my generation, I am more comfortable in a foreign language. Arabic is, unfortunately, greatly undervalued in Lebanon. Most families of means send their children to Western educational institutions where they learn to speak, read, think and sing in a foreign tongue. Arabic gets relegated to the corners of curricula and heard only in its colloquial form in the home and on the street. As a result, these children emerge highly educated by Western standards but essentially illiterate in their mother tongue.

This journalistic article is among the winners of The Anna Lindh Foundation Journalist Awards