Today I met with staff from an organization with which I am planning to volunteer. The organization works with women and children in Palestinian refugee camps, of which there are many in Lebanon. The camp I will be working in is called Chatila (also spelled Shatila)- the site of Ariel Sharon’s first war crimes back in 1982. I’m not entirely sure what I will be doing- the organization seems a bit disorganized (yet well-established, it has been around since 1976). What seems most likely is that I will be volunteering with school aged kids in a summer program (I’m thinking summer camp, more or less) for a few months, picking up an English class (the students are adult women) later in the summer, and working in the preschool/kindergarten in September, when school begins again.

Though I have the feeling that this all could change. It also seems possible to come up with ideas of my own, so I am pretty excited about it.

I got to tour the camp and see the organization’s vocational center and kindergarten. The camp is depressing, people living in squalor, more or less. No electricity is provided, so people are forced to buy sporadic generator service or go without. There is no running water, and people must purchase water for about 65 cents a gallon. The Palestinian inhabitants are prohibited by the government from working all but the most menial jobs. There is one doctor who services the camp’s inhabitants (somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000 people crammed into a couple of square kilometers), though sometimes Red Crescent provides some services. The shadow of massacres that happened here during the civil war still looms. I was shown a mosque where 800 dead are buried in the floor because there was no way to get them out of the camp for burial during the Amal siege (also known as War of the Camps). Still everywhere we walked, I saw people (so many children) carrying themselves with dignity and at least some amount of hope.

The preschool/kindergarten was cramped but lively. Tomorrow is the last day of school for them, so I am going to go on their end of the year field trip to a river in the Chouf.