We visited the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, in the central West Bank, Palestinian Territory. “Nakba” is the Palestinian term for the massive displacement of Arab people from the newly established Jewish State in 1948 and ongoing. Zionist paramilitaries and the Israeli Defense Force engaged in a dozen massacres and various forms of violence— including poisoning wells—to terrorize Palestinians civilians to flee. Around 750,000 people were expelled from their homes or driven out. Over 500 Arab majority towns, villages and urban neighborhoods were destroyed or depopulated, and looting was rampant.
The Balata refugee
camp was officially established in 1950 by the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA). With over 33,000 people, it is the largest refugee camp in the West
Bank. With only a quarter square mile of land, it is also the most crowded: a multistory
shantytown. Over the years some refugees have been able to establish a new
livelihood and home elsewhere; yet the violence and displacement continue so the
population at the camp continues to grow.
There are over 11,000 children living in the camp. UNRWA operates
two schools for boys and two for girls in the camp as well as a health clinic.
UNRWA has a severe underfunding crisis, even more acute since the US stopped
contributing in early 2024. This shorts all their emergency services in the
refugee camps, particularly the schools and health clinics. The schools lost
teachers during the Covid-19 virus epidemic and have not been able to replace
them.
The Yafa Cultural Center is an NGO serving the community with
programs “to empower Palestinians in fostering a strong and independent
identity, and to enable positive accomplishments in the future while escaping
the negative effects of the on-going Israeli occupation.” https://yafacenter.ps/index.php/our-story/
We had the honor of meeting with Abed Omar Qusini. He worked as
a journalist for 30 years for Reuters, AP and CBS, and now works as the media
and public relations officer for the Yafa Cultural Center. The people of Balata
have a wide range of needs—food, work, education, health care, and mental
health—and the Cultural Center tries with its limited resources to do as much
as it can on all these fronts. It runs programs for women, teaching them to
make and market embroidered handicrafts and traditional sweets for Ramadan to
increase their self sufficiency and sense of empowerment. It runs a store to
sell the handicrafts. It runs a guest house, including meals, staffed by women
in the camp. For Ramadan they collected food packages for 480 families in the
camp.
Maryam Mustafa is the coordinator for the Health for All program
at the center. They primarily focus on patients with diabetes or
hypertension—5,000 patients overall. For three years they had a program funded
by an organization called 1for3 in Boston, but it ended last January. They had
a team of nine nurses, a doctor, and a media guy, following 168 patients with
in-home visits. Some of the patients are handicapped with nobody to take them
to the clinic. The nurses went to their homes, took blood samples, and gave
them their medication and insulin. Now they have a much smaller, all volunteer
team, and not enough money for the insulin and medications. They are looking
for donations from outside to cover the bills.
But the major focus of
the Yafa Cultural Center is children, empowering children and youth through
cultural, educational, and social programs. They run classes and activities in
music, dance, art, and sports, they run social media exchanges with a school in
Italy, they have a scouting troop, and they have a library and space for free
play. Qusini emphasized, “The children need to
play as normal kids, to learn as normal kids, to have a chance to live, to feel
safe.”
He described recent events in Balata camp to illustrate some of
the stresses that impact the children. The Israeli occupation forces frequently
enter the camp at night. For example, “last night, they came to the refugee
camp. They entered houses, destroyed furniture, and beat the father in front of
the kids. In Nablus, they arrested 37 last night. In the morning, after interrogation,
they freed more half of them. So all these houses were awake all the night, the
weather was cold, the kids did not go to school. And if they do go to school,
there is no ability to learn, you know? Sometimes, like last week, the army
comes in the middle of the day when the kids are in school. We had about 100
kids here at the center, learning music. They were stuck here till five. The army
came at eleven; the kids were here until 5:00, without food, just waiting for
the army to go, and smelling tear gas. The kids at school were stuck there too.
Now, you cannot let a child come on foot by himself, you can't let him in to
the street. The father or the mother must come to pick him. So we keep them
here with the small team that we have.”
What can you and I do to support the work of the Yafa Cultural Center? We can:
- Urge our government to restore funding to UNRWA.
- Work with a partner organization to organize a service
project in Balata and the Yafa Center.
- One specific need is for a fiscal sponsor organization in
the US that can process and wire online donations.
- Volunteer in person, and stay in the Guest House. Medical professionals are especially needed, but all kinds of volunteers are welcomed, to teach English or organize children’s activities or work on community projects. Contact the center at info@yafacenter.ps.
- Organize a fundraising event.
And spread the word! See their Facebook page at Yafa
Cultural Center and their webpage at www.yafacenter.ps . See
also the Instagram posts by teenagers at Yafa talking about their dreams and
living conditions in the camp: https://www.instagram.com/yafa_center?igsh=dDhkZ2J6Z3NwZ3l0
No comments:
Post a Comment