By Patrick Galey
Daily Star staff
Monday, March 21, 2011
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NAHR AL-BARED: Jihad Abdel Al lays a small pile of invoices on his faux walnut desk and asks his 6-year-old son what happened during the war.
“They destroyed my swings,” his son responds.
“He will not forget this,” Abdel Al says. “How can he?”
Abdel Al and his family are one of thousands of Palestinian families who were displaced from Nahr al-Bared Palestinian camp during the fierce 2007 clashes between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militants.
As well as destroying 95 percent of the original “Old Camp,” the adjacent area, which sprung up over time as Nahr al-Bared’s population swelled, also sustained heavy damage.
Situated directly to the east of the Old Camp, homes in the adjacent area, such as Abdel Al’s, are being overlooked as reconstruction efforts focus on the camp’s original epicenter.
While thousands of Palestinian families still live in prefabricated temporary accommodation, donated and maintained by the United Nations Relief Works Agency, Abdel Al didn’t want to wait in limbo. As his family’s months in exile in nearby Beddawi refugee camp wore on, he became skeptical about the supposed speed of reconstruction efforts and the commitment of the Lebanese government to help rebuild his home.
His doubts proved well-founded.
“I lived in the good part of the house until I could rebuild the damaged part. Nobody helped me. It is all my own work, except for a Norwegian donation to put glass in my windows,” Abdel Al, who works as an electricity contractor, says. “No funding was given to anyone like me. UNRWA has helped with sewage work and generators, but for my house I have received nothing. I am frustrated. Before [the conflict], the houses were fully equipped, but now they are destroyed.”
Abdel Al’s son, his wife, her mother and two sisters crammed into a four square meter room, with no electricity, sanitation or gas.
“It was a miserable time. We try to forget it but there are things that our memory cannot erase. There was still the smell of war. There were six of us living in one room. We boiled our water with charcoal and there was no electricity,” he says.
Abdel Al believes his efforts to acquire funds to regenerate his home were stymied by his nationality. While Lebanese residents of Nahr al-Bared’s adjacent area – even some families living several kilometers away – received significant government compensation, Palestinians remain out of pocket.
“This is clear racial discrimination. My house is officially registered in the name of my Lebanese cousin, but they rejected my application [for compensation] because the beneficiaries would be Palestinian,” he says.
With the Lebanese government failing to honor its 2008 commitment to provide money for regenerating houses in the adjacent area, UNRWA has been left to pick up the slack, severely stretching resources intended for reconstruction of the Old Camp. The organization hopes to move several tranches of families back into the Old Camp by the end of March. For those in the adjacent area, the future is far less certain.
Many have undertaken reconstruction efforts at their own expense, leaving them burdened with debt.
Mona Abu Heit, 38, has five children. Six months ago, she and her husband, who lost his mobile phone shop and only source of income during the fighting, moved their family back into their house, which sits on a debris-strewn mud street next to the Old Camp.
Since then, Abu Heit’s apartment block in camp Sector E-Prime has been reconstructed thanks to donations from the Italian Corporation – an NGO supervised by the Italian government which has been one of the most active and generous international charities for providing Palestinian families with funding to rebuild their homes.
For Abu Heit and her five children, however, the funding arrived too late.
“I sold our car and all the jewelry I had,” she says. “I am now in debt and have $6,000 to pay back. I was living in a garage. We were on the street with little kids, which is why I preferred to come and live in our house, even though it was destroyed. I would have liked not to have to pay any money, but that wasn’t an option.
“It is still a hard life. We have no electricity. I am scared when we have to light candles, that they might start a fire,” she says. “We have no security and don’t go out at night. We have no sewage system yet.”
The cost of reconstructing the skeleton of her family home has left Abu Heit in dire financial straits. Although her husband has found work as a part-time steel fixer in the Old Camp’s regeneration works, the money is negligible and she is forced to choose between receiving food parcels or financial handouts. With debts to pay, she chooses the cash.
“The [financial] pressure we are under doesn’t give us any opportunity to take care of our children,” she says, as her eldest daughter serves coffee. The girl is 14 and recently returned from a stint of therapy in Morocco, organized by UNRWA.
“My daughter saw two people blown to pieces in front of her. Even now, she flinches when she hears a loud bang,” Abu Heit says.
Ahmad Loubani is 43 years old but looks at least 60. On his face he wears the burden of bringing up five children in a small, cold, prefabricated room. His address says Plot 385, one of hundreds of identical, squat rooms in which Palestinians from the destroyed adjacent area dream of now-obliterated homes.
“In this [accommodation] there is no privacy. People are close to each other and they can see each other’s business,” Loubani says. “During the winter it is very cold, during the summer it is very hot. It’s like a henhouse. In the old camp, I had a four-floor house next to the sea.”
Next to him on the concrete floor, sparsely decorated with a plain, wicker rug is Adiba Ismaail, a widow, mother of six grown-up and married daughters and now regular visitor to Plot 385.
“As a lady, I have to be covered all the time. I have only one room and when guests come, we are congested like sardines,” she says. “There is no light, no sun to access. We are dying, suffering every day. We have the right to live in dignity. Even the sexual life between a husband and wife is not easy in these conditions, because there is no privacy.”
Loubani hopes to return to his old home by November. Ismaail is not so sure. Amid the dearth of activity, rumors spread rapidly through the breezeblock communes. In spite of UNRWA’s best efforts to quash such gossip the families here fear money is running out and their cases are slowly being buried beneath claims considered higher priority.
“In spite of all of this, we have two eyes: one eye on the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared and one on Palestine,” Loubani says. “The most important thing for me is that my sons get educated and find jobs, unlike me. But [job opportunities] are very limited here. We hope that the Lebanese come back [to Nahr al-Bared] and we have good relations again,” he says.
With international donor interest stretched, and promised assistance from the Lebanese government yet to materialize, Loubani repeats a line that has become a catchphrase among Nahr al-Bared’s forgotten refugees:
“We only have God and UNRWA.”
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