Beirut, Lebanon - First Impressions of the Camp

When I learned to ride my bike, my Dad took me to the parking lot at the Eckerd on Guadalupe. He had taken the training wheels off of my bike, and I was gripped with both terror and excitement. I can remember having these mental images of flying off the bike and sailing to my death. I was positive that thousands of little girls had fallen to their death learning to ride their bikes. I have to also say that I was having the same imaginations about myself as a 2 wheeler prodigy. That I would not even need my father, that my innate sense of balance would compel me to be the first little girl who had never needed instruction to ride like the wind. In that mental image I had something resembling a cape and I was indeed some lesser form of super hero. I can that as far as my father goes it is one of the sweetest memories I have with him. Running behind me, holding me stable and telling me not to look back to just ride... And then smiling with delight as I looked back, realized I was riding on my own and holding back laughter as I immediately fell when I realized riding on my own meant he wasn't with me. I rode in circles for hours in that parking lot until we were both confident in my 2 wheeler abilities.

As I walked through the Palestinian Camp in Beirut I thought often of that memory. From the exterior the camp looks like a normal collection of poorly constructed buildings. Concrete and wire, laundry on every balcony or not yet finished apartment. Palestinian flags and Yasar Arafat posters all over. And then you walk in what appears to be an alley. Alley is perhaps generous. A passageway between the buildings. Men are gathered on the stoop in dusty old Adidas slides, dirty pants and loose fitting cotton shirts. Their darkness rests not alone on their skin, hair and eyes that could not help but stare at the strange American walking into the camp. One senses that the darkness is deeper, and not the kind of evil darkness that so many people picture when they hear Palestinian... a darkness that comes from lack of Light.

We enter single file because that is all the room that there is to walk. The uneven path is covered in dirty water, trash, cats and bones from some sort of meal the night before. There are pockets of light that hit your eyes at strange angles as it creeps its way through the buildings and the wires over your head. The wires seem so heavily lain on top of each other that you have to fight the instinctive urge to duck, feeling that at any moment they are going to give and come crashing down on your head. Occassionally you turn sideways to shimmy through the passageway, finding yourself competing with a big grey water container for space. Occassionally children walk by blatantly staring. I wondered how they found their way through the maze of the camp. This was no planned community, they building went up where they fit and when no more fit they started building on top of the old ones. The electricity that they stole from outside the camp came through those wires over our heads and some of those wires went 1/2 a kilometer in over whatever stood in their way.

I began to feel a bit panicked at one point realizing there was no way I could find my way out if for some reason I found myself on my own. One did not get the sense that they were particularly safe or unsafe, simply out of not on my own terrain. We passed Dekanes selling Pepsi, juice, meat and shoes. A tailor. A barber shop. A prayer room. All tucked into little corner shops or spaces at the bottom of buildings. The sound of the Al Jazeer news coming from every television, and the soft hum of fans trying to keep the temperature in the little shops bearable. The heat seemed to slither down from the tops of the buildings and stick to pavement under our feet and you felt as if at any moment the water on the ground might begin to boil.

How did these people end up here? I mean, I know how they ended up here. I know that these camps housed some of the most vigilant terrorist in the PLO. I am not naive about the complicated state that these camps live in the tension of. I realize that this one square kilometer is filled with 35,000 people who hold no passport, no nationality and no hope for a land or a home any time soon. Sure, they have this square of land. They have a hospital, they have schools run by NGOs, they are not destitute in the most accurate sense of the word... But in reality they have no home, they live on land in a country where they hold no rights, including the right to legally access electricity. How do those factors play into your psyche over 60 years?

As I watched the children I had a million thoughts running through my head. What kind of education are they getting? What do they think? Do they know the reality of their situation? How often do they leave the camp? I turn my head to the right and stare at a concrete wall less than a foot in front of me, I turn my head to the left and I am staring at a delapitated stairway going nowhere... And I flash back to the Eckerds parking lot, the wond blowing through my hair and riding in circles. Where do these little girls ride their bikes? Do they know the joy of rolling down a hill? Swimming in a pool? Losing your breath barely escaping being "it" in an intense game of hide and seek? There is nowhere to run, there is nowhere to ride in circles, there are no swimming pools or play ground. There is no sunlight strong enough to hold a magnifying glass over a leaf and catch it on fire. There are no green hills to roll down and there are no worms to dig up from the ground.

It is a different childhood, with different games and different delights... yet I still cannot wrap my mind around life here. 35,000 people with no right to work, no where to go, no way out and no sign that change is coming soon. What do they dream of? And if they went home? Then what?

What a strange and different world.