Arabic Classes

As autumn arrived at the end of last year and the season of Ramadan came and went, the school year started again for the students in Lebanon. I was saddened to find out that Qaderoon, the project I had volunteered on teaching English to 5th and 6th graders at Borj al-Barajneh Palestinian Refugee Camp, was not taking place this year due to a lack of funding.
Around this same time, Dipendra headed to Nepal (or so I thought) for a conference on migrant workers’ rights and to see his family, so there was no copy editing or prison visits to do.
I decided that now might be a good time to take an Arabic language class. I signed up for 2 months of classes at a language school in the neighborhood where we live. The class would be held every day, five days a week for 2 to 3 hours a day. I let the school know that I was a beginner with absolutely no prior experience in speaking or writing Arabic. The woman who runs the school told me I would start off with a week of just learning to read and write the Arabic alphabet (or Alif Baa as it’s called in Arabic) in a one-on-one session with my instructor and then the following week I would be joined by two other people who were also beginners with no prior Arabic. Great, I thought and off I went to start my class.
To give you a little bit of background, the Classical Arabic language evolved out of a number of ancient Arabian languages between the third century BC and the fourth century AD. It eventually spread throughout the Middle Eastern region, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula with the expansion of the Islamic Empire. You may have heard people refer to the numbers currently used in the western world as “Arabic” numbers (1,2,3,4,etc). The reason for this is that these numbers came into Europe via the Maghreb or current day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia through Islamic Spain and were considered “Western Arabic numbers”. The “Eastern” Arabic numbers used in the Middle East are different than those. In Lebanon, both sets of numbers are commonly used.
Classical Arabic is usually only spoken when reading religious texts, such as the Quran or the Bible. Modern Standard Arabic is the modern, formal language of Arabic print, newspapers and politics. It is the language spoken on television by most news reporters and by most politicians giving speeches. It is also the written language that all Arabic speakers use regardless of dialect. But in everyday life, colloquial Arabic is mainly used. And that means that there are a number of different colloquial Arabic varieties being used throughout the region. Some of them are very similar like that between Lebanon and Syria. Some are slightly different and would be a little more difficult for two people from different areas to have a conversation, like Lebanon and Egypt. And some, like Lebanon and Morocco, are mutually unintelligible and people would not be able to have a conversation.
Arabic script reads from right to left and is very “cursive” in form and calligraphy is an important part of the language’s culture. The following are excerpts from both the Quran and the Bible:

The Arabic language is related to the other Semitic languages of the region including Hebrew and Aramaic. The term “Semitic” refers to members of any of the various ancient and modern Semitic-speaking peoples originating in the Near East and Northern Africa, including Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, and Ethiopian Semites. The term Semitic became associated with the Hebrew language and culture in Europe in the late 18th century and the term “Anti-Semitic” was coined by a German journalist in reference to European Jews in the late 19th century. Aramaic is still spoken in some isolated communities in Syria. Amy and I had the opportunity to hear it spoken in the village of Maalula, Syria at what is considered to be one of the oldest Christian churches in the world and was dated to around the year 325AD. The church still has a pre-Christian pagan, horseshoe shaped alter in it.

It is important to note that the word “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic, not “God of Islam”. The name “Allah” refers to the same monotheistic God that all Jews, Christians and Muslims worship. When Christians who speak Arabic (and there are many of them here making up about 35% of the population of Lebanon) are referring to their God, they say “Allah”. Unfortunately, the western world often misinterprets this and frames God and Allah as two different things. They are, in fact, referring to the same thing, just in different languages. It would be the same as a Christian in South America or Spain calling God “Dios”.
My first week of class went really well. It was exciting to learn a new language, or at least the alphabet, and I was really getting into it. My teacher, Vivian, who was Syrian and married to a Lebanese man, was really nice and patient. Four years ago she could not speak a word of English, but learned from many of the English speaking students she taught. Vivian and I got along very well and also had something in common: bad backs. Mine, a torn disc from a park service work injury and hers, a fractured vertebrae from a fall down a flight of stairs. Each day I brought my lumbar pillow and she wore a giant back brace. She was due to have surgery in December.
I was going to class for 2 or 3 hours a day and studying for about two hours a night at home. It was a ton of memorization, but I liked it. There’s something really neat about listening to the neighborhood mosque’s call to prayer while you’re studying Arabic. It really sets the mood.
The second week of class didn’t go as well. I showed up for class and was introduced to my two new classmates. One was a guy from Spain who was of Lebanese decent who had had a year and a half of Modern Standard Arabic in College and now lived with his Arabic speaking cousins in Beirut. The other was a young Dutch woman who had just finished a two month course in Arabic in Damascus, Syria. At what point these two folks were considered beginners is beyond me. Needless to say they were more advanced than I was and wanted the class to go at a pace faster than I could keep up with. They also did not want to follow the set curriculum for the class and wanted to jump around. Vivian, the teacher, to her credit, tried to rein them in and continually told them we needed to cover things in order and go at a slower pace. I complained to the woman who owned the school but she stated that if I wanted to change classes I would have to pay double tuition. I was pissed. So, instead, I would have to constantly ask them to slow down, but it did no good. In order to keep up with the pace I was now studying 5 to 6 hours a night at home. My head felt like it was going to pop. There were now large gaps in what I was learning since we were jumping around so much. Vivian would later confide in me that she had asked the woman who owned and ran the school to put me in a different class but the owner said no because it would mean the school wouldn’t make as much profit off of me. Every day I would come home and consider quitting, not caring that I would lose all my tuition money, which wasn’t cheap. I decided to stick it out and would end up being in the class with these two other students for a month. When the month finished up I told the owner I wanted a different class and didn’t want my former classmates in it.
She finally listened and I was back to the original arrangement of just me and Vivian. Things went a lot smoother for the second month, but it was mostly review of the first month since we had skimmed over so much. I felt like I had wasted a month of my time and money and now I had a bad attitude about the classes. Vivian told me she was surprised that I hadn’t quit. It made me feel a bit better knowing that it wasn’t my fault. All in all though, I did pick up some of the language that I am able to use on a daily basis.
Aside from all the trouble I’ve had, I must say that Arabic is a very difficult language to learn, especially for a native English speaker. There are several reasons, I feel, that this is so. To start with, there are 28 letters and 14 vocalizations marks that serve as accents or vowels. There are a handful of these letters that are sounds not made in Romantic or Germanic languages like English. These sounds are made in the back of the throat with a slight gargle sound. The closest representation I can give for this in writing is the sounds GH, KH or AH with a gargle. These letters sounds are completely foreign to us and in order to pronounce them, the native English speaker ends up contorting his face in some very strange and embarrassing positions, not to mention the whole flying phlegm thing.
Another difficult thing about Arabic letters is that their form changes depending on where in the word the letter falls or if it is standing alone. So the shape of one letter changes depending on whether the letter is at the beginning, middle or end of a word or if standing alone. Imagine having 4 different forms for each letter of the alphabet! That basically increases the alphabet to 112. Here's an example of the 4 different forms for one letter:

Also, many of the different letters look very similar. These are all different letters that look alike:

And several letters make, what sounds like to a non-Arabic speaker, the same sound. There are 2 letters that make a "T" sound, 3 that make a "Th" sound, 2 that make a "D" sound and 2 that make an "S" sound:

And one word can mean many different things, like the word “alaa” which can mean “to”, “at”, “on” or “up”. Or “aa” which can mean “to”, “at”, “on” or “in” depending on the context it’s used in. Confused yet?
But the hardest thing for me was the massive amount of conjugation that takes place in Arabic, not only in verbs but in nouns as well. So, for instance, in English we would say “my bike”, “your bike”, “his bike”, etc. In Arabic, the word “bike” would conjugate to represent the 8 different pronouns it could be used with. So, that means learning 8 different words per noun.
For verbs in English, we usually conjugate between singular and plural by adding an “S” to the end of the word. As in, “Jack runs,” and “Jack and Jill run.” In Arabic, the word conjugates differently for each pronoun it could be referring to and the conjugation takes place as a prefix, added to the beginning of the verb, not added to the end of the word. In other words, every verb has 2 or 3 different letters added to the beginning of it to show whether you are saying, “I run”, “he runs” or “we run.” And since the letters are added to the beginning of the word (most of which begin with ‘B’), there are 8 different versions of every verb you need to memorize. And this doesn’t include exceptions to the rule. For example, instead of just learning to say “run” or “runs”, it would be like having to learn “I berun, you bitrun (male), you bitrunee(female), he beerun, she bitrun (same as you-male), we mnrun, you bitrunoo (plural), they beerunoo”. This of course means that in a sentence, every single verb now starts with a “B” sound. Did I mention that along with adding this prefix to the verb, it changes the sound of the first vowel in every verb with no consistent pattern? Pretend I never said that. Here’s the Arabic word for the verb “to come” being conjugated. 8 versions of the same word!:

I can go on. The plural form of a word is usually not like the singular form. For instance, instead of “car” and “cars”, it would be “car” and “carrahat” and there is no rule to follow, it’s complete memorization. Did I mention that Arabic has different forms for singular, two and then plural? Yes it does. Here’s the transliteration for singular, two and plural of the Arabic word for “Chair”: Kersee, Kerstein, Karahsee. Here it is for “boy”: Ibn, Ibnein, WlAd. Do you feel the madness setting in yet?
Before I started this class, I asked around about where the best place to study Arabic would be. Everyone told me to go to Syria because I would be forced to speak Arabic there since not that many people speak English. They were right. When I went to Ecuador a few years ago to study Spanish, I learned more in 2 weeks of an immersion class than I did in 3 years of high school.
Here’s some of my homework:

