Palestinian Camps...not what you might expect

I love to camp. I associate it with mountain meadows, alpine flowers, a warm fire, a cold beer. And the occasional bear.

So when I heard I would be going to a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, I had a really hard time wrapping my brain around it.

I imagined there being tents in a desert, far from the urban landscape. Hot, dusty, maybe a fence around it just to give it a sense of place.

This was my second trip to the Middle East, to work with young adult leaders who are part of the Mercy Corps Global Citizen Corps program. Meeting these young people throughout the Middle East continues to be a daily myth-busting experience. This month, I found out what it means to be a Palestinian camper.

The first thing you notice as you come upon the camp is that it is anything but a camp. It sits just on the outskirts of Tripoli, one of the largest cities in Lebanon, and looks like a poor urban neighborhood, of several thousand people. And yea, there is a fence, but it’s impenetrable, and you need a passport and a pre-approved Visa to get in. The guards are heavily armed, and I am pretty sure it’s not about the bears.

We got the OK to enter, the five of us in a Mercy Corps vehicle, and drove several hundred yards inside where we stopped and got out. The roads are dusty, the “tents’ are concrete, bland-looking structures. It feels solemn, sad, and temporary. But it has been here for half a century. In addition to meeting with a local youth group that Mercy Corps works with, and hoping to get involved in the youth leadership program where youth discuss issues on-line and take action together, we visited a local after-school youth center run by Palestinian leaders from the camp.

We walked in as children were singing and dancing, and playing a game much like musical chairs. The walls were filled with colorful youth-produced art, along with a shocking black and white photo, showing 2 young people from Hiroshima at gunpoint, hands held high in the air. Startled to see such a photo here, I asked the director what it was about. He told me that it is part of the trainings they do to let youth know that no matter how difficult times can get, people are resilient and can find a way to improve their lives. “Hope is what we most need, and seeing examples of others who have overcome tough times is very important for us”.

This continued to be the most consistent and myth-busting discovery I uncovered in my work with young people here. And it was further reinforced reading “Children of Jihad” on my plane ride home. It is written by Jared Cohen, a young Jewish American who recently spent two years traveling in these same Middle East countries talking to young people to find out how they see themselves and the world. He too, talked with youth in Palestinian camps, Hezbollah youth groups, and on university campuses. He concludes this riveting read with

“I can say from my own experience, living and traveling in this volatile part of the world, that reaching this under-thirty generation is our best hope for greater communication-but only if we engage with them on their own terms. Amid the despair of war, poverty, and oppression, they are the ones who respond to creativity. Could it be that they will also find creative solutions for peace someday?....Like us, young people in the Middle East all desire better education; they all have a fascination with innovative uses of technology; they all get bored and crave adventure and entertainment; they all seek interaction and global connectivity; and more than anything, they all want to feel as though they belong, have a purpose in this world, and can have a better life. Young people in the Middle East are reachable-and they could be waiting to hear from us.”

Is it Safe?

“Did you feel safe?”

This is the first question I get asked as I finally touch down on US soil, after a grueling 21 hours of travel getting from my bed in Iraq to one in Washington D.C. I say grueling, but this same distance would have been traveled by my grandmother over land and sea in about 6 months. She would no doubt have gotten sea sick several times along the way, and paid dearly for food the Jordanian Airlines stewardess slipped under my comatose head. (Her trip from Kansas to Walla Walla in a covered wagon was tough enough for her, so I doubt she had aspirations of a trip to Iraq. But still, you get the point).

In the airport, I picked up the Washington Post (yes, they still print the thing, its not just on-line, Dan!), and find out that 14 people recently died in a car bomb attack in one of the small Iraqi cities in which we work. Another car bomb killed 30 people weeks before in Baghdad. But this is not my experience there.

My experience is going to a local park in Iraq where a large group of high school students we work with are highlighting International Peace Day. Thousands are in this park, strolling with their babies, and laughing at the riddles posed by the students who hand out candy prizes for the right answers, and tell us about the world-wide movement to promote peace.

My experience is walking around the corner after dark in search of a little dinner, and finding an elderly Iraqi fruit vendor. His shop is no larger than my bedroom, with fruit boxes cascading outside on the street. My colleague and I buy enough for dinner, and because I speak no Arabic and he speaks no English, we hand-signal the fruit we want. After we weigh out what we want, he slowly keeps adding pieces of fruit, a pomegranate here, a bag of dates here into the plastic sack, then hands it to me. When I give him $7, he quietly but insistently refuses. It’s his gift to me. Natalie tells me it is his way of welcoming me to his country.

