Abstract
In October 2014, I began a storytelling project in one of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps, Al Rashidiya, which has profoundly challenged the way I view communication, voice and listening. Internet access and social media usage have provoked questions in marginalised communities around the world, such as “who gets to tell the story?” and “how is it told?”, and Humans of Al Rashidiya is a response to this, attempting to provide a platform for storytelling by, for and from a community with few digital resources or social capital.
Humans of Al Rashidiya is inspired by the popular Humans of New York project, which accompanies photos of passers-by on the streets of New York with short, often intimate, text about their lives. Using the same format to encourage sharing, commenting and the repurposing of images, we shared one story per day from the camp during the months of October and November, creating a platform for people in the camp to submit stories. Although the daily photo sharing has stopped, the live page continues to gather comments from people all over the world.
The stories – shared on Facebook and Tumblr – are about everything from love and family life to unemployment and maintaining culture in the diaspora. Amid touching stories about the journey into exile and the struggles faced by Palestinians from Syria (now twice displaced) are stories of anger and frustration – and of simply getting on with life.
As Mohammed Al Assad, the co-director, and I were walking through the camp one day in September we found Abu Nabil, a resident in his early 70s, sitting outside his home. I wanted Abu Nabil to tell me something about love and marriage. Instead he wanted to talk about the injustice of the difference between our lives. He said: “It’s a difficult life here in the camps. We are far from our land. Your life in England is not like our life here because you have a house in your own country. We are out of Palestine, you can see how we live here, it’s very difficult, not like your life, or anybody who has his own house in his own country. This life is very, very difficult. If I could live in my own house, my own building in my own country, then life would be not difficult for us.” He died a few weeks later.
The second stage of the project involves collaboration with a youth group in the camp, where a team of young people will be trained in digital storytelling, filmmaking, blogging and social media, creating content for an interactive documentary to be broadcast on Facebook.
Nahla Bader, one of the participants in Humans of Al Rashidiya: “Someone came in the night [when she was 8 years old] and said on a loudspeaker that King Hussein said all the Palestinians in Aqqa must leave within 24 hours. Before my mother-in-law died she asked some foreign people who came to visit Rashidiya to go to Aqqa to get some soil. They found an old Jewish man on her land. When they told him that the owner of the land is still alive and she wants a bag of soil from her land he started crying and filled two bags of soil to give to her. I miss my house, the land and the ground for planting. When I go to the border, I can smell the air from Palestine”
Credit: Mary Mitchell
The cafe operated by this youth group has the last line of the London-based Palestinian poet Rateef Ziadah’s spoken word piece, We Teach Life, Sir, painted on the wall, as a reminder of the uneven power balance of mainstream media and how the pain of human experience is condensed into an outsider’s agenda. It reads: “Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into soundbites and word limits and move those that are desensitised to terrorist blood.”
Communication from inside refugee camps has historically been the preserve of journalists, advocates and aid workers rather than those who have been displaced, and stories have therefore revolved solely around outsiders’ objectives. The stories and questions being shared and raised by those engaging with Humans of Al Rashidiya are crucial to changing this dominance.
New technological capabilities and social media platforms make everyone a storyteller and challenge the notion that only those with expensive equipment and connections to editors can tell a story. As this assumption continues to shift, Humans of Al Rashidiya and others projects like it are enabling marginalised communities to share stories of survival rather than victimhood, and agency rather than passivity.
“I think about when I will be a human with rights”
I was born in Al Rashidiya and I have grown up, played and studied in the schools of this camp. It’s beautiful to live in such a tightly knit community with people from different families, but the beauty is constantly undermined by the pain of the people’s suffering.Living at the Palestinian camps in Lebanon means isolation and a suppression of freedoms. All the camps have borders, and each exit and entrance to the camp has an army checkpoint, where guards ask to see your personal ID, ask where you’re going and where you come from.
In Al Rashidiya, there is a feeling among the youth of being isolated from Lebanese societies, the West and the wider Arab world. The isolation from Lebanese society is a legacy of the conflict between the Lebanese armed forces and Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Bared camp in 2007, and religious differences between the two communities.
Many Lebanese people think the camps are dangerous and it’s too dangerous to enter them, and many think the people in the camps are different from them. There is a common prejudice that Palestinian refugees are not educated and are responsible for crime in the areas surrounding the camps.
Those of us who live in the camps know we are humans with rights and intelligence, and our potential is the same as that of anyone else. Al Rashidiya is full of educated people who don’t have the right to be employed, and there is a high success rate in our schools.
I’m fearful for myself and for all Palestinians in this situation. I am worried about the future – that when I finish my university studies I will not find a job and will have to emigrate like many other people from the camp. I think all the time about when I will be a human with rights, land, safety and security. It’s hard not to if you are born a Palestinian in Lebanon.
Nowadays our society is starting to open up to other societies, both near and far, through technology and youth activism. I am co-directing the Humans of Al Rashidiya project to help ease the isolation of the camps by sharing daily stories from and by Palestinians in the camps on Facebook and Tumblr. We focus on groups of people who don’t often have their voices heard, such as the elderly and the youth.
It’s difficult to be a child here because there are so few opportunities. You are told to work hard in school, but then you graduate and realise that there are no jobs. We want to bring out the voices of these children and the frustrations of the youth.
Although our families have been exiled from our country for nearly 70 years, we will never forget the right to return, and it is our job to communicate our existence to the outside world.
© Mohammed Al Assad
A street in Al Rashidiya refugee camp, 2014
Credit: Mary Mitchell