A problem with studying Arabic in Lebanon isn’t just that many people here speak English, it’s that most people don’t want to speak Arabic to you. They’ll speak it amongst themselves but won’t take the time to let you practice. There’s also a class/status thing with people and English here. In Beirut, Arabic is the language of the commoners and people want to show you that they speak French or English, no matter how bad their English is. Vivian, who was raised in Syria in a home that spoke Arabic and French (the French colonized Syria and Lebanon, so many people here are fluent in it) told me that she does not have her children speak Arabic at home; she’s sending them to a French elementary school and only speaks French to them at home. Many people in Beirut make it a point to tell you that they were educated at a “French” private school and not the lower class public schools that teach in Arabic. It’s very sad to me. I saw the same thing in India where people were willing to dilute their culture and language to try to be what they felt was from a higher class. In India and Lebanon, speaking English is a status symbol.
Over Christmas break, Amy and I traveled to Syria and I was able to practice my Arabic more in one week there than I was able to do in 2 months in Beirut. (More on that trip later).
I know it seems like I’m doing a lot of bad mouthing about Arabic but don’t get me wrong, there are some really beautiful and interesting things about the language. One is that there are so many different ways of greeting someone and saying good-bye. Courtesy is built in to the language and you will hear people on the street spending a few minutes just running through the niceties of greeting each other. It makes just saying “Hello” seem cold and boring. Especially when most of the greetings and salutations involve wishing good health and peace upon the person you’re speaking to. Even saying “please” to someone is extremely courteous in Arabic. It’s actually 3 words and translates to “It might be a good thing if you…” as if expressing fear of insulting the person you are asking something of.
Another interesting thing is the number of greeting responses that involve God. If someone says something like, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” The response is “Inshallah” which means “If God wills it.” Or “Il Hamdilla” which means “I will, thanks to God.”
One of the phrases I find touching is a phrase you can say after doing something you enjoyed with a friend, like having coffee. One person will say something like “it was nice seeing you.” And you can respond by saying, “Daman Insha Allah” or “Let’s do this forever, God willing.” My friend Steve attended a funeral here in Beirut and was sipping coffee with one of the family members when the family member said “It was nice to see you.” And Steve politely replied in Arabic, “Let’s do this forever, God willing.” The family member kindly informed Steve that the one place you don’t use that phrase is at a funeral!
A nice one is when someone says, “Good Morning” or “How is your morning?” The response is “Sabaah Il Warid” or “my morning is as good as the white flower.” And my favorite of all is something people say to you after you get a haircut, “Nyma!” which translates to “Happy Haircut!” What could be better than that?!!
Well, my second month of classes would pass bringing in the month of December. Vivian would have her back surgery and be out of commission for a couple of months. I figured that this was a good time to take a break from Arabic classes and try to soak in all I had learned. I told Vivian that I would start back up again after she recovered and was back teaching. I figured she’d be laid up for 3 or 4 months. To my surprise, I got a call from the school at the beginning of February telling me that Vivian was back and wanted to schedule my classes for the month. I felt myself starting to sweat. I told them I was busy with work for February and would contact them in March. I still haven’t decided whether I will go back or not. But, in the meantime, Dipendra would contact me and soon my schedule would be all booked up….

Lebanon's Shame: Part II: Immigration Jail Visiting Day

It’s hot, humid and the guy in front of me is chain smoking. I’m trying to remember not to put my bags of food down on the concrete floor because there are cockroaches running between the overflowing dumpsters we’re standing next to. The strange part about this is that I’m inside. I’m standing in line with about 90 other people, at 9:30am on a Tuesday morning, waiting to get into Beirut’s immigration jail on visiting day. Dipendra, the Nepali social worker who I’ve been helping out lately (see last blog) was unable to make it this week, so I asked him to give me the names of the Nepali prisoners he usually brings our food to so that I could get in to the jail and deliver the food myself. Dipendra gave me the name of one prisoner, who I’ll call Nisha, and told me to just give her all the food because she would distribute it to the handful of other Nepali women who were being held in there.
From the outside, this jail does not appear to exist. There is a busy round-a-bout traffic circle in this part of the city that has a large concrete overpass spanning it. On the side of one of the overpass’s abutments is a set of two large metal roll up doors. These doors are built right into the side of the abutment. Through these doors is the immigration jail. Well, actually, through these doors and down. The jail itself is under ground, under this busy intersection. There are no signs indicating that the jail is in there.
Just inside the roll up metal doors, which are big enough to fit a truck through, is a narrow ramp with a metal railing. There are overflowing garbage dumpsters lined up at the bottom of the ramp and people lined up on the ramp itself. At the top of the ramp is a door. Behind that door is the jail and in front of that door is a police officer, sitting at a desk, determining who will get in to visit that day. Along the ramp are a couple of guards who every so often yell at the people in line in Arabic. I don’t know what they are saying but it appears that they are trying to keep everyone in a straight line, since every time one of the guards yells, everyone in line straightens out. It could also be that none of the other people who are waiting in line know what the guard is saying either, but figure if they get into a straight line they are less likely to get in trouble. Either way, when I hear the guard yell, I get into a straight line with the rest of the people in line. Once in a while, someone tries to cut to the front of the line and the guards make them turn around and go back down.
The people I’m waiting in line with appear to be from a wide variety of countries throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East. All with bags of groceries and bottles of water in hand, they are waiting to see friends or loved ones who have been sent to jail for some immigration violation. I’m not sure how many people are currently held in this jail but I do know that 600 of them are women who were migrant domestic workers. Most of these women were arrested for running away from abusive employers. More times than not, when a worker runs away, the employer will call up the police and falsely accuse the worker of stealing. Most times, the worker’s side of the story is never heard.
The line moves slowly. One hour into my wait and I’m about one third of the way up the ramp to the mysterious door. There’s nothing to do but lean on the rail and watch the people. I hear at least four different languages being spoken within earshot. Many of the women are dressed in traditional Indian saris and I guess that they are from Sri Lanka, since half of all of Lebanon’s migrant domestic workers are Sri Lankan.
Every so often a young Lebanese woman in super tight designer jeans, high heel shoes and badly dyed hair will walk up the ramp to the guards and the guards will let them go to the front of the line. This happens about 8 different times. All appear to flirt with the guards and go immediately to the front of the line. I try to convince myself that all of these women have a good reason why they deserve to go to the front of the line and that it’s just a coincidence that they all look the way they do.
These shenanigans, of course, make the wait feel that much longer. I watch the roaches run around as the two hour mark passes.
Before coming to the jail this morning, I asked Dipendra what Nisha, the woman I’m going into the prison to see, was arrested for. Dipendra tells me that Nisha, while working and living in her employer’s home, was grabbed and sexually abused by the son of her employer. On several occasions the son tried to rape her. The employer would not believe Nisha when she complained about the son, so Nisha felt it was better to run away rather than hang around waiting to get raped. Nisha was picked up by the police who really didn’t care to hear Nisha’s story, so here she sits in Beirut’s immigration jail, probably for a few months, then if the agency who set up her employment agrees to pay for a flight, Nisha will be deported back to Nepal. If the agent or the employer does not pay for the flight, then Nisha will sit in jail.