And I would bet serious money that there are more guns in the households surrounding my hotel here in Washington DC than in any neighborhood in Iraq I walked through. Feeling safe, and being safe. Who knows where the truth lies.

The second question I was asked as I rode in the Super Shuttle to my hotel here was, “Did you feel hopeful by what you saw in the Middle East?”

I met with students in Iraq and Gaza working to promote female rights, Lebanese students in Hezbollah neighborhoods cleaning up parks and soon will be working on creating more open meetings of governing bodies. I met students working on access to clean water issues. At the same time, I met with students taken in by the police for questioning because they were planting trees and taking photos to share on-line, but it was a group of both male and female students and the fundamentalists don’t like that too much.

Yesterday, I had the honor to meet with Landrum Bolling, author of “Search for Peace in the Middle East”, a war correspondent for many years, and long-time Mercy Corps advisor. He sadly told me that for the first time he feels pessimistic about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Yet in the next breath, said this work with young people, connecting them in cooperative actions across borders is absolutely necessary and is what can help make a difference.

The young people I met with throughout the Middle East face such tough odds. Some are imprisoned by a wall surrounding their land from which they cannot get out, living in cities where car bombs can explode without warning, or living under governments where a meeting open to the public is as rare as a banjo. Thomas Friedman once said "Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.” He must have run into some of these folks.

Growing up in my neighborhood, what my dad called "Poverty Flats", I loved to daydream about “what heaven is like’. My mom said heaven was exactly what you wanted it to be. So I developed a very clear picture of it; me sitting on top of an endless series of sunlight-tipped, brilliant white clouds, with nothing else. Except a big refrigerator sitting in the clouds, all by itself, filled with watermelon and ice cream and the other building blocks of a well-rounded diet.

Flying into Lebanon Sunday felt like I had finally found that place We flew just over the tops of these brilliant clouds, then broke below them to find a deep blue sea, with the light chocolate hills of Jordan cascading down to meet the Mediterranean. We landed right next to the water, ensuring that all new arrivals got million dollar views of the waterfront.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as we drove through Beirut, a city of 2 million people. I remember when we were remodeling our kitchen years ago, and describing the scene in my Christmas letter as “feeling like we are living in the war-torn streets of Beirut”. Well, you can forget that image now. What I have experienced so far is a modern, robust city, filled with small shops, a top-notch university, and friendly people. While in Israel, I felt a continual tenseness in the air, and sharp divisions among the various religious and cultural sects, here it feels more at-ease and fluid.

Yesterday I participated in a fascinating meeting of people interested in what is referred to a “civil society”. This is short-hand for folks who work to create more open, democratic, responsive public systems of governing.

It was a meeting of around 30 people, roughly divided between men and women, with ages ranging from early twenties to early 60’s. Five men sat at the head table and made a presentation on key reforms the group wanted to make: lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, ensuring that there was a “woman’s quota’ of at least 30% elected to office, giving the vote to those detained (in jail), promoting open meetings, changing terms from 6 years to 4 years, and most importantly, instituting Parliamentary Representation. (PR for short). Most seemed to favor the PR, French –style of representation, seemed to fit their culture better, with the multiple sects that all feel they need a voice so as to not be run over by others. This is a very real consideration, given the quite recent and very bloody civil war, in the late 70’s, early 80’s, and factional fighting in the past decade.

Lebanon currently is in its infancy of democracy, very fragile. It is described as a country that is half Christian, half-Muslim, but each of these halves are divided into many more sharp divisions of Sunni, Shiite, Palestinians, Armenians, and then further divided by families that lead sects within those. Most municipal meetings are not open to the public, but if you are lucky, they will post the results of the deliberations on the door when they finish.

So while things feel pretty good on the surface, underneath, we got problems…

As they talked, I marveled out how familiar this felt. This is how I imagined it was with John Adams, Ben Franklin, John Hancock and them sitting around for months trying to hammer out the US constitution. At least that is how Mrs. Elias explained it to us in 8th grade. But while I imagined America’s Founding Fathers as a very analytical, well-reasoned deliberation, the conversation I was in felt really ‘seat of the pants”. Everyone saying “we are late, this should have all been done yesterday. Let’s just draft something, anything, we can change it later, and get it in front of Parliament next week so we don’t lose momentum”.

