Photo credit: João Sousa. Wadi Khaled, Lebanon.
Madeline Edwards is an American journalist with Southern and Midwestern roots living and working in the mountains above Beirut, Lebanon.
She is currently a roving (rural Lebanon-obsessed) reporter writing for numerous regional and international outlets.
Highlights reel | Recent favorites
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The ghosts of war haunting Beirut's Gaza Hospital
Longread: Located between Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, the Gaza Hospital was once a beacon of healthcare for Palestinians and Lebanese alike.
But then it witnessed two massacres.
Fifty years since the start of Lebanon’s Civil War, I revisit a forgotten haunt.
For Inkstick Media
Photos by João Sousa
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Syria's 'princesses of freedom'
Longread: Sisters Khijou and Samar al-Khateeb, from a Damascus suburb, have more than three years of arbitrary detention and torture between them, in Assad’s prisons. They’ve both lost loved ones to those same prisons.
Theirs is a story repeated time and again for so many Syrian women.
For Al Jazeera English
Photos by Raghed Waked
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Joy and trepidation among Syria’s Druze
Dispatch: A week after the fall of Assad, I visited Sweida, the home province of Sultan al-Atrash, with a long history of revolt against outsiders.
For New Lines Magazine
Photos by Raghed Waked
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Lebanon’s migrant workers left stranded and homeless by Israeli attacks
Reportage: Among the mass exodus of people trying to flee deadly Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon are migrant domestic workers from countries such as Kenya, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, some of whom feel trapped and unable to get to safety.
For The New Humanitarian
Photos by João Sousa
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The Lebanese children coming of age during war
Dispatch: Their parents grew up amid bombs, armed roadblocks, and brutal killing. Now, they are, too.
For Instick Media
Photos by João Sousa
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War and home in Beirut’s Club Sudan
Longread: The Hamra neighborhood’s decades-old Sudanese Club tells a tale of civil war, Malcolm X, the roaring 1960s and homesick cooks from Sudan just looking for a space of their own.
Photos by João Sousa
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Lebanon’s goats and their herders brave warmer weather
Longread: How climate change is slowly eroding the millennia-old profession of transhumance in a mountainous, remote corner of the Levant.
For New Lines Magazine
Photos by João Sousa
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Four years later, migrant workers reflect on Beirut blast
Reportage: Roise Njeri Mwaura was taking a short afternoon respite from her five-month-old son and from her daily hours of difficult cleaning work, to get her hair freshly braided at a Black-owned beauty salon in Beirut.
Suddenly: an ear-shattering boom.
For Inkstick Media
Photos by João Sousa
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In Lebanon, Shia mark a fraught Ashura in a time of war
Reportage: Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in medieval Iraq, is always a heavy event. But for Lebanon’s Shia community, already grieving a nine-month deadly war, this year’s Ashura is a time of collective mourning.
For The New Humanitarian
Photos by João Sousa
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Amid war and economic woes, Lebanon’s Druze mark Eid al-Adha
Dispatch: Up in the mountains above Beirut, I attended one Druze community’s little-known Eid al-Adha tradition, known as Liqaa al-Eid, in which members of the town’s two clans greet one another at sunrise after a night spent in prayer.
For Inkstick Media
Photos by João Sousa
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For Lebanon’s Syrian delivery drivers, a motorbike ‘is everything’
Reportage: Once a ticket to better jobs, higher pay and freedom on the open road, motorbikes are now at the center of Lebanon’s crackdown on Syrian refugees.
For Inkstick Media
Photos by João Sousa
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Lebanon’s invisible killer: Stray bullets
Special series: Two teenage boys playing football. A woman living too close to recent deadly gunfights. A young woman attending Palm Sunday mass; a little girl at a playground. A woman simply standing on her roof. Some walked away with injuries, while others died of their wounds.
Here are their stories.
Photos by João Sousa
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Syrians in Lebanon stay indoors as fears of xenophobic violence grow
Dispatch: A mattress, an ashtray, and an Islamic calendar. It's all that surrounded Muhammad, a Syrian worker in Beirut, for days as he hid indoors from vigilante violence. He and others fear xenophobic attacks in Lebanon are worsening.
For The New Humanitarian
Photos by João Sousa
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What really happened at Mansourieh’s Edmond Yazbeck Building?
Investigation: In October 2023, a domino chain of construction failures ended with eight women crushed to death inside their own homes.
It started with a cracked column.
Photos by João Sousa
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Hidden in a Shatila alleyway, a one-room museum preserves Palestinian history
Photo story: For the 75th Nakba remembrance day, I visited the Memories Museum in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp.
