Deheisheh refugee camp is a harsh place to live, full of cinder-block houses, dirty narrow streets and barely any running water or electricity. More than half of its 11,000 residents are children, with precious little to do and nowhere to play. For many of these children their only link to the outside world was through computers reported NBC. Many would spend hours at the Ibda Community Centers computer room. It was always a room full of computer enthusiastic Palestinian children, until midnight August 27, when someone deliberately torched the place, stealing the computer server and reducing the rest to molten plastic and silicon.
IT WASN'T SUPPOSED to turn out this way. For five years, the Ibda (Arabic for "creating something out of nothing") Center stood out as a place where children could dream despite being surrounded by the squalor of the Deheisheh refugee camp. And now it was almost completely destroyed.
"Ibda Center is my life, my heart," 14-year-old Manara Faraj told NBC as a crowd gathered outside the two-story building Saturday.
NBC News visited the center just hours before the fire, having heard about an innovative new project called "Across Borders," funded by the Canadian government and Oxfam Quebec. The idea was to give Palestinian refugee children from refugee camps across the Middle East a chance to communicate with one another and the world, through their own Web sites and e-mail NBC said.
"It's very difficult, if not impossible, to travel to places as nearby as Gaza, or to even travel overseas," said Muna Hamzeh-Muhaisen, a Palestinian-American. She left her family behind in Oregon to marry a Palestinian in Deheisheh - and has not been allowed to leave the area for more than five years.
"We live a life of isolation, basically, that's dictated by Israel allowing us to have travel permits or not," she said. "E-mail and the Internet is really our ticket out of this place, without having to physically get out."
Deheisheh refugee camp is near the biblical town of Bethlehem in the West Bank. During the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, many Palestinians fled their homes and ended up in camps spawning generations of refugees living in barely tolerable conditions NBC wrote.
Before the fire, Manara was e-mailing her friend in a refugee camp in Lebanon using her Yahoo e-mail account. She told NBC how she talks to her friends outside “we tell the world that we are not bad refugees!" she said. "No! We are good refugees. Look, we use the Internet, the computer, everything like you!"
Peter Holland, project director from Oxfam Quebec, one of the major funders of Across Borders, told NBC "It's an uncensored voice from the camp to the outside world." He said the program can have a direct impact on the ongoing peace process.
Holland told NBC that he hopes to have an Internet connection in all 59 of the Palestinian refugee camps scattered throughout the Middle East. But Friday night's fire has considerably slowed the timetable which may have been the intention of the arsonist, who has yet to be identified.
Saturday evening, hundreds of Deheisheh residents gathered outside the Ibda Center to protest the destruction of the computers. A parade started up. Children and adults alike marched through the camp, holding banners declaring that although they had been wounded by the fire, they would overcome the incident and become even stronger -- ALBAWABA.Com
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
