Ammari
We’re in H.’s beat up car, driving through Ammari, one of the refugee camps of the West Bank. Anna’s in the front with her camcorder, while I’m in the backseat. According to the UNRWA, the United Nations agency dedicated to helping the Palestinian refugees, some 9000 people are registered as refugees in Ammari, including about 300 families classified as being in a “special hardship” situation.
H. Points to some of the institutions ran by the UN as we pass them: a boys’ school, then, a bit further, one for girls, both behind tall concrete walls augmented by razor wire, and with guards at the gates. We pass some other walled and guarded compounds, but those belong to the Palestinian Authority’s security services. Other buildings on both sides of the street are even more unsightly than in Ramallah itself: two to three stories tall, made of mostly naked concrete blocks, the urgency and, as it was then perceived, temporary nature of the constructions is unmistakable. The road itself seems to have been cemented only recently, and indeed, some dirt pathways remain.
The car comes to a stop in a narrow street. H. gets out and we follow him as he walks into a house, brushing the curtain that serves as a door out of the way. The room is dimly lit by white fluorescent lights; tables with computers on them line the wall, kids sit at those computers, and of course the whole thing sounds like a war zone: we’re in an internet café, and the game played is Counter Strike, a terrorist vs. counter-terrorist affair. A short, corpulent man comes to meet us and, unlike H. he speaks some english. He hollers and the kids, strangely enough, quiet down, but are still glued to their screens, paying no particular attention to us dumbfounded westerners, standing there in the doorway. Anna asks if she can recharge her camcorder before we go out to walk through the refugee camp, but there seems to be no power outlet available, so we’re rushed outside and let, do another house, which H. introduces as belonging to his family. The man from the internet café comes with us.
We step into the house. In a small, cold, dimly lit room, a dozen people, three generations are gathered. The house’s patriarch, an old man in his sixties or seventies, smokes a cigarette sitting on a pillow against a wall, next to the bed on which his wife props herself up on her elbow. Men and women of H.’s age are present as well, each with his or her own little corner of the bed, or a chair to sit. Small kids run around, but stop to shyly peek at us from behind their mothers’ skirts, as we unwittingly intrude upon the domestic peace. The walls are covered with various decorations, among them photographic portraits of H. and his family members. Three seats are immediately made available for us; H., as the host, stays standing. Anna plugs her camcorder in, tea is served, and the usual conversation starts.
“Where are you from?”
“What do you think of Palestine?”
I’m dying to take a picture of this family, of their living conditions, but H. would rather that I didn’t. So I don’t.
“Do you know what it’s like, to live in a tent?”
I don’t understand a word of Arabic, and most of the time the conversation isn’t translated for me word for word, but this one last question is, and it brings about an implacable realization of the realities of Ammari, and, in a broader sense of the lives of the millions of Palestinian refugees.
This camp has been a temporary home since 1949. It has also been the only home two of the three generations that live in this house have ever known. The living conditions are a far cry from what they have been in the tent towns of the wars’ aftermaths, but, according to the UNRWA, Ammari still suffers from overcrowding and poor sewage and water networks. It is also under constant threat of Israeli army incursions. The IDF rolls in at night, we’re told, and arrest whoever they want, for whatever reason. Sometimes there are shootings, and men are killed. Most of the families in the camp, our hosts say, have had run-ins with the IDF, with one son, husband, brother detained or worse.
Later, as we walk the streets of Ammari with H. and the man from the internet café as our guides, after passing an empty space H. tells us used to be a house that became “victim of the Intifada”, we come across a young girl looking up at a poster of the Palestinian Presidential Guard, announcing the death of one of its “martyrs”, young man born in 1985 and killed in an incident involving the IDF special forces last december. The girl’s friends show up, and the whole bunch of them surround us, playful and spunky, as Palestinian kids usually are. We take pictures and shoot video as they parade in front of us doing their best supermodel impressions. The young dead soldier is quickly forgotten.