Finally, after about two hours and fifteen minutes, I make it to the officer who is sitting at the desk in front of the long coveted door to the prison. In front of the officer is a stack of printed off pages full of names of prisoners in both English and Arabic. I give the officer Nisha’s name and he starts looking through the stack of papers trying to find her. No wonder this takes so long. After a couple of minutes, I notice Nisha’s name on the list and point it out. The officer then pulls out a form that has about twenty spaces on it. The first three spaces are filled in with the names of the three people who were ahead of me in line and have already gone through the door. He writes down Nisha’s name and mine on the fourth line and tells me to wait just inside the door. Once inside the door, which is just a door to a really nasty, urine soaked stairwell, I wait with the other three people. One of the three people waiting tells me that we have to wait until all the lines on the form are filled with names, then the officer will go down and round those prisoners up and we can go to the visiting room and see them. OK, fair enough.
After about 30 minutes of standing in the urine stinking stairwell, the form fills up and down the stairs we go. At the bottom of the stairs is a guard who is looking through everyone’s grocery bags to see what they have brought, so now we wait a little bit longer. Why this wasn’t done during the two hour and fifteen minute wait is beyond me. When I finally get up to the guard he asks me what I have in the bag. I say, “Food and water.” He asks me what type of food and I tell him it’s “Manaeesh” which is basically a small cheese and vegetable pizza, of which I have eight. I also have four bottles of water and a heavy plastic travel bag for Nisha so when she gets deported she’ll have something to put her stuff in. He asks me if there is any cheese on the Manaeesh, to which I bewilderedly answer “yes”. He tells me that there is no cheese allowed today. I say, “What!?” and the guard repeats that there is no cheese allowed. I immediately tell him that I misspoke and that there is no cheese on the food that I have brought. He reaches into the bag, pulls out one of the little pizzas, opens it up and says, “Yes, cheese”. He then takes my bag of eight pizzas that were meant for women who they don’t feed in this prison and throws them into the corner. I then notice that there is a big pile of other people’s rejected grocery bags lying there too. All tossed aside because of the whim of this one guard. I look at him and say, “What the fuck?” He ignores it and tells me that I can now enter the room. I quickly regain my composure, realizing that not only will it be a waste of 2 ½ hours for me but that Nisha and her friends will get nothing out of it. At least I can still give her the water and the travel bag.
When I walk into the visiting room, I’m confused. The room is about 5 feet wide by 25 feet long. It’s more like a small hallway that is dimly lit by two fluorescent lights which have plastic covers on them that are yellowed with age. It’s stifling in this room. The far end of this small hallway is just plain dark. There doesn’t seem to be any windows to talk to anyone through except for a small, one foot by two foot hatch at the end of the wall that is cluttered with people passing what little groceries the guards let them in with through to the friends they came to see. Other than that, it appears to be just a wall that is made up of standard prison bars with a sheet of metal welded to it. It appears to just be a solid metal wall. Then I realize that the other visitors are walking up to the wall and talking. I can now see that the metal wall has a pattern of small, dot like holes drilled in it that you can just barely see through. The holes are about the size of the holes on a peg board you would use in your garage to hold up tools. You can just make out the shape of the person on the other side. Since I’ve never met Nisha before, I was hoping that her Nepali features would give her away so that I would know who she was, but now that I can barely see through the perforated wall, that won’t help me. I can see prisoners filing in and walking along the other side of the perforated metal wall, trying as hard as I am to see who’s on the other side. I decide the best thing to do is to call out her name. After I do, I see a tiny figure of a woman through the holes. She leans in close to the wall and I say her name again, quieter this time. She says something to me in Nepali and nods her head yes. I gesture to her to go to the hatch and then fight my way through the crowd to get to it. When I finally get to the hatch I can look through and see Nisha. She’s about 5 feet tall and at best weighs 90 pounds. I hand the bottles of water through the hatch to her, she takes them and then shakes my hand and says, “Namaskar” which I remember being a respectful greeting from traveling India the year before. I say Namaskar back to her and with a smile she turns and goes back into the prison. I leave the visiting room and head back up the nasty stairway to the entrance ramp where the line of people waiting is just as long as it had been when I arrived nearly three hours ago.
After leaving the prison, I meet with Dipendra and ask him why the guard would throw out my food because of it containing cheese. Dipendra shakes his head and tells me there is no rhyme or reason to it. He says that some days they will tell you that you can’t bring chicken in and on others it’s cheese. He says it’s all up to the guards. It makes me wonder if it wasn’t to deter people from visiting.
Dipendra and I walk along the busy, dusty streets near the prison and he tells me that he has to go to the police station to investigate the murder of a Nepali migrant domestic worker. The worker, who was found dead in the kitchen of her employer, had been shot in the abdomen. The police are saying that they had no suspects. Amazing, isn’t it. Shot dead in the kitchen of your employer, who doesn’t allow you to leave the house, and there are no suspects.
Every week I meet with Dipendra and every week there’s another horrible story. A female worker runs away because she’s overworked, under fed, beaten by her employer and hasn’t been paid in over 4 months. She runs because she knows it will never get any better, but once on the street she has nowhere to go. The police see her on the street and know that if she’s from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal or Ethiopia, she’s a migrant worker and chances are she’s running away. So off to jail she goes. Dipendra tells me of another worker, found dead in her employer’s house and the employer claims that she committed suicide because she was “homesick”. Dipendra speaks to the dead woman’s sister, who is also a migrant domestic worker in Lebanon. The sister tells Dipendra that her sister was being maltreated and beaten by the employer. Now she has to figure out how to take care of her sister’s children back in Nepal. The sister who “committed suicide because she was home sick” was 26 years old.
Dipendra tells me that there have been at least 10 Nepali migrant domestic women workers who have committed suicide in the last five years because of being “homesick”. Dipendra tells me that he doesn’t believe it. “Maybe one or two, but all ten? Why wouldn’t they just go home?” All of the official police reports state that the reason for death was suicide due to being homesick. Now, Dipendra tells me, four Nepali women have committed suicide in 2009 alone. And it’s only May.
A week or so later I met with Dipendra, a second man from the Non Resident Nepali Association and a third man from Dubai. The third man, who I will call Raji, is a wealthy businessman who works throughout the Middle East and has for years been using his financial and business influence to better the plight of the migrant domestic workers throughout the region. He has been offered the position of Consulate General for the United Arab Emirates by his home country but has turned it down because it would mean giving up his lucrative business. He tells me and Dipendra that, “if you have money, you have power. If you have power you can help people. If you don’t have any money, you’re not going to be able to help anyone.” Raji tells me that things are bad all over the Middle East for migrant domestic workers but that Lebanon is one of the worst, along with Qatar, where some 2,000 migrant domestic women workers are in prison. Raji tells me of a mafia ring he discovered in Qatar where agents will charge migrant workers large fees to come to the country promising visas and a good job. When the migrant worker arrives they find out that the visas did not come through, though they do have a job. The worker is usually at the job no more than a couple of days before the agent calls the police and tells them where they can arrest the worker. The worker ends up in jail and the police pay the agent a commission.
“That’s what I don’t understand.” I tell Raji. “Why would the governments of Qatar and Lebanon want to keep all of these migrant workers in jail? I would think it would cost them too much money to house all those prisoners. Wouldn’t it be cheaper for them to just deport these workers or let them go back to work?”
Raji leaned forward in his seat. “The governments of Lebanon and Qatar receive funding from the United Nations for every migrant domestic worker they imprison. The more women they arrest and hold, the more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”
Suddenly it was all clear.

