‘I’m only Palestinian’

Accusations that the voices of Palestinian refugees are not being heard are being dispelled by the likes of you and me.
Two students – Shannon Bow and Jordan Popp – from McGill took the opportunity to go to a Palestinian prison camp in Lebanon with a Canadian organization called the Canadian Palestinian Alliance (CPAL) to educate children in refugee camps in Lebanon.
Now they are home, taking the stories of the refugees and their plight to universities and lecture theatres across the country.
For the 16,000 people that live in the camp, their life is a refugee’s life of hope and pride: hope that they will return to their homeland someday, and pride of their existence and identity.
But in this one square kilometre of land that they have been given by the Lebanese government, they experience conditions that are not fit for any human being. Plastic water tanks filled with stagnant contaminated water line the tiny alleys and rats run around the four or five storey buildings in this open style prison.
“Prison in the sense that they cannot leave because they is nowhere else to go for them,” said Bow, who is studying anthropology at McGill.
For them everyday in the camp is a reminder of their lives – they are viewed as a wrong and forgotten people who live but for the absence of death.
“They have lost sight of all comparisons to the outside world – the camp is all they know,” said Popp, who is studying social work at McGill. “One of the hardest things about our job is trying to get the kids motivated enough to go to school. They tell us, ‘what does it matter what we learn – I’m only Palestinian.'”
Bow and Popp chose to go to the camps to see for themselves what these people went through and how they lived every single day of their substandard existence.
“We wanted to see these people and realize that they are not just a refugee problem and that they are people like you or me,” said Popp.
“Knowledge is power,” said Bow. “And now we have the knowledge of the refugees and their lives we want to take that to people all across Canada and make them aware of their situation.”
The students said the children they taught were definitely the strength of the camps. Bow and Popp added that the children are viewed as the new hope and the generation that will finally lead a revolution that will take their people back to their promised land.

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