Refugee Voices from Shatila

Where to this Time??

I am sick and tired of moving. The fear of getting attached to friends clutches at my heart. I'm so terrified at getting attached to places. From Shatila to Mazraa to Ouzai to Shatila to Raousheh, then back to Shatila, and from there where to?

I was born in Shatila a year before the camps' war broke out. My father and sister were killed in that war, while I, my brother, and my other sister moved to Mazraa to live in a building inhabited by displaced Lebanese and Palestinian.I spent my early childhood in a one-room Mazraa house. Our house in Shatila did not mean anything to me for I had left it at a very young age, and before getting attached to it. Maybe because I was too young to realize the concept of "place" back then.

I started to discover the world in al-Mazraa. The four years I spent there taught me a lot. With Samia, Joumana, Bilal, Nidal, Nihal, and Amal, I learned the meaning of cooperation through sharing the candies we used to buy together, or through accumulating the money we received on the feasts and then going together to the Luna park. When I was five years old, the owner of the building we lived in got permission to vacate his building. So Bilal, Nidal, and Nihal left to al-Horsh; Samia went to Hamra, while we were transported by a mini bus to al-Ouzai, where my mother had to rent a small house.

On my first day at al-Ouzai, I cried until there were no more tears in my eyes. I was scared by the place, and I missed my friends and neighbors in al-Mazraa. Only my mother's promise to visit them soon, calmed me that day. Under the fig tree in Ouzai, and through playing with Zeinab and Manal, I started to like the new place and my new friends. There the girls' father used to sing to us: "Yesterday under the fig tree …You said you loved me". But as soon as I started to feel safe in my new house, the camps' war had ended, and we had to move back to Shatila, to our house! To the place where I was born and which did not mean much to me.

Darine, Halimeh, Suheilah, Rasha, Insaf, Mohammad, Ihab, Soubhi, and Othman became the new friends that I loved and was loved by and we played kamsheh [hide and seek] and cards. In Shatila I found a second mother: Imm Mohammad, who used to pamper me a lot. Most of the times I found myself waking up in her arms after spending a lovely night together. In Shatila, I learned that like Subhi and Othman I was Palestinian, while Nihal and Manal, my friends at Mazraa, were Lebanese for they have a different dialect than ours.

A year later my mother got married and handed us to our grandparents who lived at Raoucheh, in the Attar building where displaced were living. A new place ... would I like come to love it and have new friends? Would I find there a new Imm Mohammad, or new Nihal, Rasha, or Ahmad? What if I came to love them and had to leave them another time. No, I wouldn't allow myself to love the place and its inhabitants. BUT … the ice cream man and our gathering around his car at sunset, the sea and the walks on the seashore, the Raoucheh rock, all hooked me to the place and its inhabitants!!!

A year later, as I was returning home with Iktimal and Nissrine from the sunset walk, we read a paper hanging on the building's wall which read: "The building should be vacated in 20 days, or else violators will be held responsible!" Packing and bidding the place farewell, going to Shatila for the third time and for another house, where I live now ... At Shatila I know many youngsters and old people, but I try not to get emotionally involved with them a lot. That is why I'm accused of being cold and distant! Maybe! But I don't want to love people from whom I will be separated soon. Moving from Shatila to Mazraa to Ouzai then to Shatila and then to Raousheh and then back to Shatila taught me new words and their meanings. I learned and lived separation, farewell and instability. But these places never gave me a feeling of security, or stability.

Currently I live in Shatila, but who knows where I will be next? I only want to leave Shatila to return to Palestine where I belong, where I won't be labeled as a refugee... Isn't it my right to settle in one place like all human beings? In a place where I would have a house that gives me security and embraces me? Such a place would only be there, in Palestine where I won't be a refugee and regain my status as a human being.

Samar Shaaban,
14 years old,
Shatila Camp/Beirut
 

We will Return, One Day!!

One day we will return to Palestine because our house is still waiting us. It is still awaiting its folks to return to the land and take care of it. We will return because our big house is still there. I can still see it. The olive tree is still planted in the good land and is watered by nostalgia. We will return to our real house there. There we will be free and nobody will ask who we are, nobody will ask us where did you come from and when are you returning? "We will return," my father assures me, "and we will forget all the wars and humiliations we passed through in exiles and diasporas." Going back to our land will help us forget the pain of the past and work for the future, my father believes.

My father used to repeat these words to my sister upon her return from a fruitless day of job hunt even though she hold a B.A. in Philosophy - with honors - from the Lebanese university. He also said these words to my brother before bidding him the last farewell, promising him to move his body to Palestine where he would rest. He also repeated them to my mother when she got sick after the death of my brother and after she was refused admission to the hospital because we had no money. And he always repeats them to me when I feel disappointed at his inability to satisfy my requests.

Like my father and brothers, I used to want to return to Palestine so that my sister would get a job, and for my mother to be cured, and for us to live a dignified life. But now I want to return for wanting to and because I have the right to. UN Resolution gives 194 gives me this right. And UN Resolution 242 gives me the right of self determination and we are determined to return. And because information reveals that our villages are empty and we have a place there.

Iktimal Shaaban,
13 years old,
Shatila Camp/Beirut

(via Mayssoun Soukarieh, Beit Atfal al-Sumoud)