Tarek Osman is recounting a joke he recently overheard between two displaced people.
“I’m 45 and they put me in Kindergarten 1, what class did they put you?” one man said.
“Class 7,” the other replied, laughing.
Of course, the joke is not really funny – being a reference to how many of Lebanon’s newly displaced people have now found shelter in school classrooms. As Israel’s assault on Lebanon continues, the country’s norms have been shattered and lives torn asunder. But even as a failed government is unable to provide for its people, lines of charity have sprung from unexpected places.
Osman (39) is a founding member of Ahleam Lajae, or the Refugee Dreams Association. It was set up in 2011 and initially focused on Shatila camp, an urban refugee camp in southern Beirut usually home to as many as 25,000 people – largely Palestinians and Syrian refugees – living inside a square kilometre. The organisation soon expanded to other neighbourhoods as well to run kindergartens and a recycling facility, fix up streets, provide services for young and old people, and work to combat drug addiction.
In the past few weeks, its focus has shifted again. It has mounted an emergency response to help some of the now roughly 1.2 million people displaced in Lebanon – more than one-fifth of the country’s population.
During a tour of one of the group’s kitchens, Osman says it has been buying supplies partially with money crowdfunded by Irish friends of his, Enda Nevin from Galway and AnnaSophia Gallagher from Belfast. With schools and kindergartens closed as a result of the war, its 30 kindergarten teachers have been repurposed as cooks. They prepare lunch and dinner for about 300 families each day.
Malak Sukkar, a 25-year-old social worker, is one of seven women shelling peas into big buckets inside a kindergarten now being used as a food preparation centre. “I think the most important thing for people to continue surviving is a place to stay and [have access to] food ... we are providing the food,” she says. The meals are vegetarian – there are no fridges in the shelters, so meat would go off too quickly in the heat – but the group is working in consultation with a nutritionist, Osman says.
In a technical school turned shelter in Ghobeiry, the southern Beirut municipality that includes Shatila, the Refugee Dreams Association provides water tanks, electricity, bed sheets and blankets, and meets a range of other needs.
Staff member Khaled Abadi (24) says their roles include serving the food but also trying to calm down the new residents during air raids. Three days before, a strike hit only a short walk from the shelter, he says. They now gather everyone into a basement area when the bombing begins, usually at night.
At the moment, the school is at capacity, but families leave – once they find the means – to go to safer areas, and others take their place. “Every room here has a story,” Abadi says.
In one classroom Khadija Ghoson, in her mid-40s, immediately apologises that she has no way of making coffee for guests. Her husband is sitting in a wheelchair at the entrance to the building: he was partially paralysed from an electrical accident, Ghoson says. Their teenage son is on crutches after another injury.
Ghobeiry has been hit by air strikes, but it is not currently considered as dangerous as Dahiyeh, the area known as a Hizbullah-stronghold, from which Ghoson and her family fled.
Dahiyeh was a good home to them, Ghoson says. It “is a place where all people are living together ... Anything you want, you can find it in Dahiyeh. Dahiyeh is a normal city, the capital of Beirut. People are kind, they support each other. If anybody was sick, you would find all of the neighbours coming to see you.” She puts her hands in the air when asked what happened to her neighbours; many people, she says, don’t even know where their close family members are.
All of this made it hard for them to decide to flee their home on September 27th, the night Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a series of blasts that shook Beirut and levelled a block of apartment buildings. “We left at 4am, we didn’t know where to go,” Ghoson says. “It was very dangerous.”
Ghoson’s son was studying computer programming, but the area he attended classes in is now one of the most badly damaged.
In the shelter, the family’s needs are being catered to by various organisations for now, Ghoson says, but the Lebanese government’s assistance “is less than zero”, she adds. “The government is not asking about us.”
Osman says concern about a lack of available supports means many men in particular stay in dangerous areas so they can continue working. His wife and four daughters have left Shatila for a safer area, but Osman still sleeps regularly in their home there. “It’s very hard to leave your house, even if you have another place. [But it’s also] very hard to feel afraid all the time. I’m not going to say that I’m not afraid. There’s no person not afraid.”
Today, the narrow streets of nearby Shatila camp are much quieter than usual; Osman says many people have left to stay in shelters or with relatives in northern Lebanon or in the mountains. Driving through on his motorcycle, he passes a blacksmith, tailor’s, grocery shops and a bakery that are open. The Refugee Dreams Association also operates a recycling facility that still has half its staff – they are paid daily and say they need the money.
Unable to expand the site outwards, the residents of Shatila camp built upwards throughout the decades. That means construction can be unstable; Osman says he feels buildings – including that containing his own home – shake from side to side when there are nearby aerial attacks. “Sometimes I [shed] a tear because I’ve been living here 14 years. I started my family in this house ... We don’t know when it will collapse.”
Last year Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, estimated there were 250,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Osman says the invasion and aerial assault on Lebanon has given Palestinians, like him, a new “push that we will liberate our country. We’ll go back to Palestine. Even if I die, maybe my children will continue, maybe their children ... We are in shock, we are traumatised from the bombings, of the terrible things happening, people dying. But you know, liberation can’t happen without blood, without fighting, without struggling”.
He says he wanted to be interviewed so he could emphasise that what’s happening in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, is “not a religious war”, but a “massacre and the whole world is watching, not doing anything, just watching”.
In the meantime, he says, “life hasn’t stopped because of what [Israeli prime minister Binyamin] Netanyahu is doing or [because] they are bombing us ... Most of the people are thinking this way, that we will continue our lives until death comes, but we will not stop everything waiting for death.”
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