It houses possessions families brought with them in 1948 — “proof that we existed on that land.”
With photos and collaboration by João Sousa
About
I am HEFAT-certified and have nine years of experience writing about the Levant region for numerous news outlets.
I’ve been a passionate bookworm since childhood, which I spent daydreaming between Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Catch me sewing, knitting and crocheting all manner of grandma-tastic crafts in my free time.
Projects I’m proud of
Lebanon’s invisible killer: Stray bullets | Read my recent project to count and compile the stories of Lebanon’s stray bullet victims here. Over the course of several months, I created a log of everyone injured and killed by celebratory and other stray bullets across Lebanon in 2023.
I then turned that data into an interactive infographic of their stories and profiled several select cases by meeting with the victims and their families.
Beirut’s Sudanese worker community | Over the course of months of getting to know the characters behind this hidden Hamra legend, I tell the story of Beirut’s little-known Sudanese Club, a safe haven for Sudanese migrant workers since the 1960s that has survived war, economic crisis and political upheaval (and even once hosted Muhammad Ali).
Here I also profile one weekend in the lives of Beirut’s Sudanese workers, now coping — through spotty phone and internet connection — with watching their home country’s war from afar.
Amid Israel’s deadly airwar on Lebanon, I also profiled how the country’s 14,000-strong Sudanese community coped with displacement and bombs, leaving families trapped between a war here and one at home in Sudan.
Spotlight on Ozempic | It’s a longstanding stereotype that Lebanon is stringent about beauty standards. Amid a nationwide shortage of Ozempic, the diabetes drug also used for weight loss, a black market is booming.
I contributed an investigative article as well as commissioned and edited this first-ever series that takes readers on a deep dive into Lebanon in the Age of Ozempic.
Photo: João Sousa.
Tripoli, Lebanon
Photo: João Sousa.
Beirut, Lebanon
Illustration by Jaimee Haddad.
In case you were wondering
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I speak, read and write English as a first language.
I am fluid in written and spoken Levantine Arabic, particularly the Jordanian and basic (“lahjeh baydaa”) Syrian dialects.
I write my articles in English.
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My aim is to immerse myself in one place and/or community to really get to know it as best I can, and to understand what human stories, offbeat tales and unusual yarns lurk beneath the immediate surface.
I’m much more interested in the life stories of rural Akkar goat herders, elderly Armenian refugees and undocumented delivery workers than in politicians and other big-name public figures.
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Scroll to the bottom of this page to find my contact information. I’m always excited for my next deep dive or investigative story!
Deep cuts | Some recent(ish) older L’Orient Today work, for your reading pleasure
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State power isn't keeping the lights on in Akkar. Can rooftop wind turbines take over?
2023 Lebanon’s northernmost governorate is also its windiest. With state-supplied electricity at little more than a trickle, some Akkar residents are turning to rooftop wind turbines.
Photos by João Sousa
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In Beirut, Sudanese workers wait for news of loved ones
2023 As war broke out in Sudan, I spent a weekend with Beirut’s largely-young Sudanese residents as they struggled through erratic phone connections to check on loved ones back home.
Photos by João Sousa
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In rural Lebanon, autumn’s first rains summon an annual delicacy
2022 Each year, after the first heavy rains of autumn, people across the mountainous regions of Lebanon go into the woods to hunt for wild snails.
Photos by João Sousa
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Baalbeck’s golden-era heritage hotel weathers crisis with solar energy
2023 The Palmyra Hotel once buzzed with celebrities like Fairouz and Nina Simone. Now it’s past its glory days, mired in state electricity cuts. The owners are banking on a possible life raft: solar power.
Photos by João Sousa
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‘On Friday we buried him’
2023 Eight of the 16 confirmed Lebanese victims in the February 2023 Turkey-Syria quake were from northern Lebanon.
A month on, I visit one family in Wadi Khaled, Akkar, as their village mourns its loss.
Photos by João Sousa
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Crisis turns rural Lebanese toward traditional olive oil soapmaking
2022 This year marks Lebanon’s fourth annual olive harvest since an economic crisis began spiraling out of control in late 2019. Some people are forging ahead with their own spins on a traditional craft: olive oil soap.
Photos by João Sousa
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‘They built a house and couldn’t sleep in it’
2023 Anjar, in the Bekaa Valley, is home to the descendants of Armenian genocide survivors resettled here in 1939. What is their future here amid Lebanon’s crisis?
Photos by João Sousa
