'We couldn't see ourselves raising our children anywhere else': The Lebanese who choose to return home

"I never want to get that kind of call again," says Stefanel, 35. Losing a loved one while she was in Cyprus was a turning point, sealing her decision to return to Lebanon in September 2025. After eight years on the Mediterranean island, with a few brief returns, she says she never found that feeling of "belonging" abroad. "I tried to convince myself that stability was enough, but something was always missing," confides Stefanel, who now works at an IT services company for air transport.The decision to come back gradually took shape: watching her parents grow older, her nephews grow up from afar, then going through a bereavement away from her family. If she had resigned herself to leaving Lebanon after the Beirut Port explosion in 2020, exile taught her "being far from loved ones had deprived her of the...