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| Girls participating in RTP games in Jerash, Jordan. |
Jordan is home to three million Palestinians, of which at least 400,000 are considered refugees and living in semi-permanent “camps”. We visited what would be the first of many camp visits over the next few days in Jerash.
Jerash, famous for ancient Roman ruins that ring the city, is also home to a Palestinian refugee camp and one of Right To Play’s project sites focused on empowering girls through sport. After meeting a series of school officials at a girls school in Jerash, we observed a few programs in action, walked the school grounds and ended up at a women’s community center. As this is the third women’s center that we’ve encountered, I have come to realize that women’s centers are the equivalent of community centers – places where children and adults congregate for specific activities, information gathering and support. It’s not lost on me that the “refuge” for these transient communities is created by women who are trying to provide for their families and build community with each other.
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| Girls outside during school hours in Jerash. |
The side of Jerash that most tourists won’t see since its tucked back from the main roads – similar to the hutongs in Beijing, where you have to look for alleyways into the bowels of the original city life – is the Palestinian refugee camp there. The school and women’s center with which Right To Play partners are the epicenters of life in this camp and thus this is the community we engage.
I have come to realize, when walking through the littered and uneven streets with sewage flowing through a dugout cement chute, is that “camp” has always implied temporary housing through Western media. One may envision a fleet of UN tents providing shelter for a people that will eventually migrate elsewhere. The assumption is that people in a camp are displaced temporarily, like they were after Hurricane Katrina when residents moved into FEMA-provided trailers. The assumption is that displaced peoples will eventually go home, or go somewhere where they are wanted.
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| Palestinian refugee camp in Jerash, Jordan. |
The reality is that these refugee camps resemble the tenements of New York City during the great immigration waves of the 19th and 20th centuries. Shoddy infrastructure housing three to four times the number of people originally planned for; tin roofs weighed down by tires and rocks since Jordanian law prohibits refugees from securing their roofs and actually making life permanent in a home; and open sewage systems since this community is not allowed to incorporate a more permanent, more hygienic system. At the end of the visit, I was told by our ringleader that the camps only get worse in conditions from here.
During this visit I discovered UNRWA – a United Nations agency designated specifically for serving Palestinian refugee populations. UNRWA’s original mandate back in the 1960s was to function for three years and support displacement needs of refugees, namely feeding, clothing and facilitating access to water. Over four decades later, UNRWA still exists with the original mandate from the 1960s and essentially pumps money into these camps since refugee usually have limited ability to work in their host countries (in some cases, they are unable to participate in daily life outside the camp boundaries). Every three years UNRWA has to lobby to the General Assembly to renew its mandate and its budget, and every three years it has faced budget cuts and depleting ability to serve these communities. Without intending to, UNRWA’s depletion cycle seems to lock Palestinians in an endless poverty cycle.
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| Chickens for sale in Jerash. |
We walked by a truck full of live chickens, endless rows of produce, a few donkeys carrying kids through the alleyways in this camp, and garbage everywhere. We stood out like sore thumbs and created the dynamic of virtuous tourists trying to do good by just raising their awareness of another people’s poverty, as if that might do something meaningful. But children didn’t smile, women whose faces were fully covered turned away from cameras and the boredom was palpable. These people were just waiting and waiting and waiting.
