No Place for Children
by Hanson R. Hosein, NBC News Producer
(DEHEISHEH, Palestinian Authority - August 26)
Friday morning, it was a room full of computers and enthusiastic Palestinian children sending e-mail through their only lifeline to the outside world. By midnight, the Ibda Community Center's computer room was on fire. Someone had deliberately torched the place, stealing the computer server and reducing the rest to molten plastic and silicon.
It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. For five years, the Ibda (Arabic for "creating something out of nothing") Center stood out as a place where children could dream despite being surrounded by the squalor of the Deheisheh refugee camp. And now it was almost completely destroyed.
"Ibda Center is my life, my heart," said fourteen year-old Manara Faraj as a crowd gathered outside the two-story building on Saturday. She said she cried when she first heard about the fire. "I'm very sad. We are children, we hope to smile everyday. My heart is broke. I don't know why they did this."
NBC News visited the center just hours before the fire. We had heard about an innovative new project called "Across Borders," funded by the Canadian government and Oxfam Quebec. The idea was to give Palestinian refugee children from refugee camps across the Middle East a chance to communicate with each other and the world, through their own websites and e-mail.
"It's very difficult, if not impossible to travel to places as nearby as Gaza, or to even travel overseas," said Muna Hamzeh-Muhaisen, a Palestinian-American. She left her family behind in Oregon to marry a Palestinian in Deheisheh - and has not been allowed to leave the area for over five years. "We live a life of isolation basically that's dictated by Israel allowing us to have travel permits or not. E-mail and the Internet is really our ticket out of this place - without having to physically get out."
Deheisheh refugee camp is located near the biblical town of Bethlehem in the West Bank. During the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, many Palestinians fled their homes and ended up in camps - spawning generation of refugees living in barely tolerable conditions. Deheisheh is a harsh place to live, full of cinder-block houses, dirty narrow streets and barely any running water or electricity. More than half of its 11,000 residents are children, with precious little to do and nowhere to play.
Before the fire, Manara was e-mailing her friend in a refugee camp in Lebanon using her Yahoo e-mail account. She wrote in English - the almost universal language on the Internet - despite having Arabic as her native tongue. "Thank you for your beautiful card and letter" she wrote. As she clicked the mouse and typed away at the keyboard, Manara proved that she was just as adept as any other computer literate youngster in North America.
"With this computer, we tell the world that we are not bad refugees!" she said. "No! We are good refugees. Look, we use the Internet, the computer, everything like you!"
In July, Manara and her friends accomplished the near impossible. They managed to make it up to the border with Lebanon, just as the Israeli Army was completing its pullout from southern Lebanon. During this transition period, Palestinian refugees on both sides of the border had the chance to speak to long lost loved ones through the barbed wire fence. The kids from Ibda used this window of opportunity to put the faces to the e-mail addresses of their pen-pals from the refugee camp in Lebanon.
"They told us about their lives," fourteen-year old Tamara Aboulaban said. "They live in a camp, and we live in a camp. So I think it's the same life."
"It's an uncensored voice from the camp to the outside world," said Peter Holland, the project director from Oxfam Quebec, one of the major funders of Across Borders. He explained that the program can have a direct impact on the ongoing peace process "It's key for the final status agreement. Does Yassir Arafat speak for the refugees of Lebanon?"
Holland hopes to have an Internet connection in all fifty-nine of the Palestinian refugee camps scattered throughout the Middle East. But Friday night's fire has considerably slowed down the timetable - which may have been the intention of the arsonist, who has yet to be identified.
Saturday evening, hundreds of Deheisheh residents gathered outside the Ibda Center to protest the destruction of the computers. A parade started up. Children and adults alike marched through the camp, holding banners declaring that although they had been wounded by the fire, they would overcome the incident and become even stronger.
Ziad Abbas, the director of Ibda was also there. He was one of the first to discover the burnt remains of his center.
"It was very difficult to see that." Ziad Abbas. "It is something that makes the children very happy. But they will not succeed forever to destroy the idea." Abbas is optimistic that through outside donations, they will be able to have the center up and running within two weeks.
Notwithstanding the setback from the fire, the Internet makes life far more tolerable for the children of Deheisheh refugee camp. However, it does not substitute their desire to lead a normal life. Tamara, like the other children, said that she wants to return to the village where her parents came from before they became refugees.
"I don't want to stay in this camp," she said. "If I want to open the window, I can see trees, and nice things. Not like here."
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