Lebanon's Shame: Part I: Migrant Domestic Worders

Walk down Hamra Street, one of Beirut’s main thoroughfares, on a Sunday afternoon and you will think that you’ve accidentally found your way to the streets of Manila. Instead of the usual fare of Lebanese pedestrians that are out and about during the week, the sidewalks are filled with Philippine women. Many of these women can be seen lining up at any one of the international phone call businesses or standing in line at the Western Union, waiting to wire money home to relatives. These women make up part of Lebanon’s more than 200,000 migrant domestic workers. In other words, women who have come from poverty stricken parts of the world to work as live-in maids for Lebanese families.
Lebanon is about ¾ the size of the state of Connecticut and has a population of about 4 million. The migrant domestic workers make up about 5% of the population. 82% of Lebanese women do not work.
The migrant domestic workers come to Lebanon primarily from poor countries such as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea and Nepal and most send their earned wages back to their families in their home countries in the hopes of bettering the lives of the family members they left behind. Many of these women have children of their own who they have left in their home countries and will not see again for years to come. With the remittance received from the domestic workers, those families use the funds for everything from meeting basic needs, to sending a child to school. For many of the receiving countries, the remittance makes up a sizable amount of the country’s gross national income.
Migrant domestic workers who come to Lebanon are usually recruited by an agency that sets the worker up with a “sponsor” (employer). Both the sponsor and the worker end up paying hefty fees to the agency and government for permits, visas and airfare. Once in Lebanon, the employer takes and holds the worker’s passport and is the only one the worker can work for. In exchange, the employer is responsible for taking care of the worker’s food, sleeping quarters and medical needs. For many of the migrant domestic workers, this arrangement works out well. However, many others find themselves working as slaves, serving prison time or dead.
While most of these women are hired as live-in maids, their jobs quickly include not only cleaning the house and cooking but also caring for their employer’s children or elderly parents, shopping, running errands and walking their pets. Many are forced to clean the houses of the employer’s relatives for no additional pay.
According to a 2006 study done by Dr. Ray Jureidini for the International Labor Organization, 56% of the migrant domestic workers in Lebanon sampled reported working more than 12 hours a day. Some were found to be working as much as 19 hours a day, but the average was around 16-17 hours a day. 34% reported not having any days off and most reported being paid between $100-$150 a month. (The cost of living in Beirut is only slightly less than that of most cities in the US)
A previous study, done in 2001, showed that 22% of Philippine domestic workers had their pay withheld, 15% had their food withheld, 14% were confined to the house and never allowed to leave, 17% were physically abused and 8% were sexually abused.
The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch reports that Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population is “unprotected by (Lebanese) labor laws and are subjected to exploitation and frequent abuses by employers and agencies. The most common complaints made by the workers include non-payment or delayed payment of wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as, physical abuse”. Lebanese labor laws do not grant any rights to migrant domestic workers for days off or limit the number of hours they can be made to work in a day. Lebanese law also makes it very difficult for the worker to leave or change employers even in cases of physical and sexual abuse. Many migrant domestic workers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. If they are being abused, their only recourse ends up being to run away. If they run away from their employer’s home they are now viewed by Lebanese law to be illegal aliens without out any identification, because their abusive employer still holds their passport. Many of the abused women who run away find shelter in safe houses set up by non governmental agencies and religious organizations, but most are arrested by the police and spend months in jail, many serving sentences longer than ruled by the courts.
Some of the stories are horrifying. A Sri Lankan woman who was not allowed to leave the house or contact her family for 9 years and 8 of those years she received no pay, essentially working as a slave. When she finally was able to run away the Lebanese courts only required the employer to pay a settlement. Apparently slavery is not a crime here in Lebanon. When fighting during the Lebanese civil war reached its peak in the 1980s many Lebanese families fled, leaving their migrant domestic workers behind, locked up in their apartments with no food, for months at a time. This would happen again during the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. The families would return to Lebanon to find the worker starving to death, some surviving only by having food thrown to them from other balconies of the building. Apparently, treating another human worse than you would an animal is not a crime here either.
Human Rights Watch further reports that “at least 45 migrant domestic workers died in Lebanon in 2008, a majority of whom committed suicide or died while trying to escape” the home of their abusive employers. A number of workers have gone so far as to throw themselves from the balconies of the high rise apartment buildings they have been locked up in.
While the Lebanese government has recently started to address some of these issues, it is doubtful that any laws, even if passed, will be enforced.
A friend of mine, here in Beirut, who I volunteered with teaching English at one of the Palestinian refugee camps, asked me if I would be interested in trying to help out the migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. Of course I would, but where do we start? Fortunately for us, we had a list. A former American expat teacher who used to live in Beirut had compiled a contact list of non-governmental organizations, church groups and community leaders who have spent years trying to help with the plight of Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population. On the contact list was a note stating that most of these groups were interested in learning English. That seemed easy enough to help out with, but we decided to contact them and do a full assessment of what their needs were. What we found out was that English tutoring was just the tip of the iceberg.
I started off by contacting Pastor Ayana, who is Habasha, an ethnic group of people located in Ethiopia and Eritrea. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity) Pastor Ayana’s services are held every Sunday in a church borrowed from another congregation in the Dora neighborhood of Beirut. She also runs several safe houses for abused, runaway migrant domestic workers and arranges for these women to find work again when she can. Pastor Ayana told me that English lessons and computer skills tutoring would be very welcomed to the people of her congregation. She also mentioned that she could use help in finding donations to help support the safe houses she runs, buy food for the women staying in the safe houses and have help buying and bringing food to the women who are held in prison for being runaways.
“Bring them food?” I asked, “Don’t they feed the women in prison.” Well come to find out, they do, but not very much. Sometimes they only get rice or potatoes and often the women become malnourished while stuck in prison. Pastor Ayana explained to me that when the migrant domestic workers get abused and runaway from their employers many of them come to her for help. This is because in the past, the abused workers have run to their embassies for help and the embassies have just turned them over to the police, which, of course, lands them in jail. Pastor Ayana will take in as many women as she can (she showed me video of one of the safe houses, with 16 women living together in a one bedroom apartment, all sleeping on mattresses on the floor, 3 and 4 to a bed, some sleeping head to toe to fit on the mattress) and since many people in that area know about her, many potential employers come around as well. The potential employers come around looking to hire the women from the safe houses as maids because now they won’t have to pay any middleman fees to the agencies. They also know that these women are in such a tough situation, especially due to not having a passport anymore, that they will work for less than the already low rates they were being paid. The new employers also don’t have to sign any type of contract with these women because they are considered “illegals”, and this opens them up to more abuse.
The next person I contacted was a man named Ezekiel from one of the many Sudanese churches in Lebanon. (His name has also been changed to protect his identity)Ezekiel and I sat under the shady canopy of a banyan tree near one of the entrance gates to the American University of Beirut. Ezekiel told me of his home in Sudan and how his “mother tongue” was a language called Kawalinb Nuba; however, he was also fluent in Arabic and English. Ezekiel also told me that English and computer tutoring would be greatly appreciated. He told me that there is a doctor who is a friend of his church who often helps them out with medical assistance but so much more is needed, especially when it involves an emergency and they cannot bring people to the hospital without fear of being arrested. Ezekiel then went on to tell me about their need to provide child care and schooling for the undocumented children who are not allowed to go to school in Lebanon, food for prisoners and vocational training for refugees wanting to return home. Wait. What did he just say? It was then that I realized that all this time Ezekiel wasn’t just talking about trying to help out the migrant domestic workers from Sudan but also the many refugees who had come to Lebanon both documented and undocumented. Needless to say, if the live-in maids of Lebanon have no rights, you can imagine the predicament of the refugees. My head began to swim with the thought of how extensive the needs of this community are and the amount of resources that would be needed to address their problems. It would take the effort of, well, a government to help fix this and I was quickly realizing that the Lebanese government was the one entity that wasn’t helping.
I made no promises to Ezekiel, because, as he told me in our conversation, many people come and make promises to help but then they are never heard from again. I told him I would see what I could do and get back to him.
From there I hopped in a shared taxi and headed to Dora, the part of Beirut where many migrant domestic workers live. There, in front of the Western Union, I met up with Dipendra Uprety. Dipendra is a clean cut, 5 foot 4, Nepalese man, maybe in his 30s. He always wears a clean, white button up shirt even when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity out. Dipendra came to Beirut as a migrant domestic worker himself in 1998 in hopes of sending wages back home to Nepal so that his younger brother and sister could go to school. Dipendra paid an agent $3,500 to “sponsor” him and in return, the agent was to get all the appropriate visas and work permits so Dipendra could find a job in Beirut. As happens so many times in Beirut by unscrupulous agents, the man took Dipendra’s money but never came through with the paperwork. Dipendra found himself in Beirut with no job and no money. He had no choice but to find work without proper paperwork and lay low. This lasted for a couple of years, but then one day he got asked for his papers by the police and wound up in jail for 5 months. The jail Dipendra was sent to was the General Security Immigration Jail, the same one all migrant domestic workers get sent to if they get caught running away or working without papers. While in the jail, Dipendra saw the suffering and terrible conditions the workers were subjected to. He also saw how nasty the jail itself is. From street level there is nothing visible since the jail is underground. There is a concrete overpass on top of it and it looks more like a bunker than a jail.
With the help of a Baptist Pastor and $6,000 in donated funds, Dipendra found freedom, a new job, a work visa and God. He vowed from that day on that he would work to help the migrant domestic workers who had been abused and imprisoned. So, every day he bought food with his own money, cooked and brought meals to the Immigration jail for the prisoners. He did this until the police tried to arrest him for it. “Helping people out is not a crime,” he told them. They didn’t care. It took the intervention of the Pastor and the Nepalese Consulate to keep him out of jail again. This time the Consulate made him an honorary diplomat, complete with diplomatic ID to keep him out of trouble. Now he moves freely in and out of the jail, serving as a translator for the arrested Nepalese and trying to get their side of the story heard in court. (Often only the employer’s side of the story would make it into the police reports and court). Dipendra works most days volunteering down at the jail translating from about 9am to 2pm. After that, he heads to his regular job cooking at a restaurant from 3pm to midnight. I had to admit, the guy’s got energy.
Dipendra and I walked a few blocks and headed up into a small, dingy apartment that had part of its living room blocked off from the rest of the apartment by a curtain. There was a family sitting on the other side of the curtain going about their daily business. The portion of the living room we were standing in was the home to the local Non Resident Nepali Association, of which Dipendra was the President. (I would later find out that there are other branches of this Association throughout the Middle East). Two other Nepali men would join us and when we sat down; Dipendra smiled at me and said, “You’re the first non Nepali person to ever come to this meeting room.” He went on to tell me that every Sunday at least 60 Nepali people crowd into this little 12’x20’ room, many out on the stairway leading up to it, to talk about problems and give each other support. Dipendra said that one day he hoped to get a larger room to meet in.
Dipendra ran through pretty much the same list of needs that the other community leaders had mentioned: English and computer tutoring, food for prisoners, funding for safe houses and funding to get prisoners out of prison. He also mentioned that he would like someone to come with him as a “witness” when he’s dealing with some of the employers of abused migrant workers because he said that often they will say one thing to him and then deny it later. He also said that he wished he had someone who could take the letters he writes to lawyers, journalist and embassies and put them into proper English (his English is not that fluent). I realized that these last two items were things that I could definitely help him with and told him so. When we finally left the apartment/meeting hall, we walked out into the Dora neighborhood of Beirut. Before saying our goodbyes, Dipendra told me I should come back to Dora on a Sunday afternoon. “The neighborhood is full of Sri Lankans on Sundays, it’s very nice.”
While I was contacting these community leaders, two of my friends were also going out and doing a needs assessment on a handful of other groups. They came up with the same list of needs and complaints of abuse as I did.
A day or two later, I received a phone call from Dipendra asking me if I could meet him at the Philippine Embassy in Beirut to help him with a runaway migrant domestic worker. Since people usually call Dipendra up to help translate in Nepali, I asked why the Philippine Consulate, since I knew he didn’t speak Philippine. Dipendra told me that after the worker ran away, someone offered to drive her to her embassy. The driver assumed she was Philippine. The Philippine Embassy recognized her as being Nepali and called the Nepali Consulate who in turn called Dipendra.
When we arrived at the Philippine Embassy, we were directed to a petite 5 foot nothing tall young Nepali woman who looked terrified. She probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet. She began moving backwards as we approached, so I immediately stopped and let Dipendra continue going forward. She calmed down when she heard him speak Nepali to her. We found out that she was 20 years old and had just arrived in Beirut 3 days ago. She ran away because she said her employer was very mean to her. (As the ILO report exposed, it is common for employers to be exceptionally harsh on migrant domestic workers in the first few weeks to try and “train” the workers into submission as if they were animals). Fortunately, Dipendra was able to get a hold of the agent who had brokered her job and with much persuasion, convinced him to find her a new employer so that the police wouldn’t be looking for her. All three of us hopped in a cab and headed to the agents office where the agent and another Lebanese man were waiting. The agent explained that the Lebanese man was to be her new employer. When Dipendra and I went to leave, the girl began to follow. Dipendra had to explain to her that she had to stay and couldn’t come with us. It was so sad having to look at her face as Dipendra told her she would now have to go with this other Lebanese employer. It was like abandoning a child.
Over the next four months I would receive emails from Dipendra asking me to edit letters and help bring food to the jail with him. I would edit one or two letters a week for him and on a number of occasions, I would go to the jail with him to bring food. At the prison, Tuesdays and Thursdays are visiting days. On those days you can see hundreds of people lining up to get into the prison to see loved ones and friends who are being held there. The variety of ethnic backgrounds in this line is amazing. And each person in line has several bags of groceries to bring to those hungry prisoners on the inside. I’m told it takes a long time to wait in that line to bring the food in and visit with one of the prisoners. But because Dipendra carries a diplomatic ID with him he doesn’t have to wait in line and can go through a different door and see his “clients”. I unfortunately, cannot follow. Each time that I tell Dipendra that I want to wait in line to get in, he tells me it’s just easier for me to give him the food and let him go through the diplomat door. He tells me this with a look that says, “Why would you want to go in there?” So Dipendra and I chat at the door for a while, then I hand him my bags of food and off he goes, down into the underground bowels of the Immigration Jail. Each time I watch the door close and tell myself, one of these days I’m going to see what it’s like in there.

And today's guest speaker is...

