Home Is Someplace Else

As I walked down the alleys of Balata Refugee Camp last weekend, I wanted to bring my readers along to feel and see the camp. You know these camps exist, but unless you have been in one, you can’t know anything about them. 

You don’t know that the passages between homes, where there should be roads, are barely wide enough for two people to pass each other.

The result is not just a cramped feeling, it is an absence of light entering the homes. Imagine your apartment or house not having windows or receiving any natural light, let alone sunlight.  In turn, you live with artificial light, usually fluorescent, day in and day out.  The narrow alleys outside your door don’t invite you to take a walk around the neighborhood, nor do they invite your children to go out and play, though the children do anyway.

Why are there 19 such refugee camps in the West Bank alone and 58 altogether spread through Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan?   They were created in the early 1950’s by the U.N. for the 750,000 Palestinian refugees who survived the expulsion from their homes in 1948. Originally people lived in tents, which were meant to be temporary, as every family thought they would return home as soon as hostilities ceased. But years passed, and it became clear that the situation in Palestine was not temporary, and the people had to accept that they would not be allowed to return to their homes.  The U.N.began to replace the tents with cement block structures of two small rooms for families of up to 12 people.  While the houses were better than tents, they were just as overcrowded.

Balata Camp was alloted a quarter of a square kilometer for  5,000 people. (A kilometer is .6 of a mile.)The boundaries of the camp have not expanded since then though the population certainly has. Balata now has about 27,000 people.  As the population has grown and people have needed more space, they have built into the streets, narrowing them to be the alleys they are today.

There are still a few streets that accommodate cars and small delivery trucks; there are shops selling everything needed in urban life; but it is the absence of space that I feel acutely when I walk around with my Palestinian family. (We adopted each other 15 years ago during the emotional wartime of the Second Intifada.) I also have to watch my step as there is poor drainage and people do attempt to wash the alleys, to clean them of bits of trash.  It seems the trash wins more often than not.

When I experience these conditions, I wonder what life would have been like if there were never any camps?  What if today the United Nations did not try to provide shelter, food staples and some minimal services to these refugee families?  While it seems like we need these camps, they are also a reminder that home is somewhere else.