'I can make something beautiful with it'

Sep. 26—When Zara Boon visited Beirut in October last year, broken glass still littered many of the streets.

The city was just beginning to recover from an explosion in August that claimed more than 200 lives.

Boon, a sophomore at Byron High School, said she saw the glass as a symbol of how widespread the destruction and disruption had spread in the city.

"The glass was something that emphasized that disaster," she said.

Windows are a must in the Mediterranean climate there, Boon added.

"You can't have a stuffy house," she said.

A shockwave ripped through the city in seconds when hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate ignited in a warehouse in the Beirut port, shattering windows across the city.

In an instant, the windows that are essential to a quality of life there became a deadly threat to anyone on the street.

"They say it literally rained glass," Boon said.

Boon was at her home in Minnesota when the blast happened. She worried for her father and the people who lived in the city. Boon had been visiting and staying with her father there occasionally as long as she could remember.

When she arrived to visit more than two months after the explosion, she saw the shards of glass still in the street.

"I looked at it and thought, this is part of history," she said. "I can make something beautiful with it."

Boon had started hand-making jewelry a few weeks before the trip. She marveled at how each piece of broken glass on the streets in Beirut had a unique shape and hue.

One of her first pieces of jewelry, a necklace she made for herself, was likely part of a mirror, she speculated.

"It's silvery and reflective," she said.

She found her favorite piece of broken glass in her bedroom at her father's apartment, on her bed.

Since beginning to make the jewelry, she has made more than $780 which she gives to her father who hands it out to people who are in need in Beirut.

"We bypass the charities and hand it out where it's needed most and immediately," she said.

The city is still recovering and economic hardships coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic has made recovery more difficult for Beirut's residents, she said.

Boon visited her father again in June this year. While much of the glass was cleaned up in well-traveled portions of the city, she was able to collect more shards for her jewelry.

"I found more than I could carry," she said.

Working with glass upped her jewelry craftsmanship, she said. She was originally using light material but began working with heavier gauge wire to better secure the glass pieces. She sands some of the sharper pieces for safety, but tries to leave the shards as she found them.

Each piece has a story and its shape is part of that story, Boon said.

She and the wearer will never know if it was part of a window from a person's home, a storefront display or something else that shattered that day.

"It's separated from its identity of who it belonged to," she said, "and it's now symbolic of something much bigger than what it was."