This spring I found myself being a guest speaker at three different schools here in Beirut. At the first school I was a ringer since it was one of Amy’s American Literature classes at the university. This semester Amy is teaching a class she created called, “The American Wilderness.” It basically covers ideas of American wilderness as interpreted through American writers ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” to John Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”. Part of the class focused on national parks in the US and what better way to expose the students to the national park service than to make them listen to the stories of a bitter, old, crotchety former park ranger from Alaska: me! Amy had each of the students submit a question they wanted answered in regards to the US National Parks or land management in the US before I came to speak to the class.
Many of the questions the students in Beirut asked were similar to questions that I would get from students and visitors to the parks in the United States, such as how has the management of the national parks changed over the years; why do some park rangers carry guns and what can be done about over visitation. These questions are fairly easy to answer. Many of the questions also showed how the students here, just like those in the US, struggle with what wilderness is and why we need to protect it. But then there were a handful of questions that gave me some insight into how things are different here in Lebanon and the Middle East. Questions like: what type of heavy artillery do the park rangers in the US use? Or, if someone were illegally picking a flower and you shot them what would you give as your justification? Bizarre as these questions may seem, they would not seem so strange after spending some time here in Lebanon. Let me explain. To start with, the police in Lebanon do not wear police uniforms like we are used to seeing in the US. They wear the gray, black and white urban camouflage outfits we are used to seeing on soldiers who are engaged in urban warfare. Also, the police here rarely have a hand gun and instead carry an M-16 rifle (the ones you see soldiers going into battle with) or Kalashnikov assault rifles. The police carry these rifles openly as they walk down busy, crowded streets often times with their fingers on the triggers, swinging the gun carelessly back and forth as if it were a loaf of bread. And there are a lot of police here. One day, on my bus ride back from teaching at the refugee camp, we were stuck in traffic due to the police dealing with someone at an intersection. When the guy made a run for it, about six police officers shouldered their rifles and opened fire down the crowded street at the guy. Everyone on the bus ducked way down and the bus driver floored it through the intersection. I never saw the result of this gunfight but would lay odds that a lot of innocent people got hurt that day. It’s easy to see that the police here do not have much training.
Add to that, at most major intersections in the city you will find a group of Lebanese soldiers dressed in the traditional green camouflage uniforms, also carrying rifles, except that they are usually standing around an armored personnel carrier or a tank. The tank is usually surrounded by walls of sand bags and there is always a soldier at the ready of the tank’s or the personnel carriers’ 50 caliber machine gun. Many of the major roads in and out of the city have army run roadblocks on them. Initially it’s unnerving but after a few months of it you barely even notice. So it’s not surprising that the students here in Beirut have an image in their heads of park rangers patrolling through the campground on a tank, running down delinquents who litter or let their dogs run off leash.
All in all the students seemed genuinely interested in the discussion and as expected, there wasn’t enough time to cover all the questions the students had for me. Some of the students stayed after class to ask me some more. After everyone had finally left, the last remaining student asked me how I like the national park lands of Lebanon and then, after a quick look around to make sure none of her classmates could hear, she said, “I would love to come to the US and camp because I’m still a Scout!”
My next guest speaking opportunity came in a roundabout way. An acquaintance of mine who lives here in Beirut had heard about me teaching English at the refugee camp and told me that I should go and check out an elementary school that friends of hers ran. The school, which was called “Marouj” or “Greenfield” School, was located in one of the Beirut neighborhoods near the refugee camp that I taught at. I set up a meeting with one of the school’s owners and asked if I could have a tour of the school. The owner, a Lebanese woman named Rana, said she would be glad to give me a tour and tell me about the history of the school but asked me to bring a resume with me when I came. She then went on to “warn” me that the students at the school were all Shia; in other words, were all from the Islamic minority group known as Shi’a or Shi’ite. This struck me as a strange thing to say since a large number of people in Lebanon and the Middle East are Shia and they are, after all, just children.
After getting a tour of the school, Rana told me that she was looking to hire teachers who were native English speakers. She said that though I did not really have any teaching experience or training she was willing to give me a “trial” teaching day in which I could substitute teach a class of third graders to evaluate my ability to teach. Always up for a challenge, I said “sure.” I asked Rana if I could see the lesson plan of the teacher I would be substituting for but was told that the teachers at the school didn’t use lesson plans. She told me to do half the class on adjectives and the other half on reading comprehension and handed me a copy of a poem about an astronaut going to the moon. While this seemed strange to me, I figured I would still give it a try because, heck, how hard could it be to teach a class of third graders who don’t speak English as their first language! Well, I was about to find out.
When I returned a week later, I brought with me my worksheets on adjectives that I had used teaching the children at the refugee camp. I made copies of the astronaut poem and was ready to go. When I walked into the class, the children were already in there sitting down and listening to another teacher talk to them. There were about 25 students, all wearing blue and white school uniforms. When the other teacher announced that I would be the substitute for the day, the children all perked up in their seats with smiles on their faces. They looked SO excited that you’d think they were just told they were going to Disneyland.
I started off with the poem and had each one of them take turns reading a verse. When they were done I started asking reading comprehension questions to see if they understood what they had read. I was surprised and how many of the kids raised their hands. I would learn quickly, though, that just like my students at the refugee camp, there was a disparity in the abilities of the students to speak English. Some were as fluent as any American third grader while others were struggling with the language. I also found out quickly that not all the students were raising their hands to answer my questions. Some were raising their hands to ask me questions, especially this one boy who was sitting in the first row. He spoke English well but his thoughts were obviously somewhere else. He raised his hand for every single question and every time I called on him to answer a question, he would instead ask me a question. I felt like I had been set up. That maybe this kid had been paid off to break me. One time he asked, in reference to the astronaut poem, why we could see the moon at night but not during the day. Keep in mind, I’m being evaluated on teaching English, not science and the owner of the school is sitting in the back of the class taking notes the whole time. Though it wasn’t English related and we were running behind schedule, I felt it important to answer the kid’s question. I also didn’t think it was healthy for me to tell him not to ask such questions. I answered his questions and immediately noticed the owner jotting down notes in her pad. Damn, the kid trapped me, I thought. One time he asked me if I liked Adidas sportswear and another time he asked me if I considered metal to be gray or silver! He was getting the best of me and I noticed half way through the class that I was sweating. The teaching was tough. It seemed really difficult to get the concepts and thoughts through to the children, not to mention I felt like I was always way behind on what we were covering especially when I found myself answering completely unrelated questions. I barely got into adjectives by the time the bell rang. I felt like I had just gone 13 rounds with George Foreman. Surprisingly, once class was dismissed, all the children rushed up to me to ask excitedly if I was going to be their new teacher. It was so sweet. I told them we would have to wait and see.
After the class, I had a follow up meeting with the owner where she gave me my evaluation. When asked, I told her I didn’t think it went so well. She said that she thought I spent too much time answering children’s questions that had nothing to do with English. I agreed and thanked her for the opportunity to teach the class and got ready to head for the door when she offered me a job. What?! Yes, you heard me right, she offered me a job. She said that while she could see that I had no formal training as a teacher; this was the most talking she had heard the students do in English than with any other teacher. Which isn’t surprising since all of the other teachers are Lebanese and English is their second or third language. She said she wanted me to teach third grade English for a few hours a week, like maybe 15 hours or so. She told me to think about how much I wanted to get paid (this is how deals are done in Lebanon, they don’t tell you a salary, you tell them a number and they work you down) and to set up a meeting with her brother who handles the business end of things.
In a daze I worked my way back home trying to think if I wanted this job or not and what number I was supposed to tell them I wanted to get paid. I knew the pay would be really, really low, as in not just below US minimum wage but probably just enough to cover cab fare to and from work with a little left over. Which means I’d be working for free, which I reminded myself I was already doing at the refugee camp.
A few days later I was back down at the school for a meeting with the brother to talk money. While I waited in the hall, a group of three or four little third graders came over to me to say hi and asked if I was now going to be their teacher. Talk about pulling on the heart strings, these kids really know how to work you! The brother showed up and told me to first meet with the woman who was in charge of the academic program, she would be my boss should I take the job. He also told me that he hoped I didn’t mind that all the children were Shia and of the “same color”. I found this to be a bit offensive and prejudiced at this point, not to mention bizarre since I had just finished teaching a class of these sweet little kids and they were all the same color as him! I’ve quickly learned that in Lebanon, people’s prejudice against other religions runs deep enough that they start to see people as a different color, when in reality they are not.
During my meeting with the academic head, I learned that they intended for me to teach a full schedule, five days a week, from 7:30am to 3:30pm and that I would be teaching Science and Math along with English. I would also be required to oversee two after school projects with two groups of kids from different grades. This may not sound so bad to those of you who teach as a profession, but keep in mind, I’m not a teacher and there are no lesson plans to try and mirror. I would have to make up these classes myself. On top of that, this schedule would not allow me to volunteer at the refugee camp anymore, which to me was the biggest problem. The final blow came when I met with the brother again to discuss money. I asked him about getting me a work visa, which would cost the school a few thousand dollars. He said they would look into it but that it might not be necessary. Now let me tell you about the two British teachers who were volunteer teaching at a school outside of Beirut who were recently arrested for working without a work visa and were still being held in the Beirut jail. I told the brother that I needed more time to think about it and headed for the door. I would meet with Rana, the owner, a few days later and decline the job offer letting her know that I decided to continue my volunteering at the refugee camp instead. She told me to give her a call if I change my mind, which was very nice of her. I still get pangs of guilt when I think about those little kids in that classroom. I feel like I bailed on them somehow.
My third gig as a guest speaker came from yet another acquaintance who told me that I really must go see the campus of this private school that his friend had started. He said he would set up a meeting for me with the principal who was an American ex-patriot who had started the school about 4 years ago.
Initially I worried that I would end up in another situation like Greenfield and have to talk my way out of a job or worse, that people would start to wonder why I was spending so much time hanging around the children at elementary schools. I set up a meeting and tour with the principal, Dr. Marj, and sent her a copy of my resume which seems to be the standard procedure here when meeting people. Fortunately I received a reply that she would be glad to give me tour of the school but that there were no positions open now, especially not for anyone with my lack of teaching credentials. I breathed a sigh of relief and made my way to Dr. Marj’s school which is called Wellspring.
Wellspring was located on the grounds of a former convent which had been renovated to be a wonderful, warm learning setting. There was actually green space and trees in the center courtyard of the school. During the tour, I mentioned to Dr. Marj that I had moved to Beirut from Alaska. I saw a light go on and she said, “Wait, you’re the park ranger, right?!” I told her it was true and she said, “Our third graders are doing a project on water conservation and the fifth graders are doing a big project on deforestation. You’ve got to come talk to the class! In fact, you need to go on the field trip with them next week to the Cedars Reserve in the Lebanese mountains!!” The Cedar Reserve is one of Lebanon’s last stands of old cedar trees which used to cover most of the country. Due to a couple of millennia of over logging they are now almost all gone. This reserve is to Lebanon what Sequoia National Park is to America. Pass up a trip like this, I think not. I jumped at the chance to go on the field trip and then to come speak to both classes a few days later.

