Story

Lebanon: One story of many

2 I spent almost all day among the Nahr al Bared refugees who are staying in temporary shelter in schools and community buildings at Baddawi camp in
Tripoli.

Beddawi is the closest Palestinian camp to Nahr al Bared and so received many of the refugees fleeing the conflict when it broke out in May.

Most are still there. Original Beddawi residents are angry because their children can no longer be schooled as before and the Nahr al Bared displaced are desperate, as the winter cold sets in, to return to the ruins of their old camp and resettle.

Iman is 25 and has two kids and she welcomed me into her home from home, a 6ft by 8ft space in what was once a school room in one of Baddawi's schools run by UNRWA. Now the rooms are divvied up with a system of ropes and sheets and bright blue plastic coverings. 6 Her two boys, aged four and five, came and went quietly during our conversation, clinging to her hands or playing with the straps of my bag.

As she told me of her family's exodus under the Army shelling of Nahr al Bared, I could hear a distinct wheeze in her voice. It turns out she has been extremely ill, diagnosed with subglottic stenosis. She pulls away the ends of heir veil which was arranged carefully around her neck. There lies a plastic implant through which she is breathing. When she wants to emphasize a point, she puts a finger over the whole and the rasp disappears and her voice assumes its full power. She has to remove it again to breathe.

She has been operated on twice, once at the cost of UNRWA and the second time paid for by a Qatari association. But UNRWA doctors have said that she needs to go to Beirut, to the American university of
Beirut
Hospital to get laser surgery so as to completely treat the problem. The surgery will cost $1,700, a price UNRWA cannot cover.

5
Iman says her husband, Omar, 28, is jobless since fleeing Nahr al Bared where he was a marble mason. He is anxious to leave her alone during the day but has to go out to find a way to pay for her surgery. The $1,000 the PLO has recently given each Nahr al Bared family to help offset hardship will go entirely towards the laser surgery, Omar says. 9_2 She says he has recently joined the PLO armed faction Fatah in Baddawi, a fact he later denies – despite the Fatah fatigues hanging on the wall behind him.

When UNRWA and the NGOs fall short, it is often the factions like Fatah or Hamas who tend to the smaller details. UNRWA is currently working on the mammoth task setting up hundreds of prefabricated homes on or beside Nahr al Bared. In Iman's case, it is Fatah who provided the medicine she has needed.

Iman and Omar lived in a one-room space at Nahr al Bared when they first got married and worked hard to be able to afford to move into a proper apartment. One month after they finally did, the bombs began to drop and they had to leave their gather a few things and run. Omar has been back to see the damage. The apartment is completely destroyed, he says. Iman says she cannot go back there until the camp is rebuilt. She says she has weak nerves because of her illness and is not sure she could bare the sight of a flattened home.

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This is perhaps the family least in hardship of all the families I encountered and it may even seem bizarre then to focus on them. But in revisiting a refugee crisis, and one that has continued now for six months with little change, what struck me this time is how simplified such crises are often portrayed.

It is true, food, water, shelter and warmth are the basic needs everyone scrambles for at first and these are the hardships which receive the coverage in that initial wave of media interest. But as the dust settles, the refugees situations begins to reveal itself as the more layered and nuanced complex it is.