Maybe that is how John and Ben felt too.

First day in Gaza

My morning begins when, in the space of 100 yards, I go through no less than eight reinforced steel security gates and have my passport closely scrutinized at two separate guard posts. I lose count of the number of security cameras watching me before I am able to cross into Gaza.

One and a half million people live inside this 30 foot high, miles long, concrete wall. Few are allowed to leave. They are all Palestinians, guarded by Israelis, and today, we are driven to a small youth center, where I am meeting with Palestinian students preparing their own photo-exhibit, entitled "Recognizing our Common Humanity". (photo of young girls pictured above is from the exhibit)

I meet with 30 of the more than 1000 students who come here each week. All part of Mercy Corps' Global Citizen Corps program we operate in 6 countries. They tell me about the local action projects they are leading; going to a local orphanage to play with the kids there, going last week to 9 homes of families who have been found by the students to be living in dire poverty and so they have brought food and comfort, going to a field and planting seedlings for new trees, since so many were killed in the war last January. I do a presentation to about 20 of the students on how to use on-line communities like Facebook, Twitter, Diggs and others to mobilize others for the causes they care about. They show me a crazy on-line game they use with friends called Barn Buddy and get me to join. Its Ramadan, so they are all fasting each day from 4am to 4pm for 12 days. We are sitting around a table talking, I am drinking from a very large bottle of water trying to hydrate in this desert heat when I remember. "Uh, sorry, I forgot it is no food AND no water". They laugh. Say its fine, no matter.

In the afternoon, I sat in on one of several classes being held that day in their youth center, and found the teacher presenting Steven Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people, for the leadership class. 25 students were piled into a 10 x 10 room, hotter than the blazes, sharing seats because it was so crowded. Everyone seemed very attentive and engaged, while I sat there wiping beads of sweat off my forehead.

I leave at the end of the day, shaking my head in wonder. Here is a group of students, majoring in things like Business Administration, Pharmacy, and Engineering, living in a community with 60% unemployment, and not able to leave. Held there by another country. And rather than raging in frustration, they are instead volunteering to sit in a crowded classroom, learning about becoming a good citizen, a good leader, carrying out community service projects and putting on a photo exhibit about "our common humanity?". I wonder how I would do in the same circumstances.

I leave after spending 6 hours with them, get driven to within a quarter mile of the wall, show my passport to two different sets of Hamas agents, then go through the gauntlet of 8 gates, multiple guards (they double checked my banjo and chapstick I was packing to be sure everything was on the up and up), get in the car, and soon fall asleep in mental exhaustion. Andy, the Country Director for Mercy Corps, drives us back to Jerusalem.

Gaza voices, unexpected findings

When I was finally able to get through the 9 gates of Israeli security guards at the Gaza Prison-like walls, and walk the 800 yard gauntlet inside, video cameras watching every move, and get past the second set of guards of Hamas who staffed a shack-like structure inside these walls, this is what I found...

heading home

Dear Friends,

A few summary comments as I get ready to take the 9 hour flight over the pole straight from Amsterdam to Seattle, non-stop. Surprisingly, Iraq turns out to be the easiest, quickest country to get your passport approved of, one minute in and out, and Amsterdam, heart of liberalism and carefree-ness, the most difficult (next to the Israeli crossings)..almost didn't let me through...something about not liking the Iraq, Israeli travel itinerary and all....imagine if I hadn't been of the White American persuasion...

(By the way, all the comments made on this blog are my personal reactions, opinions and commentary, and mine alone. They do not represent the position of MercyCorps or any other organization).

Gaza: Worse than expected. Gaza felt like the near-perfect breeding ground for cultivating and growing hatred. Not a good strategy for peace. Israel seems to me to be in a position where it has enormous power, doesn't have to do anything, but to create some kind of positive change will need to make a magnanimous move. But they may not do it unless Palestinians go into a big non-violent civil disobedience campaign to force the moral issue, like Gandhi did with Britain. Things felt to me to have gotten worse here instead of better, since I was in this part of world 30 years ago. If only because of what Israel has created here with its settlements in the West Bank, erected walls and guard crossings nearly everywhere that have been created out of fears (very real), and an abundance of power. It has been said that power tends to corrupt. I hope Martin Luther King was right when he said “the arc of truth bends toward justice”….it better start bending here, and soon. What happens here continues to deeply affect the political situations in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere. Yes it's complex here with the myriad of cultures and deep histories of mutual hurt, but I know we can do better than this.

