COMPASSION OR COMPLICITY?
In a Beirut slum, controversial funds from Canada are big news,
BEIRUT, LEBANON— For Wafa Daye, the matriarch of a Palestinian family that fled a Damascus suburb a year and a half ago with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, life now is six people crowded into two tiny rooms in a grim, crumbling, concrete warren that houses 400 families.
Wafa’s son-in-law made the perilous Mediterranean crossing last year and is now in Sweden, she says, but he is not yet able to help the family. So Wafa, her husband, her grown daughter and her three grandchildren survive in this place, known as Daouk, on her daughter’s meagre wages as a hairdresser.
“It was easier in Syria,” she says through an interpreter, citing the difficulty of getting work in a country where discrimination against Palestinians is codified in law. “And here, the rent is so high.”
Sparsely furnished with a single bed, a salvaged couch and plastic chairs, the two rooms cost the family $450 (U.S.) a month.
On a bare concrete wall is a pencil drawing made by her 11-year-old grandson, Wafik. It depicts what he most misses: “Memories of my house,” he says. Asked what he brought with him on the journey out of Syria, he shrugs. Nothing.
Daouk is one of three informal Palestinian communities, known locally as “gatherings,” that have formed just outside the official, decades-old Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The impoverished gatherings are collections of multi-storey buildings that have filled with Palestinians and people escaping the Syrian conflict.
Rashid El Mansi of the local charity Popular Aid for Relief and Development (PARD) points out that Lebanon is “where refugees are welcoming refugees into refugee camps.”
To Canadian eyes, it’s an apocalyptic scene.
Boards are placed across the base of doorways on the lowest floors in an effort to keep out the frequent floods. A tangle of electrical wires dangles menacingly overhead in every maze-like passageway. Haphazardly constructed concrete steps lead every which way to improvised shelters built atop of, carved within and wedged between several tightly connected buildings. Sometimes just a curtain separates families.
But being close to the official camps means Wafa and her family can get some of the services provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), set up in 1950 to provide help strictly to Palestinians scattered into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza after the creation of Israel.
UNRWA, funded by voluntary contributions from other countries, runs 67 schools and 27 health clinics in official camps here and in other parts of Lebanon. In the gatherings, it helps fix water systems, collects garbage and assists with rent.
On Nov. 16, the Canadian government controversially announced it was restoring funding for UNRWA. Canada pledged an unrestricted $20 million annually and earmarked another $5 million for Syrian refugees.
The move was criticized by the Conservatives, who ended support for UNRWA in 2010 on accusations it was too tightly connected with Hamas.
“I’m horrified,” Conservative foreign affairs critic Peter Kent told The Canadian Press after the Liberal announcement. He said there is ample proof that “massive amounts” of UN aid have been redirected to support Palestinian military efforts against Israel.
The government said the money will be accompanied by “enhanced due diligence,” including anti-terrorism provisions.
Opponents also argue UNRWA’s existence, generations after it was assumed Palestinians would be resettled in host countries, perpetuates a dependency.
But Canada had been the only core funder, which includes the United States, Britain and European Union, ever to withdraw support.
“It’s a major contribution and it’s really important, given the significant deficit ($37 million) we’ve been struggling with,” Gwyn Lewis, senior co-ordinator in UNRWA’s Lebanon office, said of Canada’s new commitment. “It means a lot to get this, to help us maintain services and to have the renewed partnership and confidence of Canada.”
Classrooms are overcrowded in UNRWA schools, in part, Lewis says, because the schools weren’t built for that purpose. Refugees complain the free clinics don’t do much more than dispense Aspirin — a point Lewis disputes while acknowledging concerns about a recent change requiring refugees to pay a portion of hospital costs.
In truth, some Canadian aid has already been making its way into the gatherings through other routes.
Wafa’s clan is one of 1,288 families currently receiving monthly food vouchers of $25 per person, up to five per family, with widows, ill or disabled breadwinners and large families getting priority.
The program, run by PARD, relies on funding drawn by the Canada/U.S. charity Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) from the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a food-security coalition of Canadian churches and farmers, whose funding is bolstered by four-to-one matching grants from Ottawa.
Lebanon, a country of 4.5 million, is currently hosting 1.1 million registered Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — a gross underestimate, because the government ended registrations 18 months ago.
The 31,000 Palestinians included in that number — who have joined about 450,000 Palestinians already in Lebanon — face additional burdens: They’re legally prohibited from working in all but17 lowpaid occupations, may not own homes or taxis, may not attend public schools and have no hope of ever gaining citizenship or the government benefits that come with it.
One ray of sunshine for children in the Beirut gatherings is a kindergarten run by PARD and funded by MCC through its Syria/Lebanon representatives, Doug and Naomi Enns of Kitchener, Ont. It allows Syrian refugee children to get some grounding in English and basic education.
The Lebanese school system assumes parents pay for three years of preschool before they enter Grade 1, where core subjects are taught in English, Naomi Enns explained. Syrian kids arriving after an interrupted education in a very different system are deeply disadvantaged and face discrimination and bullying.
“Typically,” she said, “they drop out in frustration.”
“D-capital, d-small, d-dog!” one class of kindergarteners chants enthusiastically as their teacher, in a floral hijab, points to letters on the whiteboard. The classroom is tiny by Canadian standards, but it’s bright, colourful and filled with joy. There is a new playground on the roof of the multi-storey building, a couple of blocks from their grim homes.
Some of these children, the Syrians, will go on to remedial classes provided for refugees by the government. The Palestinians will enter an UNRWA school. What the future holds for them may depend on what happens here.