In a span of weeks, emotion has become an increasingly difficult thing for Safa Elnaili to explain.
A Libyan doctoral student studying at the University, Elnaili’s native land, family and friends have been thrust into a bloody revolution that is beginning to resemble a civil war.
“I’m angry, scared, happy and thrilled at the same time,” Elnaili said. “I’m about to be reborn again.”
Elnaili lives with her daughter and husband, Hesham Elashhab, a master’s student at Southern University, who is from Elnaili’s hometown of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city located on the country’s northern coast, and unofficial capital of the resistance to the government.
Elnaili describes Benghazi as a tightly knit Mediterranean metropolis, citing chapter and verse of transgressions committed by the country’s dictator of 41 years, Moammar Gadhafi, that have fermented anger enough to spark the current bloodshed.
“We are sick and tired of him,” Elnaili said. “We want him out. He has been a burden to the society and people here. We are an oil country, but we haven’t seen any progress in the country.”
Anger over crumbling infrastructure, underfunded education and an impoverished society have amassed a powder keg of political anger that is now exploding across the country, Elashhab said.
“He has been suppressing the people’s opinion, and he claims he is promoting democracy, but he is not,” Elnaili said. “When anybody speaks about him, they would simply disappear the next day, be put in prison or killed. That is why people were afraid to say anything.”
Elnaili said revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were the spark that ignited the current uprising.
“It was when the revolution in Tunisia succeeded and the revolution in Egypt succeeded — the people got fired up, and we say, ‘You know what? It happened in Tunisia, it happened in Egypt, we can do it, too,'” Elnaili said.
Benghazi was one of the first areas thrust into violence, causing the couple to live in constant fear for their families back home.
“Every time they would post pictures [on Facebook] of the dead bodies of victims in the hospital, we were freaked out because we were worried maybe my brother was one of them,” Elnaili said.
Elnaili’s older brother, a doctor in Benghazi, barely escaped injury when his car was hit by a stray bullet as he traveled from helping those injured in the violence.
“He said he was given a second chance to live, and he was so thrilled,” Elnaili said.
Like many other students, Facebook is a major distraction for the couple, but they aren’t just procrastinating.
“Facebook is my No. 1 source,” Elnaili said. “After all, it is the Facebook revolution. You have no idea how this network has helped everything that goes on.”
Elnaili said the initial protest in Libya was organized on Facebook. Libyan doctors and others involved have used the social media site to appeal for and to receive aid from Libyans living outside the country.
Elnaili keeps track of developments through two Arabic news organizations on Facebook — Almanara and “February 17th” — which aggregate various sources and give up-to-the-minute information through user input from all over Libya. The couple also use Facebook to donate money to aid the injured.
But that’s not enough for them or Ibrahim Matri, a Libyan freshman studying petroleum engineering at LSU who has family living in a suburb of Libya’s capital, Tripoli.
“If it were up to my parents, I would be sitting at home [in Libya],” Matri said with a smile. “But you have that spirit in you when you see your brothers getting killed and murdered in cold blood by mercenaries. Who wouldn’t want to be in their country, especially in this time of need?”
As the death toll rises, the debate surrounding proposed intervention from the U.S. and other superpowers intensifies, but Matri is reluctant to support any outside intervention.
“If you have oil, it is the modern-day money,” Matri said. “In my opinion, they want to protect the Western assets.”
Although they can’t be there, the three students said seeing their country united behind the cause of removing Gadhafi makes them proud and could open the door for a return home to build the future Libya.
“We are the Libyan future,” Elnaili said. “We are the scholars, we are the scientists — they need us back home. We want to go back home if things change.”
 
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Contact Xerxes A. Wilson at [email protected]