Iraq: Way better than I expected. More patriotic toward US than I expected, even if it is Northern, Kurdish Iraq). Felt much safer than expected (although the breath of paranoia rustles the hairs on the back of your neck at times due to the possible unknowns). Taking photos is tough when you have one eye on the item of focus and one out for some underground security personnel who might not approve. Young people I met in both places (over a hundred I talked with) seemed generally optimistic, had a good dose of hope, and good and unique senses of humor. Mohammed and I, (he is local teacher, Arabic, that I got to know) we were joking around and grandly fantasizing one day in the car, planning how we could fix things right up in the world.

“You organize the Arabs, Mohammed, I will organize the Christians, but we need someone to organize the Hindu’s”…
To which Mohammed replies, “Go find a Cowboy”.
“What?”, I say.
“A Cowboy. You know how the Hindu's revere cows”…..

Jordan. Feels quite rich, relatively speaking. And is westernizing at breakneck speed. McDonalds, Burger Kings, KFC’s, western clothes, jewelery everywhere. Hard to find indigenous stuff. (Also hard to find it in Iraq too, and they have few of the chain stores anywhere.

Food. Great food in Iraq and Jordan! Lots of vegetables, superb spices. Could eat the same stuff for weeks in a row… Come to think of it, I did.

OK, internet access here in airport is going kaput now….got to throw in another 6 g’s if I want to keep it up, and my wallet is drained as usual. By the by, there are no ATM’s in Iraq, so bring cash when you come! Even in small African and Guatemalan towns you could find an ATM. I nearly had to beg on the street, and I didn't even bring my backpack banjo this time to draw a sympathetic crowd!

OK, see you all soon!

Last night in Iraq

Last night I had a live video conference with my daughters, Erica and Jenny. Iraq to Seattle, my bedroom to theirs, easier than a phone call, and it’s free. This is the new world of today. Electricity goes off from time to time each day here, there are worries of terrorist attacks in the markets and there are virtually no Americans in the two small towns we visit. One hundred percent Kurds. American, or any other non-Arab/Kurdish face is hard to find anywhere around here. (Military personnel are farther south). But every Kurdish /Iraqi teen worth his salt has a cell phone, peppering each meeting I attend with cell phones going off, and texting going on non-stop. And if you have a computer and internet (common) and a $50 webcam, you’ve got some potentially serious global legs.

The most disconcerting part of being here is the tight security leash we must be on.
‘When you leave here at the MercyCorps offices you must text message the Director to let him know you are leaving”, I tell my daughters on our call. “And then you have to text message him again when you arrive at your destination just a few minutes away to let him know you have arrived safely”.

“Wow, it sounds just like when we lived at home in high school”, Erica exclaims.

Despite the heavy security that can be a real downer, I leave tomorrow with an enormous dose of optimism. The young people I have met in Gaza and Iraq, two of the most war-torn areas of the world in recent years, are filled not with hopelessness and grinding despair, but with hope and enormous energy. They are painting and repairing schools neglected by their governments, doing teach-in’s on democracy, and educating children and teachers about how to dispose of unexploded bombs that still lay about the community. They want to really connect with Americans, and see it as a beacon of hope, of freedom and potential allies to discuss problems they face that are similar. Sometimes it is an unrealistic picture (no poverty, no garbage, no political corruption in America), and sometimes they think “why should Americans even care about them?” I will give you one reason, we could all learn a thing or two from them about hope.

“When we open our eyes, we first smell catastrophe”, Nazim, a local teacher tells me at the end of our training session today. He is twenty five years old and has lived through three wars/invasions. “Our last escape involved my family piling into one car with five other families and racing to the border. I still don’t understand how we all fit.” Yet, despite this, Nazim is daily teaching students the critical importance of talking directly with people from other cultures so they are exposed to new ideas and to take positive, effective local action. “It’s the only way we are going to make this world better for all of us”. And now, for the first time in his history, his students are doing just that.

The internet is a great thing. It can connect families like mine when some member is half-way around the world in a war-zone, to ease any fears and joke about being held hostage as a teen in high school. And it can connect Kurds with Americans with Palestinians with Jews to get to know one another as human beings. That alone won’t solve the nasty problems we now face. But it’s a heck of a start.