Before I knew it I was on a school bus full of 5th graders, who to pass the time on the long drive there sang songs in Arabic. Though I could not understand what the songs were about, I was pretty sure none of them was, “100 bottles of beer.” As we wound our way up into the mountains, we came across a rural house that was burning its trash and dead brush in a pile. Some of the children got all worried that they were burning the cedar trees. It was cute to see the kids’ concern but also gave insight into the view of forest fires in the region. Forest fires are still seen as a great evil in Lebanon and have been aggressively suppressed for years. This is the same fatal mistake that the United States had made for well over a hundred years. “Smokey’s Lie” as it is now referred to was the US Forest Service’s ad campaign and policy to suppress any and all wildland fires, no matter where they were. This suppression of natural fire lead to over a hundred years of dead and down tree branches and leaf litter being built up on the forest floors which would in turn lead to the massive wildland fires that we see today. Scientists in the US had warned for years that natural fire needed to be allowed to work its way through the forests to clean up and keep a balance of the dead tree debris that covered the forest floor. They also warned that some trees, like the Sequoia trees in California, needed forest fires to help release their seeds from their cones. All this was generally ignored until the 1970’s and 1980’s. Slowly the National Parks and Forest Service started to conduct “control burns” in the forest or manual thinning of dead trees to reduce the build up. This practice is only just making its way to Lebanon. I now knew what one of my classroom topics for the kids would be.
Lebanon is surprisingly mountainous. The coastal area along the Mediterranean is rocky and occupied by the country’s main cities. This coastal stretch quickly rises to foothills that are dotted with dozens of rural villages and towns and then the terrain continues up into the mountains, some of which are over 9,000 feet high. This mountain range, which runs north-south, then drops down into a fertile farming valley known as the Bekaa Valley. These mountains use to be covered in cedar trees, but as early as the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the trees had been logged to be used for things such as boats, homes, charcoal and the building of the pyramids. The logging of the trees in this area is even referenced in the Bible. Now, most of the trees are gone with a few areas reserved for their protection.
It was pleasantly cool and quiet in the reserve. As quiet as it can be with 35 fifth graders, that is. The cedar trees grow in rough and rocky soil up on the slopes of the mountains. Off in the distance we could see a terraced slope where new cedar trees had been planted in an effort to reforest the area. It was a nice effort to see, if not strange since the trees had all been planted in rows and looked more like a farm than a forest. The kids were so enthusiastic about the trees and the outdoors. They were full of good questions as the guide from the Cedars Reserve took them on a tour. After the tour, they broke up into smaller groups to collect scientific data about the trees, like trunk size and branch lengths. It was cute to hear them yelling at each other to “not step on the baby cedars!” when anyone came close to stepping on a sapling. I could tell that many of the children and even some of the teachers held the cedar trees in reverence, which seems only appropriate since it is the symbol on their nation’s flag.

Before we knew it, the trip was done and we headed back down, out of the fresh, cool air of the mountains and back into the smog and traffic of the big city. It made me miss the days of being a park ranger for sure. It especially made me miss Kings Canyon National Park and the big cedar trees that grow there.
Like the students at the University, I asked the 5th grade students who were on the field trip to put together a list of questions they wanted addressed when I came and spoke to their class. I also asked that the third grade students, who were not on the trip but were studying water conservation, put together their questions before I came in to speak with them. I looked the questions over a few days before coming in to speak to the two classes. The fifth grader’s questions on deforestation were earnest and pretty straight forward: What causes deforestation? What can we do to stop it? What are the governments of the world doing to stop deforestation? Why isn’t the government doing anything about deforestation?
When I initially wrote down my answers to these questions, I looked them over and realized how grim and pessimistic my answers were: Basically, the governments are doing nothing, it’s going to continue until all the trees are gone, there’s nothing you can do to stop it and you’ll be lucky if there’ll be a tree left by the time you’re 30. Wow, really depressing. The real work came in turning all that info around to a positive set of answers that would inspire the children and not send them screaming into the streets.
The water conservation questions by the third graders, on the other hand, were fun to research even though they had nothing to do with anything I had every worked with. The reason being is that though they were studying water conservation, which I am familiar with, their questions were all about dams!: How big is the biggest dam? How much water does the biggest dam hold? How much concrete is used in the dam? How much water can the biggest dam hold? What was the biggest dam break in the world? I realized that they should have had an engineer come in to talk to these kids, not a park ranger. But, with a little help from Google and Wikipedia, I found out all these answers, some of which surprised me. Like how they divert the river through a tunnel, build the dam where the river used to be and then bring the river back. The most interesting trivia to me, if not the most morbid, was reading about the largest dam break which took place in China in 1975. It was called the Banqiao Dam and it broke after receiving a rainfall amount equal to the normal annual rainfall in one night. It was built to withstand a 1,000 year flood, but unfortunately, that day it was a 2,000 year flood. The breaking of the Banqiao Dam triggered the breaking of 62 other smaller dams and eventually killed 230,000 people. Damn!
I grabbed the answers to the kids’ questions and headed into Wellspring for my guest speaking engagements. Both classes went well and the kids were really into what they were studying. The learning environment in this school is amazingly well set up and it would be considered top notch in the US not to mention cost a fortune to send your kids to. It’s considered one of the better schools in Lebanon and is the polar opposite of the learning conditions down in the refugee camps. The classrooms at Wellspring have what are called “Smart Boards”. I had never seen anything like this before except in science fiction movies. I brought in a zip drive that had some photos on it that I wanted to show the students while I was talking. They loaded them into the teacher’s computer and then the computer’s screen was projected up onto the board in the front of the class. No big thing right? Except that I could touch the board and move things around, open and close pictures with my fingers like I was touching an interactive computer monitor. Every once in a while I’d get stuck on opening or moving photos around an one of the third graders would hop up and help me through it. The kids were so into the stuff they were learning about that the teachers let me stay over about an extra 45 minutes for each class. It was great. I hammered home my lessons about why fire can be healthy for the forests and even worked in some pros and cons of building dams on rivers and let the kids try to decide for themselves which is best. I think I had as much fun as the kids did.
I even got a few thank you letters from the kids, one of which said, “Thank you so much for talking to our class. We learned so much about dams and we were sad to hear about the 230,000 people that died in China.” Lets you really know you’ve made an impact, right?
About a month after I spoke at Wellspring, I received an invitation to come to Wellspring’s Annual Science and Arts Expo which would display the works of the students from that past year. I happily accepted the invitation and went down to see the kids’ work. When I finally got to the floor that had the fifth graders deforestation projects on it, I was immediately surrounded by 6 kids who dragged me over to their exhibit. It was a computer based slide show that they gave an oral presentation along with. Each student had a bit of information to convey and there was a group of anxious parents waiting to for it to start. Their presentation walked the audience through the history, causes and potential corrections for deforestation and even spoke about how wildland fires are part of the natural cycle and can be healthy for the forests! They spoke about the importance of preserving forests not just for the sake of the trees but also for the sake of the people and the planet since the health of our planet will directly affect the health of the people.
I realized that if there were more school programs that taught children the importance of conserving land and water at this young an age, maybe we wouldn’t have such a hard time grasping the concept of preserving wilderness when we become adults.

