Where this was said
Mona Khalil: A Life Devoted to Turtles on a Lebanese Beach
At 23:15 · chapter starts 22:00
Ann Wroe opens in scene: it is a warm summer evening in 1999, and Mona Khalil is walking along Mansouri Beach in southern Lebanon with a beer when something thuds beside her and throws sand at her feet. It is a huge green sea turtle, digging a nest to lay eggs — having swum hundreds of miles back to the exact spot where it hatched [1] — Ann Wroe "On a warm summer evening in 1999, Mona Khalil was walking along Mansouri Beach in southern Lebanon when a green sea turtle surfaced beside …" 22:00 . For Khalil, the moment is transformative. She had grown up on that beach, lived abroad through the Lebanese Civil War, and returned in 1999 to find the family home neglected and deteriorating. Restoring it with a friend, Habiba Fayyad, she turned it into a B&B and turtle conservation centre. What followed was decades of quiet but tenacious activism: corralling hatchlings — each only the size of a palm, vulnerable to everything from foxes to footprints — into the sea; persuading dynamite fishermen to stop; lecturing local mayors into designating the beach a nature reserve; even accosting UN peacekeepers about their rubbish. Every obstacle she faced, she overcame. Every threat she encountered, she confronted. The portrait that emerges is of a woman of extraordinary moral clarity and stubbornness, driven by a single, pure devotion.
On a warm summer evening in 1999, Mona Khalil was walking along Mansouri Beach in southern Lebanon when a green sea turtle surfaced beside her and began digging a nest. At that moment, her life changed forever. She would spend the rest of it protecting the turtles — and the beach — against war, developers, and fishermen with dynamite.
Mona Khalil's conservation base — the orange-painted Orange House on Mansouri Beach — was hit in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. She fled briefly, returned, and ultimately vowed never to leave again. She made a statue from the Israeli shells that had fallen on her garden, and barricaded herself inside as the latest attacks began.