Today four of us hop in an SUV driven by a MercyCorps driver, and take a 2 hour drive to Kalar, a small town near the disputed border between the Kurdish territory in Iraq, and the rest of Iraq, run by the Shiite-led government. As we move out of the town of Sulaymaniyah,, my main base camp, the mountains surrounding us grow, until we begin to pass through a valley that has the look and feel of parts of Central Washington, with small jagged cliffs. It’s the start of the New Year here, 2071, and the valley is dotted with families who have pulled their cars off to the side of the road, quite randomly it seems to me, and are dancing, building fires and sitting on the ground chatting away. There are few national or local parks anywhere to be found, so people seem to just go into the countryside and hang. We drive through a series of checkpoints run by the Kurdish police. They all know our driver who lives in this valley, and wave him through at each point, while other cars are stopped, despite having two gringos in the car, who stick out like sore thumbs in an area that is virtually 100% Kurdish.

“This is the last place on earth where you can find people who just love George Bush”, I am told by the Director of a local humanitarian organization stationed in Kalar, the town we settle in tonight. The sentiment echoes what I have been hearing from others in northern Iraq, Kurdish-country, the past few days.

“I was utterly hopeless before. Now I have hope”, Mohammed states, a bright, engaging man who lives here and shares a dinner with me.

“Yes, its true Bush invaded Iraq, and may have done so for oil or other reasons that were not right, but now we can live a life, and before we could not.” Bush as a beacon of hope. It is a hard pill for me to swallow, yet here it is, clear and true.

The younger Iraqi students we meet with today, 13-15 year olds, uniformly say how much they value freedom, and a good life. “Here people throw garbage in the street, children are not in school and need to get back in. In America, this does not happen, and people can do what they want”. We suggest they discuss this with their American counterparts when they go on-line this week. “You may be surprised by what you learn,” I say. They stare back with a look of skepticism in their eyes...

First Impressions

"Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists. " — Thomas L. Friedman ...

"So, what are your first impressions of Gaza?", Reem asked me excitedly as I settled in to my chair with a room full of her 14 fellow Palestinian students at the MercyCorps Youth Center in Gaza.

Just four hours earlier, we had left beautiful Jerusalem for a 45 minute drive to one of just three entrances to the Gaza strip. A 30 foot wall surrounded this 26 square miles of land pressed up against the sea. 1.4 million Palestinians reside within, a virtual prison camp in which no Palestinians are allowed to leave, but visitors with the proper credentials can sometimes be allowed in by the Israelis.

I assumed I fit that category of the properly credentialed.

Along with 4 other MercyCorps staff, we were allowed in after a 2 hour wait , despite having been approved for entry days before by submitting our passports to the Israeli authorities. After showing our passports twice, walking past multiple machine-gun toting young men in khakis, entering through at least 6 locked gates, and down a deserted 800 yard tunnel, we entered into Gaza. As we walked further still to catch a taxi that awaited us about a quarter mile away, you could look in any direction and see bombed out buildings. We later toured Gaza and saw more devastation on every block, with dozens of makeshift tents set up by the UN to house the now-homeless. We later stopped at the site of recently bombed "American International University", a prestigious university that previously had attracted 230 local Palestinians, attracted to its more liberal university education. As one of the board members, Sharhabeel Al Za'aem, explained to us as he stood in front of the devastated university, it is hard to comprehend why it was targeted. It had been hit twice before by Israel, by accident, so they knew where it was located. He had met just weeks before with Senator Kerry and Congressman Baird from Washington State to talk about the destruction of Gaza, and told them, as he told us, "all we want is a chance. Just treat us as half a citizen with just half the rights others are afforded so we can at least show we can contribute".

As we drove up to the MercyCorps office in Gaza, the sky opened up and we all were afforded a panoramic view of the sparkling Mediterranean Sea just a few hundred yards away. I love the ocean and wanted to go dip my toes in it after a very hot, dusty ride. "Yes, it is beautiful, but it's very cold right now and you wouldn't want to go swimming in it, you could be shot. It's heavily patrolled to blockade any entrance to Gaza by the sea". I looked up and saw the drone flying over all our heads, a Goodyear-like looking silent machine, with the watchful eye flying several thousand feet above Gaza, filming everything as it moved slowly across the sky.

We then walked inside the office, where we sat down in a roomful of excited high school and university students, so happy to see us, welcome us to their community, feed us great falafal and hummus and wanting to know more about Ryan and Catherine and Raisa and everyone else they were talking with on-line and wondering what these US students REALLY thought about them...

"So, Greg, what are your first impressions of Gaza?", she said........

Getting ready to leave...