Palestinian Refugee Camp, Part III: Bourj Women’s Center

“Do you think you can find your way back?” asked Mariam, a Palestinian woman from Bourj Al-Barajneh refugee camp who worked as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s Women’s Center Coordinator in the camp.
Mariam had just finished showing me and seven other American ex-pat teachers the way from the Women’s Center, which was on one side of the camp, to the city bus stop which was clear on the other side of the camp. Now it was time to turn around and find our way back.
As we stood at the opening of one of the many narrow alleyways that entered the refugee camp, I looked down at the make-shift map I had scribbled on a scrap piece of paper and said, “I’ll give it a try.”
Down into the maze I went keeping one eye on the alleys and the other on my little map. After a while, the alleys and forks all started to look alike, so I focused on the map, counting cross alleys, doorways and footsteps. A turn here, a flight of steps there. Is that the same cat? Couldn’t be. Wait, I recognize that graffiti. A few more turns, then a long straight-a-way, through a dark tunnel and before I knew it, there it was: the Women’s Center. One of the ex-pat teachers patted me on the back and said, “You really were a park ranger, weren’t you?!”
I heard about this volunteering opportunity through one of the other volunteers I worked with on the Qaderoon project. A teacher from one of the local private Beirut high schools had set up a meeting with Mariam and several of the ex-pat teachers to see if they could arrange English classes for some of the adults living in the refugee camp. Even though I wasn’t an actual teacher, they let me tag along. When we showed up for the meeting, we realized there were enough people wanting to get English tutoring that everyone of the teachers would have a class, including me. Since all of the teachers worked during the week, they all set their classes up for the same time on Saturdays. That way they could all commute down to the camp together in a minibus provided by the private school they worked for. And since I was a man of leisure, I was able to set my class up for during the week on the days I wasn’t teaching the 5th & 6th graders at Qaderoon. This allowed any of the adult students who couldn’t make it on the weekends to still be able to come to a class. This also meant that I would not be able to catch a ride in the private minibus with the rest of the teachers and would have to figure out how to get from my apartment to the camp via public transportation. Hence, the walk with Mariam to see where the city bus would be letting me off.
The bus ride, as it would turn out, would take about an hour to get from my neighborhood down to the refugee camp, followed by a 20 minute walk through the maze of the camp to get to the Women’s Center. After a couple of weeks of teaching at the Center, I got to where I no longer need the map to navigate my way through the camp and it only took me about 10 minutes or so.
The bus ride itself wasn’t necessarily long distance-wise, it was just that the bus moved incredibly slowly and would make multiple stops on nearly every block. Instead of having people wait at a bus stop every few blocks, people were just scattered along the city streets waiting for the bus. The bus would stop to pick up each one of them and no one would walk to where anyone else was waiting to reduce the number of stops. Frequently, the bus would stop to pick someone up on the street and then a hundred feet later, someone else would ring the bell to stop and get off. I guess when you’re paying 60 cents for a bus ride you want to make sure you don’t need to walk any further than you have to.
Once in a while, while walking through the camp to the Women’s Center, I would hear someone yell “hello” and turn to see one of the school children who I was teaching English to at Qaderoon waving at me. They’d run over to me and shake my hand or put their arm around me and walk with me for a while. It made me feel good to see those kids and to think that they still wanted to say hi to me after making them stay after school and read bizarre children’s stories.
Unlike Qaderoon, the teaching we would be doing at the Women’s Center was not part of a larger program and there was no oversight or guidance in what or how you taught. Qaderoon had a minimum amount of this guidance but at least there was someone there from the program to help out when your class devolved into a riot. Once the initial meeting was over, each of the teachers, and I, was in charge of figuring out how and what to teach in our own classes. This was easy enough, I’m sure, for the other 7 people who were professional teachers but for me, someone who barely made it through high school English myself, it was going to be a challenge. I spent endless hours online looking through English as a Second Language (ESL) websites trying to figure out what to do. And endless more hours borrowing, pirating and downright copying worksheets and stories from these online sites.
I figured I would start with the basics and spent a fair amount of time during the first few weeks just going over things on the dry erase board and running through grammar and sentence structure. I had 8 adults in my class, all of whom were women. Their ability to speak English varied from advanced down to non speaker. I came to realize that the biggest challenge was trying to go slow enough for the non English speakers without boring the more advanced students. Unfortunately, I wound up doing both and my classes ended up being geared towards the group of the middle. It was not uncommon for me to look over the class from the dry erase board and see some of the students writing notes, a couple with completely puzzled looks on their faces and a few who were chatting with each other to stave off the boredom. At one point, while covering different types of verb tenses, one of the advanced students asked, “Why would we use the Past Participle form of a verb when we could just as easily use the Past tense?” I won’t lie to you and tell you that I had an answer for her, what I can tell you is, that I quickly moved onto irregular verbs. I would then get hit with more unanswerable questions like, “Why is that verb irregular?”
Which I would answer, “Because it is an exception.”
Which would then be followed by, “Yes, but why is it that way?”
I considered telling the student that it was all the fault of the Brits, but thought better of it and moved onto Adverbs.
After a few weeks, the more advanced students and the non speakers dropped out and were replaced by others who fit more or less into the middle of the group. After that, there was very little continuity of students in the class. Each week that I would come in would bring new faces, which made following a set lesson plan difficult and giving homework impossible.
On occasion I would email one of the professional ex-pat teachers from the high school and ask advice. He would recommend trying to keep the students talking. I realized I was spending too much time at the board and decided to switch my strategy to having the students read stories out loud. I didn’t want to have them read children’s books since I felt they were more advanced than that but they weren’t ready for advanced literature. So I settled on some childhood to young adult short stories. Some of the stories I had them read were American Tall Tales, like “John Henry”, “Pecos Bill Rides a Tornado” and “The City Mouse & The Country Mouse”. After they all took turns reading I would review vocabulary with them. This was a lot harder than you would think. Especially with Pecos Bill, where everything in the story is fantasy. It was surprisingly difficult to explain vocabulary words when the students don’t understand any of the synonyms or other vocabulary words you are using to describe the word in the story. I ended up resorting to drawings and charades. Try drawing or acting out the word “Makeshift” or “Slave” let alone why Pecos Bill would be purposefully on top of a tornado. I’m pretty sure the women in my class thought I was nuts.
One of the best days of teaching at the Women’s Center came on a day when I could tell no one wanted to read another story about Jack and the Beanstalk or the Tortoise and the Hare. After laboring our way through a story, the women just started asking me questions about life where I grew up and I in return asked them about their lives. I found out that a lot of women there get married at an age that we would think of as young, like late teens, early twenties. I found out that both women and men wear engagement rings on their right ring fingers and then switch it over to their left hand after the wedding. I found out that the English classes being taught in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools, (the only schools in the refugee camps) were being taught by teachers who were not native English speakers and that classes consisted of a teacher telling you about English in Arabic. One of the women said, “We get about 10 words in Arabic to every half word of English”. Apparently the Norwegian People’s Aid School, a non-profit in Beirut, is the school that teaches the best English to the refugees that can get in. When I asked if there was anyone they could practice speaking English to at home they all told me that English was discouraged from being spoken at home by older family members. I also found out that one of the women is really into Mickey Mouse, so much so that she wears a big 4 inch diameter silhouette of Mickey’s head on a necklace that hangs down like a rapper’s jewelry over the front of her head scarf and Hijab covering. I learned that many extended families live together in small apartments and many apartments share bathrooms with other neighbors. I learned that even if you were born in a refugee camp in Lebanon and so were your parents, and you know you’ll never leave that camp or see where your grandparents were from, you still identify with where your family originated and refer to yourself as “Palestinian”.
That day, as I snaked my way back out of the camp and then took my long bus ride home, I couldn’t help but think about how my life differed so much from the students I was teaching. I couldn’t help but think about how the United Nations (which our tax dollars fund), volunteers and non-profits are left to clean up after and try to fix Israel’s mess and Lebanon’s neglect. How long ago, these ladies’ grandparents fled Palestine as educated people or people with trades and skills and now, 60 years later, due to some horrible legal policy they have been de-educated generation by generation. And even if they could get a proper education, they could not get a job since Lebanese law states that many of the country’s jobs and the right to own property are forbidden to “people who do not carry citizenship issued by a recognized state.” And if you’re a refugee, you fit conveniently into this category. It’s so very targeted, so very prejudiced. It made me realize that while many people support what Israel does and many people turn a blind eye to Lebanon’s legal policies, and think for whatever reason it’s all for the best, they shouldn’t be surprised when the people in these refugee camps get pissed off and retaliate violently or (gasp) back the politicians from Hezbollah on election day this year.
As for me, I will be doing my little part by deciding whether to bring “Paul Bunyan” or “Johnny Appleseed” for next week’s reading.

Palestinian Refugee Camp, Part II: Bourj Al-Barajneh

I had a group of six boys in my class, ranging in age from ten to twelve. One of the boys, a small kid named Hammod, spoke English the best. He was in fifth grade and probably spoke English at a second or third grade level. I would soon realize that was pretty good for most of the boys in the camp. Hammod, which I would later learn is a nickname for someone named Mohammad, would soon become my translator for the rest of the class. This is because three of the other boys spoke English at about a kindergarten level or worse and the other two boys spoke no English at all. I was supposed to be teaching them conversational English and was told to “make it fun” for them to learn. Along with the language barrier was the issue that these boys are really wound up and rambunctious. They have absolutely nowhere to let their energy out, as there are no open spaces anywhere in Bourj Al-Barajneh, the Palestinian refugee camp we were at in southern Beirut. I quickly realized that this wasn’t going to be easy. Prior to coming to Lebanon, I envisioned the Palestinian refugee camps to be actual camps, as in, tents and squatters living in open fields. It’s not that at all. The camps are actually very densely populated ghettos within urban areas of the city. Many of these camps were created back in 1948 when Israel declared itself a state and most Palestinians fled their homes in Palestine to avoid being killed by the war that had started. Many were just plain run out of their homes. These camps have had over 60 years to build up and become so dense that there are now no streets in the camps, only a labyrinth of alleyways. Some of the alleyways are no more than an arm’s width across. Buildings are made of concrete and cinder block construction, stacked 3 or 4 stories high on top of each other. Some of the construction is makeshift. Addition after addition of construction added onto the next until there was no room left or they had reached the Lebanese Government’s imposed height limits. United Nations’ estimates put the population of this camp between 15,000 to 18,000 people, all jammed into about 2/3rds of a square mile. Some other estimates have put the population up over 20,000. Not only are there no open spaces in the camp, there’s not an alleyway that has a straight line of sight for more than thirty yards. There are no horizons here, literally and figuratively. There are more than a dozen of these camps throughout Lebanon with approximately 409,000 refugees in them or about 10% or Lebanon’s population. I started the class off with having the boys take turns at reading pages from a children’s book called “The Polar Bear and the Snow Cloud”. It’s meant for really little kids who are just learning to speak. It’s the kind of book with one or two large font sentences one page and a big illustrated picture opposing it. I wasn’t sure whether any of them were going to know what a snow cloud was, let alone a polar bear, but then again, I knew they weren’t going to figure out what a “Cat in a Hat” was or a “Lorax” for that matter. So, since I didn’t want them to learn how to speak in Dr. Seuss riddles and I was curious about the polar bear myself, we went with the Snow Cloud book. I initially tried reading the book to them, but that fell apart really quick. I realized that if you did not keep their attention focused at all times, you would lose them and the room would devolve into a rumble. So I had them take turns. I’m pretty sure Hammod was the only one who had any comprehension of what was going on in this little tale of arctic antics. The other three who only spoke a little English could say the words but when I asked them what the story was about, I could tell they didn’t know what most of the words meant. The two that did not speak English just looked at the pictures when their turns came then passed the book along. After a while, someone came into the room and told me to take attendance. I took out a piece of paper and had the boys write their names in English on it. That went surprisingly well. They all wanted me to write my name too, so I obliged. A few minutes later we were done with the story and I was having trouble keeping them in their seats. Rough housing would break out with no warning whatsoever. I decided that we’d had enough reading for the day, handed out paper and colored pencils and told the boys to draw something from the story. Since they didn’t really understand the story, this didn’t work, so I eventually told them just to draw anything they wanted. Off they went, sketching away. It was the first time they were all engaged. I watched Hammod as he drew what looked like a small, stone house with smoke coming out of a chimney. He added a tree and a detailed sun over head. Then he added a plane with a star on its wings and tail. Lastly he added bombs dropping from the plane and two people on the ground. One was lying on the ground near the house bleeding and the other was near the tree crying.

