For most of the displaced, coming to the Beqaa was for them, prior to the Syrian crisis, a daily outing, as were the Beqaa inhabitants’ visits to Syria.
Syrian camps in the Beqaa precede the crisis. Syrian workers of the valley have been residing there since the Lebanese decided they were above working their own land and found an alternative in the Syrians’ poverty and privation.
Following the crisis, the patch of camps in the Beqaa expanded and the number of displaced there exceeded that of its inhabitants. The tents that have sprouted in every corner there are almost competing with its agricultural seasons.
In one of the camps in Bar Elias, the landowner has substituted the cultivation of potatoes with cultivating tents since the fee he receives from the «[United] Nations» is fixed, guaranteed and with no losses; the season of displacement is plentiful, the tent is rented at a hundred dollars, and each tent put up next to another is an auspicious sign of the continuing crisis.
Even displacement has been soaked in the social classes system. There are misery camps and «elite» camps like the one Angelina Jolie was taken to, explains the miserable displaced woman. «By God it’s not envy, they have rooms and not tents, with walls, ceilings and doors. They have nice bathrooms and a school for children,» she adds.
In the misery camps, the tents are playgrounds for wind in the winter. When it snows heavily, they come crashing on the heads of their residents, and during the summer they turn into solar energy batteries. Solidarity delegations do not visit them.
***
When Oum Awwad and residents from her neighborhood arrived in the Beqaa, they were offered «aid» and a tent was set up for each family. On the piece of land that they had taken as a temporary homeland, on its border, there was a small room in concrete, which appeared to have been used as a toolshed. Everyone agreed that Oum Awad would stay there given her age and the pains that the frost of the Beqaa triggers in her bones. But she wishes she had not moved into it, she says wryly, as the room turns into a mice and rats den after dark. In the beginning, she stuffed her windows with old rags and pots, shut her door with the bed springs she had found in the nearby dump and wrapped it in sheets. But before break of dawn, the rodents were back on all the barricades, having their fun in the room, dragging spoons and cups and messing with the food leftovers. Over time, Oum Awad got to know her «guests» and the «guests» got used to her too. She now sleeps and the rodents awaken, scurrying around, sniffing her feet and clothes, and then leaving her alone.
***
Salama is not just a woman. Salama is a homeland, a people, a land, a harvest and life. She embodies the phrase «no despair in life» with her smile that never fades, her optimism that has no reason, her positive energy that she inspires in you when she takes you by the hand around the corners of the life at the camp, a life she organized and ordered with rules, excellently and fairly.
Here’s a corner for making «quilts». She gathers the remains of old, torn wool cardigans and sews them to make blankets that she distributes to those in need around the camp. Then there is a corner for making bread, with a stove, a saj top, a cart, yeast for the dough, and piles of tinder and wood for the stove. It exudes the aroma of fresh bread all day long. «Bread by turn» is a daily program shared by the tent-wives. And they are real homemakers because they get up every morning to make life out of nothing. There is a corner for goats and chickens with a corral and a pen that decorate the edge of the camp and make living there a luxury. This is not something to be taken for granted when you are homeless and you get a glass of fresh milk every morning or two eggs for breakfast. It is nice when tragedy takes a break for a moment and life regains a taste of normality.
Salama is annoyed with the Lebanese minister who accused the displaced of exacerbating the garbage crisis. She responds, «We barely get our fill, the hungry do not leave garbage, garbage is sometimes their food.»
***
Nothing torments me at the camp as the cold, says the little rascal, I can take hunger and alienation, live without school and toys, but I can’t take the cold.
In Syria, I used to love snow. I used to think it was a holiday for children. I would long to touch it and play on its white surface. I never knew that it was this cold and that its brightness would make our days this dark, and our lips blue, and our noses red and our hearts stop. I was wrong to think that I loved it.
Snow makes me feel helpless, that my life is pathetic, that I need a lot of coats, cardigans, wool socks and boots, which my parents cannot afford at the moment.
The aid that we brought to the camp that day was three boxes of winter boots for children. The camp shaweesh («superintendent») called the children of the camp and asked them to organize themselves in three rows. The child comes up to us and we write down his/her name, age and shoe size. We give him/her his/her shoe, sometimes along with a kiss, wink or a smile. He/she puts it on right away and runs back to his/her tent.
The little rascal stood before me. She asked to pick the pair of shoes herself. It struck me that she did not put on the shoes right away like the rest of the children, but rather put it under her arm and walked away. I resumed my work and I saw her standing in the third row, looking away so I would not see her. I went up to her and she burst into tears before I had even uttered a word. I took her to the side telling her off. She was sobbing and with a breaking voice said, «I want another pair, bigger than the one I took. I got one for this winter today. Who guarantees that I would get another pair next winter? Maybe you won’t come back again. Maybe you’ll forget us. But the cold won’t forget us.»
***
My home in Hauran is the best in the world – a large room with two small rooms adjoining it, like two little girls cuddling to their mother and a wide yard nestling them from all sides. Feelings of contentment and satisfaction thrived inside its walls from the never-subsiding voices of my sisters, the smell of fresh produce that my father would toss in the doorway every afternoon and the back and forth movement of my mother, full of life, like a breath of life in the body of a fetus.
Every time I retire to my dark room here, I am overwhelmed with a longing for the warmth of its walls and floors, for the feel of its wooden doors and old windows, for the bitter orange spheres that light up the shadows of the yard like stars in a summer sky, for the babbling water in the small pond in the middle of the yard, when my mother would forget the tap running and my grandmother would get up, dragging her feet to close it, cursing neglectful beings.
Why did I flee? My father was a wheat farmer and I do not know why his hard work only made us poorer. The revolution was for him a place to vent his helplessness and our hunger. He went with those who took to the streets. My mother did not stop him – she was even more enthusiastic than him. Many days had passed since the first demonstration when night visitors came by and dragged him from right before our eyes. They returned him days later in a white bag, a bloated body with severed head and limbs. We buried him right away and fled.
I clean homes for a living. There is something of an intimacy that has developed between me and the doors that I knock every morning. Perhaps because I am like them chopped off from a tree; like them I master the art of waiting silently on thresholds. The homes I go to make me sad. The warm breezes that blow in them, the mingling voices of children, mothers and fathers, especially in the mornings, the smell of laundry, cooking and the ringing of spoons in teacups, they all remind me how displaced and alienated I am.
It has been four years that I am here. I think they are enough for me to lose the ability to find the right answers to why I am displaced. I dream of returning to my country and I also dream that those that have gone there would also return to their countries. Perhaps I am here because they are there. I wish I had some courage to stand up to those who grumble at my accent and my skin color and say to them, «If you go back, we go back.»