[This blog was designed to get me to post more photos and fewer words – for this one post, I break the rule and write lots of words. Feel free to skip down to the pics.]
If you compressed a 12 day learning tour of Palestine and Israel into 2 hours and 1/10 of a square kilometer, for me that would be our visit to the Aida refugee camp.
The Aida refugee camp is just outside Bethlehem. You can walk to Aida camp from the Church of the Nativity, where Christians honor the spot where Jesus was born. It takes about 25 minutes to walk between them.
Why does Aida Refugee camp exist? In Israel’s push to become a country it destroyed entire villages leaving the Palestinian inhabitants homeless, village-less, farm-less, and country-less. The UN mandated that these people be given a place to stay, thus refugee camps – you know, temporary refugee camps, like Aida, which has existed since 1950!
At first it was a camp of tents, then small allotted rectangle buildings (photo G), and eventually it grew into an assortment of buildings. The people who live there hold a hope and dream of some day being able to return home to their former villages. Many have kept the keys to their homes as a symbol of that hope. Graffiti, artwork, and other imagery in the camp often includes references of these keys of hope. Even the entrance to Aida camp is a huge gate topped with a giant key. (photo A)
The area of Aida is 1/100th the size of Morden, the town where I grew up. The population is over 5,500.
In a few quick hours and in this tiny space I encountered kernels of the many different stories I would encounter again and again during the 12 days of our learning tour, each story unique, yet each also much too similar. Stories of institutional and systematic oppression of a people, stories of abduction and torture, stories of fear and uncertainty, AND, stories of resilience, acts of courage, people doing amazing things in difficult situations, and incredible acts of hope.
The camp is not a prison. Though several sides of this camp are bordered by huge concrete separation walls with guard towers and machine guns, the people are free to leave and return. Some continue living here because they lack the resources to leave. Some have jobs outside the camp, and money, and cars, and also choose to stay. Staying is an indicator of hope, and an act of resistance. Leaving might lead to an easier life for some, but it would also signify giving up, surrender, letting go of the hope of returning to your home, your farm, your village.
I’m pretty sure the state of Israel would love it if everyone just left – left the camp, and left the whole region. So to encourage people to give up, to leave, to abandon their hopes, their life is made very difficult.
Aida refugee camp is the most tear-gassed place in the world! If you search on youtube you can find video of the Israeli military shooting a tear gas canister into the children’s playground (the playground seen in photo E). The toddlers are not organizing a protest. They do not have weapons. Adults can be seen running in to the playground to whisk the children to safety. Reports also suggest that the Israeli army uses Aida camp as a testing ground for new kinds of tear gas.
A more careful look just beyond the playground reveals concrete separation walls, guard towers, many cameras, and if you look carefully, two armed soldiers on the nearby rooftop. (photo F). Residents of the camp tell stories of waking up in the middle of the night to find soldiers at their bedside, there to take away a son or daughter in the middle of the night, to be interrogated, sometimes brutally.
On the opposite side of that tall separation wall there are better paying jobs, lower taxes, and all the services you expect of a modern city, like running water and hospitals. On the Palestinian side of the wall water is limited, it might come on one day a week, maybe less often, maybe more, probably unpredictably. Palestinians install large water tanks on their roofs hoping to stretch their intermittent access to water. In the past the soldiers would sometimes shoot holes in the tanks. There is a clinic nearby, but hospitals are on the other side of the wall. You need a permit to go to the other side, and you need to cross through a checkpoint, that is sometimes open, sometimes not. So you cannot know if it is possible to get to a hospital, whether for a childbirth or a gunshot wound.
There are many more stories about the struggles and challenges of living as a Palestinian in this region. I’ll stop with these, BECAUSE, at this camp, and in many other places we visited, we also met the most amazing people, doing beautiful things, making a difference.
At the very edge of Aida camp is Lajee Center. Their website says: “The main aim of the center is to provide refugee youth with cultural, educational, social and developmental opportunities.”
I love the way one speaker put it. She said “When people are suffering, eventually they react. If all they have are stones or guns, that is what they will use. We want to give them more tools, tools to express anger, to create change, and provide opportunities, so that instead of stones in their hands, they have paintbrushes, pens, cameras, and hoes.”
So with security cameras and guns pointed into Aida, Lajee offers the youth of the camp photography, dance, gardening, film-making and more. The people we met move easily between telling the hard stories above and telling beautiful stories about children learning to express themselves in photography, or in learning to play an instrument. We went to the roof to see the garden and the greenhouse they are building there. (photo K).
This little snippet of contrasts, of harsh and hopeless stories meeting creative and hopeful people, is a window into the other days and experiences of our learning tour.
Undoubtedly not every Israeli is cruel, nor is every Palestinian hopeful, strong, resilient, or creative in their response to violence. But certainly these were patterns we saw played out many times in our short visit. I will remember the people especially.
