After travels from his hometown of Beirut to the salons of Paris and back to Lebanon, Nicholas Chedid, the eight-time hairstyling champion of the world, has arrived in Providence. Chedid fled the war in Lebanon with his family in July to join his younger brother, Wassim Chedid, a five-year resident of the United States and owner of Thayer Street's Salon Persia. Even as the brothers spend their days cutting hair in the salon, they are working constantly to bring the rest of their family from Beirut to the United States.
Childhood amid conflict
The Chedid brothers are no strangers to political conflict. Nicholas said he remembers a "nice life" growing up in Beirut with his family and pet eagle, but the frequent, unpredictable conflicts in Lebanon made even regular attendance at their private Christian school problematic. Like all others, the Chedid siblings' school often closed down unexpectedly, sometimes for as long as three months at time.
"Life goes very slow," Nicholas said of growing up during times of conflict in Lebanon. "People are afraid, and it makes you stop your playing. ... It can make you stop your dreams, stop your imagination."
Wassim agreed.
"When war is around you ... you don't have a future," Wassim said, "You can't do anything but hang around."
Still, the brothers continued going to school and picked up several foreign languages - Nicholas speaks French, Arabic, Armenian, Lebanese and English.
But the skills he learned outside of school may have been just as important. From age 11, Nicholas spent holidays, and the days when schools shut down because of civil unrest, working in a hairdressers' shop.
"It was a way to study but also make a living," Nicholas said. In 1988, Nicholas left his hometown of Beirut to attend cosmetology school in Paris.
A champion hairstyling career
Soon after he arrived in Paris to study psychology and cosmetology at the Federation Nationale de la Coiffure Française, Nicholas decided to enter the World Hairstyling Tournament. Organized by the International Beauty Show in New York and the Mondial Coiffure Beauté in Paris, the tournament judged competitors in areas such as cutting, styling and coloring.
Though it was his first year in the tournament, Nicholas' training at FNCF and his years in the hair salon back in Beirut paid off, and he won the competition. The results proved to be far from a fluke, as Nicholas would win the competition five more times in the next six years. He then returned to Lebanon to open his own salon. Nicholas won the competition two more times in later years, making him the eight-time world champion in hairdressing.
Back in Beirut, Nicholas opened a fourth branch of his family's successful hair salon chain, Hair Games. "What else are we going to do? Gamble?" said Wassim of the Chedid family's salon business. "Each person does what he likes. This is what we liked, so this is what we chose."
In 1996, Nicholas married fellow Lebanese citizen Hiba Sawaya. As the couple traveled the globe for the World Hairstyling Tournament, their two younger sons were born in the United States. Neither he nor his wife realized that their younger children's U.S. births would later change the course of their lives.
Leaving Lebanon and finding Providence
When conflict exploded across Lebanon and Israel this summer, the U.S. Navy instructed Nicholas and his family to leave Lebanon on a ship sent to take all American citizens - including Nicholas' two younger children - to the United States. Though Nicholas, his wife and their two older daughters are all Lebanese citizens, on July 17 the whole family began a five-day journey to America.
"There was only one choice," Nicholas said. "What else can you do when you have four kids and a bomb rains down? Are you going to be there under the bomb?"
Once in the United States, Nicholas and his family joined Wassim in Providence. Wassim had started working at Salon Persia in 2001, and in 2004 purchased the salon from its previous owner. Nicholas said he joined his brother at Salon Persia to "give him a hand."
"I'm very happy. I like America," he said. "It's my dream."
But Nicholas and Wassim's two other brothers and two sisters and their children are still in Beirut. Both brothers are in constant contact with their family while working to bring them to the country.
"Of course we're worried," Wassim said. "Every second we're thinking about them."
Neither Nicholas nor Wassim wanted to comment on the war.
"I don't deal with politics," Nicholas said. "Whatever happens, war is war. People are killed who are innocent: children, old people ... someone going to work, someone going to buy medicine. War is war. I cannot say anything else."
