"We felt like it was a turning moment for us towards the neighborhood that we are living in"

Imad recently moved to ​​Furn El Chebbak, and the first neighbors he met were the grocery store owner and butcher, “the people that you often encounter." When we asked Imad what it felt like, being a newcomer to the neighborhood, he replied that at the beginning he didn’t have a sense of belonging to the neighborhood, but later on, and after Imad and his wife decided to open a local coffee shop called “HOOK” hoping that it would become a meeting place for the residents nearby, their lives changed. “We felt it was a turning moment for us towards the neighborhood that we are living in, we met a lot of people, specifically our neighbors from the building that we live in.”

 Imad reminisces about his childhood adventures from the old neighborhood that he lived in, "when we were kids we used to play in the garden next to our house, all our neighbors would visit us and we would play Hareb Ballout with them." Imad wishes there were more public spaces in the neighborhood, so that he could play with his kids outside their home. "Sometimes I take my children to Horsh Beirut, but the problem with the Horsh is you can’t play ball there, you can’t bring your food and it closes way too early!" According to Imad, the best thing about ​​Furn El Chebbak is “the simplicity that it holds.” Imad is still surprised that after all this time a lot of people living in the neighborhood aren’t aware of the coffee shop simply because the road that leads to their houses doesn’t pass by it, so Imad wishes if there was a way to introduce neighbors to each other and to their neighborhood.