With hands grasped around flickering votive candles that rain droplets of white wax, they march silently from Curtiss Hall to Beardshear Hall.

Through an empty central campus, littered with the leftover trash of Veishea festivities, Lebanese students and other supporters make their protest of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.

It’s about 7 p.m. Saturday, and not many Iowa State students seem interested. A few Veishea celebrators stop for a second to read the handmade signs — “The world remains silent as Israel bombs Beirut”— but they don’t pause long enough to read the second line — “Hundreds are killed. Over 400,000 have been displaced and horror continues.”

And none but the protesters stick around to hear a soft-voiced Zeina Zaatari speak to the group.

It’s hard, she says, very hard to be here, studying while her family is in south Lebanon, in the city of Sidon—a city now inundated with refugees, forced from their homes by Israeli orders and Israeli bombs.

Zaatari’s mother is a teacher, her father is an educational administrator, but right now, they don’t have class. The schools are filled to the brim with the displaced people of southern Lebanon. All day long, she says, her brother and her sister are going to the schools, feeding people, cleaning up, playing with children. They don’t come home until late at night.

She’s lived throughout the whole war. Through 10 years of bombings and shellings and invasions that “come and go and come and go and come and go and then they come again.” The last time Lebanon was bombed by Israel was two and a half years ago, while Zaatari was still at home. It’s totally different, she says, to be at school in the United States.

“You’re totally helpless and you have no control. I don’t know how I keep doing the same things I do every day. I don’t even know how do I wake up knowing that my family is in danger.”

When she sits down again on the steps of Beardshear, her eyes are filled with tears. A friend pats her hand and grasps her wrist to comfort her. Then the group of about 20 sits silently on the cold cement steps for about 15 minutes until Zaatari gets up to speak again.

“In the coming days, remember before you sleep, and say a prayer or something.” Later she says, in mumbled tones, “I’m not sure prayers are enough any more.”

Zaatari, one of six or seven Lebanese students at ISU, thanks her friends and the other marchers for lending their support. “Maybe it didn’t make as much of a difference in terms of getting things changed, but it did make a difference in terms of me and other people who were here.”

Her friends plan another march, for Monday (today) at noon, from Curtiss to Beardshear. One offers to make fliers, another to call some people.

It will be Zaatari’s 23rd birthday on Monday, but her mind will be more on her family and on her country than anything else.

“I just imagine what they’re doing, what the people are feeling. And then I just want to snap off my mind and think of anything else.”