Donate Now 
I had been a little worried about getting inside Nahr al Bared and the camp. Since the conflict ended and it had been partially reopened for some of the camp's residents to return, it had 'shown' just once - for a few hours - to the press in a sort of horse and pony show of destruction. Since then, journalists have been barred and all volunters are strictly forbidden to take photos.
Today, through a mixture of good luck and playing dumb, I managed to get through the stiff army controls (with two cameras in my bag) and into Nahr al Bared. Only a part of Nahr al Bared has been reinhabited, the rest is sealed off, deemed too dangerous to enter right now. The buildings are also said to be "completely destroyed." Driving through the streets that have been returned to, it seemed hard to imagine degrees of destruction more than this.
We drove slowly through what were once lively streets and alleyways. I was not allowed to get out and talk to people and I could only sneak a few photos with a digicam.
Before us was the result of months of bullets and shelling between the Army and Fatah al Islam: collapsed buildings in piles of rubble, structures with their sides torn off, chuncks of concrete hanging on metal girding like beads on thread, floors and rooves of buildings fallen on each other like sad, dusty sandwiches.
The place seemed lifeless: no windows, no curtains, no lights but as the sun set (we arrived in the late afternoon and the army allowed us onlty 30 minutes inside), signs of life appeared from the cave-like spaces between leaning or fallen walls or under staircases.
I had read how people were eeking out an existence in the ruins of their old hiomes. I had imagined the lucky few whose homes were furtherst from the epicenter of conflict and could come back and
wipe the dust off and perhaps replace the windows....
But I saw hardly any homes like this. Those who are moving back are literaly putting bedding down over crumbled walls. I saw a family eat on second floor balcony -- just four people sitting on chairs about 20 feet off the ground on a rough concrete ledge of a sideless building. It was like something fron Beckett only there was nothing metaphorical or theatrical about this. The existence in Nahr al Bared right now right now is raw and extreme and, it seems, a testement to the people's will to return to their place.
When I interviewed refugees from the camp this summer, many said they didn't care if their homes were destroyed, they wanted ot be back at the camp and they would go there as soon as teh conflict was over and pitch tents and live how they could. this is exactly what some have done.
Burnt out cars littered the streets and alleys. Some people had begun to sell produce out of garage like spaces.
And of course the physical vocabulary of international aid has already made its mark: large plastic ECHO (EU humanitarian fund) cisterns, UNRWA toilets and UN prefab units. Some people passed by with the
trappings of reconstruction, cement bags, corragated iron sheeting etc... but the reconstruction job is really bigger than them.
Nahr al Batred was a complex brick and mortar living space which literally grew out of the ground, like many of the other camps in Lebanon, replacing the tents of the post-1967 exile of the Palestinians.
Much has been written about how this unmediated, gradual urban growth enabled the Palestinians in Lebanon to memorialize their native Galilee and inscribe the space of the camp with its own symbolism. Now the camp is a veritable tabula rasa and the signs are that the government, with the help iof UNRWA, are keen to build a well-planned and easy-to-control space on the ruins of what was an approximating physical correlative to the social fabric of life in pre-1948 Palestine as displaced to northern Lebanon.