Our Lebanon schedule listed several more visits to communities where Right To Play works (www.righttoplay.com), including to Ain el-Hilweh, one of the biggest (and most dangerous, I’m told) in Lebanon. This proved to seem true since the visit was cancelled after a bombing in the camp that led to anywhere from eight people injured and one killed, to 15 injured and one in critical condition. The spread of statistics indicated that no one really knew the outcome (despite my Lebanese colleagues being locally based and plugged into the camp). Despite its base in this modern country, Ain el-Hilweh had the feeling of being off the grid and secluded from standard news reporting.
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| View from a rooftop play area in one of our partner community centers. |
As a result of this camp battle between Palestinians, we first stopped at a refugee camp on hill overlooking Tyre, a Lebanese city south of Beirut. We waited for at least 45 minutes at a checkpoint managed by Lebanese police and then breezed through a second checkpoint run by Palestinian security forces. When I asked my Lebanese colleague if the Palestinians felt protected by the Lebanese and whether they trusted these forces, he responded “nobody trusts anybody.”
The schools where we’re working are cinder block buildings with their play spaces on the roofs. Rung with barbed wire and metal grids along the walls to keep kids in (or keep people out), these play spaces are usually concrete and lacking in any grass or soft places to land (literally and metaphorically speaking). The teachers and students that we met all raved about their Right To Play programs given the otherwise lacking focus on sport and play in this hard life.
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| A jungle of power wires in Shatila. |
The next day we visited a “KG,” a kindergarten program run by local community members in a camp known as Shatila. Through a beautiful maze of alley ways decorated by knots of electrical wires – another sign of assumption that life is temporary and soon enough these refugees will return home – we found the KG was in an unmarked building and dimly lit throughout its small rooms.
We met a group of three year-olds who had to be the most well-behaved, quiet and observant group of children I’ve encountered. It was spooky who quiet they were, like the air was limited in the room and they were preserving their energy (below, right). The teachers led a fun introductory session involving us and then we explored the rest of the tiny school.
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| Quiet group of three year-olds. |
Between school visits, I was completely overwhelmed by the sights of the camp itself. One doesn’t get used to these surroundings; numbing is not an option. Thanks to my Lebanese colleagues who work here daily, I learned that the 12 refugee camps in Lebanon were all originally designed to be approximately 1 square kilometer and to house 4000 – 5000 refugees. The camp we visited yesterday housed 60,000 refugees; Shatila housed 40,000. The discrepancy should tell you something about the extreme demands placed on space and resources. In spite of Beirut’s modernism, many apartments in these camps don’t automatically offer running water.
These camps are tiny little cities within cities, having to create their own economies since Palestinian refugees usually face limitations in employment within their host countries. One knowledgeable official from an international organization commented that all the wealthy Palestinians have already emigrated and those remaining in these camps are usually poor and fairly uneducated. As a result, they can (or already have) become targets for Islamic fundamentalists offering prosperity through devotion to an extreme.
This day concluded with a marathon run from Lebanon to Israel and the Palestinian Territories via Jordan. We went through an epic experience at the border crossing, which involved about four vehicles from start to finish and a wait at the office as well as a few verbal gymnastics with border officers to “make our story stick” so that we could get through. All ended up fine and we were silently triumphant about having “made it.” Arrival time was 10 pm local time – another packed day with dinner starting close to midnight.