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News from the Region

Olive Harvest Delegation
Report #7: How Can We Tell the Story?
November 17, 2006

Aida Refugee Camp—The Interconnections of Hope

By Bill Plitt

On Saturday, the 18th, after seeing the group off to the airport at 2:00 A.M, I contacted a former student that my wife and I supported through her graduate program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Amal is a Palestinian from Bethlehem.  She completed her doctorate a year or so ago and had promised to return to Palestine when she finished her studies to work toward peace. Amal lived up to her promise. I learned a few days before coming on the delegation that she had fulfilled that part of her dream, and has worked since the elections with the President of the Palestinian Authority on international negotiations.  What follows is story which reveals surprising connections between Amal's family experience and an earlier excursion by the delegation to Bethlehem this past Friday, our final day on the West Bank.

A portion of the Lajee Center mural. Photo: John Treat

On Friday, the 17th, we made our first trip to Bethlehem, having zipped past it on several visits to Hebron and villages further south.   The day began with a stop at the Lajee Center in the Aida Refugee camp in the western part of the city.  The street was lined on one side with a 10-ft high wall covered with unique murals, brightly colored and designed to represent the experience of the refugees from 27 neighboring villages who settled in the camp after fleeing Israel in 1948.  The murals foreshadowed the story we would hear later from a child of the camp.

The Lajee Center was established in 1999 to address the needs of youth in the camp.  There was also the hope that young people might hold on to the memories of their fathers and grandfathers, so that they might continue to remember "the right of return," part of the legal, moral, and human rights guaranteed by international law and various UN resolutions. 

The Center has two buildings, one with a computer lab and library, and the other for festivities like dancing and art displays.  While we were touring the Aida camp, several students followed along with us.  Under the guidance of the center's director and local volunteers, the children are provided with social awareness activities through music, art and dance.   Students are also taught skills in critical thinking which teachers feel will lead to the kind of an adult who seriously questions options, and acts on his/her convictions.  This approach is predicated upon the belief that a future Palestinian state will require active participation by its citizens. 

Children in the Aida refugee camp. Photo: John Treat

In the information session with a local volunteer, Iyad, who teaches at a nearby school and grew up in the camp himself, we learned that the center provides assistance with school work, extra curricular activities in the arts, and, when possible, field trips to the Mediterranean Sea. (Many of the residents of Aida Camp came from villages—now in Israel—near the coast).  Most of the current generation of children in the camp, which numbers around 2000, had never seen either the Mediterranean or the Sea of Gallilee.  We were stunned to learn that of the current generation, some 120 are in prison for various crimes against the state of Israel which range from rock throwing to the making of homemade firecrackers.

What I found most enlightening, was Iyad's story about his family's journey, first  to the camp in 1948 and then through the many years that followed.  We had visited several other refugee camps in the previous days, but nothing touched me as much as the story told by a refugee himself within the confines of the camp.  Many of us began to feel more and more empathetic as we heard about the tremendous hardships of early inhabitants who at first had only what they brought with them from their homes in the villages.  The winters were harsh as the early residents had only tents to shelter them.  Later, the United Nations constructed concrete block structures which were fairly simple, with little room, but offered better protection against the weather.

After developing a clearer picture of what refugee life was like for camp residents, we moved around the neighborhood and saw with renewed understandings the brightly colored murals that kids had painted over the last two summers with international volunteer support. 

Later, when I returned by myself, I learned from my visit  to Amal's home just up the hill from Aida, that her parents had been refugees in the camp, and that she and her other four brothers and sisters were raised in the shadows of the concrete block homes that still make up the camp. I spent Monday traveling around the same neighborhood I had seen with the delegation a few days earlier, though somehow with what had seemed like a quantitative leap in my understanding.  Now knowing that someone close to me had actually survived the camp, managed to build another home close by, and produce children who became a physician, a journalist, a banker, a nurse, and a Harvard-trained staff member working with the current President, astounded me.   I also learned that Amal's mother was a mathematics teacher in the school we had seen, and that Amal herself was a current board member for the Lajee Center.

Amal's younger brother, Monjit, is a free lance journalist and works with The Arabic News Network.  He too grew up in the camp.  He now works on stories which describe life for people within the walls of the West Bank. I watched several of his taped stories and was impressed by the quality of the tapes and intimacy of the stories he told through probing interviews. I wondered how they might be useful for us as delegates as we prepare for presentations at home.  I wondered how many other Monjits and Amals rose out of the camps and how many were still there with the potential to do so.  And like all of my other experiences these past two weeks in Israel and on the West Bank which changed my life forever, I wondered how we might tell their story.

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