Syria’s youth rebuild life in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley

February 27th, 2015

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Xanthe Ackerman

Xanthe Ackerman IMAGES

In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, home to a third of the country’s 1.5 million Syrian refugees, Al-Qaeda linked attacks on the Lebanese Armed Forces have provoked violent sectarian retaliation. Amid the insecurity and economic devastation, however, Syrian youth are going tent to tent to help refugees rebuild their lives.

Like many Syrians did before the war, Fadi Hallisso came to Lebanon without a visa. It was 2010 and he was a first-year undergraduate studying philosophy at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. The summer after his second year, he went on a Jesuit mission to Africa. When he returned in September 2012, over 100,000 Syrians had poured into Lebanon. Driving around the towns along the Bekaa Valley, piles of waste announce the existence of roadside squatting. No one was prepared for the amount of aid needed to cope with the situation.

Fadi started the process of registering Besmah-Zeitooneh (“Smile Olive”), as a formal charitable organisation in Lebanon after he watched a Syrian girl die on the steps of a Lebanese hospital. He had been working with two friends, a Syrian Jesuit activist and a Muslim woman from Aleppo, to fill in where the Lebanese system was falling short. That day, in the winter of 2013, he received calls about a 14-year old girl who needed an emergency operation. The hospital wouldn’t treat her without proof of the means for payment. Fadi called his network of volunteers, but by the time he scraped together the funds, the girl was dead.

Fadi thought it would be impossible, but after 8 months, in January 2014, Smile Olive was accredited as a charitable organisation able to channel funds from Lebanese and Syrian philanthropists to projects for refugees.

On the map, it looks as though Syria is going to devour Lebanon, a tiny paw print of a country, and in the first years of the war Syrians passed freely to Beirut from Damascus and Homs. Now a quarter of the population in Lebanon is Syrian, and most of the latest refugees are blocked at the border.

Lebanon’s government recently announced a plan to respond to the effects of the Syrian crisis. It requires over $2 billion in aid from donor governments, but it is uncertain that so much will be paid. In 2014, the UN appealed to the international community for $1.5 billion in aid to Lebanon; just $700 million was received.

Smile Olive tries to meet those needs which other NGOs don’t or can’t provide for; it is also supporting self-starters. A year ago one of Fadi’s Syrian outreach workers climbed five flights of stairs to his office to ask for a loan. Her husband was out of work and she wanted to buy a fridge so that they could start selling sandwiches to support their five children. She sat across from his small desk, holding her hijab across her mouth, and they thrashed out the details of a small loan, which she repaid within two months. Now the centre buys sandwiches from her for their theatre events.

After several other women asked for loans, Fadi had the idea of a grants programme specifically for woman. Smile Olive now awards women up to $1,000 in business start-up grants. To create a positive incentive, they offer larger amounts to Syrian women who work with Lebanese or Palestinian women in the neighbourhood.

Smile Olive’s main centre in Beirut is in the Palestinian Shatila Refugee Camp, established in 1948. In the middle of the camp, a huge rusted bronze key on a water tower symbolises the refugees’ right to return to their homes in Palestine. The rent in Shatila is cheap, and many Syrians have made it their home. In the camp, the Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah maintain a presence and Smile Olive runs programmes for international organisations which don’t operate there.

Fadi has a love-hate relationship with international NGOs; although they have the knowledge and funding that he needs, getting their attention has been difficult. He speaks bitterly about the large NGOs that have flocked to Lebanon in the past two years: “They don’t support the local charities. They hire Syrian staff and give them huge salaries that local organisations can’t compete with… When they leave, because of lack of funding or another crisis in the world, they won’t have prepared local stakeholders to take over.” As a result, Smile Olive’s staff, many of whom are refugees themselves, make do with what they have.

Arriving at Smile Olive’s centre in the Bekaa Valley after an hour’s drive from Beirut, the small fifth floor suite of three rooms offers a panoramic view of the informal settlements and the all-pervasive piles of domestic rubbish. The manager, who fled from Damascus last year, lives next to the office; he invited me into his sparse living room for cardamom coffee. He and his wife met while working at Besmah-Zeitoonah and were married just a week ago. She lent me her only coat to guard against the cold.

From the centre, I drove with Azzam Moustafa, a Syrian from Aleppo and a programme manager at Smile Olive. He does theatre in his spare time from the American University in Beirut but he looks more like a rock star than an actor, sporting a wild crop of curly hair, skinny jeans and army surplus boots.

I spent most of the day with Azzam at an orderly camp midway between Beirut and Damascus. In the absence of any government or NGO presence, an Islamic group has stepped in to run the camp. There is no school but they hold prayers five times a day in a small mosque.

As he prayed, I watched a bunch of scruffy kids try to turn over an abandoned playground bench swing. They lost their momentum each time a man with salt and pepper hair veered over to admonish them.

A family had just arrived from Ghouta, an opposition-held area in Syria now under siege by government forces. After assessing their condition, Azzam and I returned to the centre to fetch blankets for them.

While he unloaded items into the family’s container shelter, I saw that the kids had succeeded in righting the swing and were swaying back and forth triumphantly, a throng of them, overcoming for a moment the desperate situation around them. In their own small and unintended way, these children were a sign that, despite everything, life can and will go on, driven by the Syrian youth who won’t sit back and do nothing. There’s a lesson in this for all of us.