By the time Hammod was done with his picture the other boys were in full Battle Royale with each other. I asked them to sit down but the rumble continued until one stopped and grabbed his backpack and said, “Go?!” then ran out the door. The others followed suit. As the last boy left, a big kid named Omar, who was one of the quieter boys that did not speak any English, he handed me his picture. It was a fancy, colorful version of my name. And with a smile and a wave goodbye, he ran out the door after the others. I was supposed to have taught the boys for an hour. I looked at my watch. It had been about thirty five minutes. I shrugged and figured, not bad for the first day. I had about an hour break before the next group of children would arrive, so I walked outside and looked up at the callous sun trying to bleed its way through the hot, city haze and a tangle of haphazardly hung electrical wires. Men with armfuls of produce and women in hijab headscarves bustled their way past and down the maze of alleyways. I found out about this volunteering opportunity through some people I met at the American University of Beirut (AUB). It was a program that had started up last year with the purpose of trying to increase the mental wellbeing of the children in one of the Lebanon’s larger Palestinian refugee camps. The program came in the wake of a study done in 2002 by a professor at AUB that included the surveying of almost 600 children that lived in the camp. Questions on the survey ranged from how often the children felt afraid to how much hope they had for their future. Needless to say, the results were pretty grim. The survey results showed that there was a fair amount of violence in the camps, both external and domestic. Almost 45% of the children were not in any type of educational institution. 27% of the children worked full time and 18% of the children were working for more than 40 hours a week. All of the children who worked earned less than $50 for that week’s work. (Keep in mind, Beirut is almost as expensive as a US city). Unemployment in the camp was about 60%, mainly due to Lebanese law prohibiting Palestinians from working in any but the most menial of jobs. 20% of the boys had been in at least one fist fight in the past month and 78% had been exposed to a criminal assault in the past month. 42% had a death in the family in the past year, 67% had a family member hospitalized in the past year and 94% of the camp’s residents, both children and adults, stated that they did not trust their neighbors. 33% of the children surveyed were, what the mental health professionals assisting in the program called, “in need of a psychiatric referral to a doctor”. Keep in mind that this survey took place in 2002-2003. In 2006, Israel bombed Beirut and the southern suburbs where this camp is located. 2007 saw more political violence erupt in Beirut, so chances are that things have only gotten worse for these kids since the survey was taken. The AUB program, which was called “Qaderoon” which means “We are capable” was trying to address some of the larger mental health issues that the children of the camp faced, such as anger management, violence, depression and emotional distress. Teaching English was just a small part of the larger goals of this project. Though, in a way, it was a very important one. Since the Palestinian refugees are not given the status of citizenship in Lebanon, they are restricted from working in many professions; are not allowed to own land, have no right to vote and the children are not allowed to go to public schools. Health care is very limited as well since they are not entitled to any public assistance nor can they afford any kind of health care. So who tries to pick up the slack? The United Nations and a bunch of Non Profit Organizations, Non Government Organizations. The classrooms we were using to teach English in for the Qaderoon project were borrowed from the school that is owned and run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). When the children reach 14 years old, they will be given a test to see if they can continue on with their education. One part of the test measures their competency in English. If the children don’t pass the test, they don’t get to continue with their education. And if their hopes of becoming fluent in English were resting on my teaching abilities, the future was grim indeed. By now a few of the other volunteers had congregated outside the front of the school for the break. Ali, a quiet young man who grew up and lived in Bourj Al-Barajneh Refugee Camp and was volunteering as a mentor to the kids in the program, came up and asked if we would like a tour of the camp. He didn’t have to ask us twice. Off we went, following Ali down the unimaginably confusing maze of alleyways. More than once I found myself wondering how we’d ever find our way out, let alone back to the school, if we got separated. Ali walked along like you or I would stroll down Main Street of our home towns. He seemed to know everyone and pointed out things along the way. The camp was not just a cluster of people living together. It was its own city, its own community. Inside the camp were vegetable sellers, butchers, clothes shops, tailors, food stands. It was amazing how they had built their own support system in there. Ali brought us by his father’s fish store where his dad cleaned and sold all sorts of fish from a wheel chair. On the outskirts of the camp was a small Palestinian cemetery with hardly any space in between graves. The infrastructure of the camp was mind boggling. A main water line would enter the camp’s edge and terminate in a 6 foot long stand pipe that had several small spigots on it. Each of these spigots would have a garden hose sized plastic tube attached to it and run down the alleyway, randomly, to an apartment.

The electrical was the same way. There would be a large, rusted fuse box with no cover on it, near the entrance to the camp and a billion small wires running in a tangled mess to each building.

There were stretches of alleyway that had what appeared to be a net overhead that was actually a tangle of electrical wiring and water hoses.

Frequently, we’d feel water dripping on us or run through the spray of a split hose. Once in a while we’d have the stench of sewage from an inadequate plumbing system. Many of the camps buildings had no plumbing and people often share bathrooms with their neighbors. I have no idea how things did not flood, burn down or electrocute someone. We passed by the United Nations Hospital/clinic that was in the camp, run by the same agency (UNRWA). It was packed with old folks, mothers and little kids. There were a lot of elderly people in the camp, many who appeared to just be waiting. Maybe to just hear that their grandchildren might get a home before they themselves passed out of this misery. Just waiting as some have for over 60 years now. Soon it was time to head back to the school and start our next session. I wasn’t really confident that the next class was going to go any smoother than the first, but when I walked into my classroom, I noticed something quite surprising: all the students were seated, quiet and waiting for class to begin. How was this possible? I thought. Then it hit me: they were girls. It was the complete opposite of the morning class. The girls, all six of them, were well behaved and most spoke English well. A couple spoke English at just about their 5th or 6th grade level. We constructively worked our way through a few stories, taking turns reading and going over vocabulary and pronunciation. At the end of the session they asked if they could leave. The class ended and I actually felt like I taught them something. The other volunteers had the same situation. We would learn that due to funding issues with the UNRWA and lack of space, the children go to school on a split schedule and are separated by gender. Girls go to school for 3 or 4 hours in the morning and boys go for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon. And for some unknown reason, this schedule flip flops every month. So we were getting the boys for an hour before they went to school and then the girls shortly after they were dismissed from school. My fears would be confirmed the next month when we would get the boys after they had just finished school: totally uncontrollable. We tried all sorts of different ideas to engage them in learning. We abandoned the books altogether and just let them draw. We tried letting them draw with chalk on the black board. Nothing really worked that well and the classes would keep getting bigger and bigger as more volunteers dropped out or only stayed to teach the girls. I handed out 3 boxes of chalk one day and when I asked for them back, no one had any. Moments later the hallway erupted into a chalk throwing fight amongst the boys! One day we resorted to just playing soccer in the hallway. At times I would have to tell the really rowdy boys to leave the classroom and go home. One boy in particular begged me to let him stay and when I gave in he kissed my hand. Even still, he was back at it five minutes later. Meanwhile, the girls trudged on doing their work. They were so sweet and wanted to know all about the characters in the children’s books. “What’s a polar bear?”, “What’s a caribou?!!” At home, I would find worksheets online, print them out and have them fill the sheets out in class. Many of the websites are geared towards teaching English as a second language; however, much of the vocabulary is irrelevant to their lives, such as “lawn mower” and “bungee jumping”. Living conditions for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are considered to be the worst in the Middle East. Other countries, such as Syria and Jordan have a large number of Palestinian refugees as well (Jordan has an estimated 500,000), but the refugees in these countries are allowed to work. Even Saddam Hussein gave Palestinian refugees in Iraq better living conditions than they have in Lebanon, though I’m sure his motives were political and not out of the kindness of his heart. Initially, some of the wealthier Palestinians that were displaced bought land, houses and apartments in Lebanon, while the poorer refugees went into the camps. The Lebanese government then changed the property ownership laws and established a “No Inheritance” clause for Palestinians. This meant that the Palestinians could not pass their property down to their children. When the original Palestinian owner died, the family was sent to the camps and the state took ownership of their house. While over the past few decades many in Lebanon are quick to say that they support the Palestinians in their plight, history has shown things a bit different. In 1982, during Lebanon’s civil war, Israel invaded and occupied much of the southern half of Lebanon. Not only did Israel lay siege to the Palestinian refugee camps, but some of Lebanon’s Christian militias took this opportunity to march into camps and slaughter Palestinians. Three years after Israel withdrew, The “Amal”, a Syrian backed Shiite militia laid siege to the camps in southern Beirut again, killing men, women and children. They even went as far as burning humanitarian aid food shipments that were heading into the camp. Amazingly, a man who was a refugee at the time had a video camera and recorded much of these travesties that went on inside the camp. Sadly, things do not look like they’re going to get any better in the future since without the economic resources for income, the education that might come with citizenship or public health care, nothing here is going to change. Even the United Nations agency UNRWA which funds and runs the clinics and schools in the camps is known for being a bureaucratic nightmare. For the children in Bourj Al-Barajneh, school is finishing up for the summer break. Already the children are asking if the Qaderoon program will start up again in the fall, saying how much they enjoyed it this past year. Depending on funding, it’s uncertain. But for now, in celebration of the success that Qaderoon was, the children and their mentors from the camps have put on a little performance/variety show at the school. I went back down to the camp to see it and though it was all in Arabic it was still nice to watch. There was a skit going on with about 6 kids in it and the parents were all laughing. I just sat there soaking it in when I heard this little voice behind me say in English, “Do you understand what’s going on?” I turned to see it was one of the girls from my class. I told her I had no idea. She said, “Don’t worry, I’ll translate for you”.