Askar Camp

Kids in Askar

Nablus, West-bank, Palestine

The el Lod center where I teach is just outside of Askar camp on the
far side of old Askar's main drag. Although this is my third week
working this evening was the first time I visited the actual camp
itself.

Myself an another teacher, Sarah, entered the camp through the large
metal archway. All the camps have these archways. Kids start gathering
demanding "What is your Name?" and more crucially "Barcelona or
Real?". The kids keep coming, a middle aged guy approaches, he wanted
to know what we are doing, which was seeming to seem like a good
question as more and more kids arrived. Sarah explained we were
teachers in the center and he welcomed us and took off. More kids
arrive. They all want to play volleyball, this got more complicated as
more and more kids and balls appeared and the kids started competing
for attention, getting more and more hyper and turning into a mob.

One kid was, who was clearly mentally disabled was introduced as
'Majnoon' which means crazy, then slapped across the face as if to
demonstrate. He didn't flinch or protest.

I've seen barefoot kids in Askar. There's not much to do here judging
by how big an attraction we were and there's nowhere to play. 'Go play
in the traffic' was a killer putdown when I was about ten years old
for a about a week. The phrase came back to me the other day when I
saw two kids dodging cars, playing in the traffic.

Askar camp is home to 32,000 people living in a few square miles.
Unemployment is the norm and nearly all families receive flour, oil
and basic foods from UNWAR.

The camp itself is very beat down, it's layout is organic. There's a
Joe Sacco Cartoon strip that shows how the camps a started as empty
fields after '48, where refugees took shelter however they could, then
tents arrived, after another while cement and cinderblocks arrived
from the UN, and the tent sites turned into one story cement
neighborhoods which then had a second and third story added. There's
a medieval street layout, all lanes and narrow streets, graffiti and
kids, and then some.

When I was a kid, the last thing I would have wanted to do in my free
time was go to extra classes, I'd rather have played in the traffic,
and while we all do our best to make the classes fun, it's still
school, Huckleberry Finn knew it, I knew it, it's universal. School sucks, but these
children really want to be in our classes, and they really want to
learn, they are not naive and understand where they are and at ten
years of age thay are fighting to change that.