University Community Spearheads Nahr El-Bared
Relief Campaign

Volunteer AUB students helping displaced Palestinian refugees

As shelling continued at Nahr El-Bared in early August, children in the refugee camp at Bourj Al-Barajneh gathered around members of the AUB community to inaugurate a children's activities center. There, they would draw, sing, and play soccer as they waited for the fighting around their neighborhoods to stop.

The center is the work of the Nahr El-Bared Relief Campaign, a network of volunteers from AUB and across Lebanon that joined in June to respond to the growing humanitarian crisis spilling out of Nahr El- Bared, where almost 2,000 people in the Beirut area have been displaced. Several members of AUB's Task Force for Reconstruction and Community Service (TFRCS)-an ad hoc group created during the July 2006 war-were involved in creation of the center.

According to Professor Mounir Mabsout of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who is chair of the Task Force, adopting the campaign was logical. The Relief Campaign is part of the larger group of foreign NGOs and civil society groups providing food, medicine, hygiene supplies-and now social activities-to the more than 30,000 people displaced by the crisis in North Lebanon. So far, it has raised $180,000 in donations to run its relief work.

"We help local people help themselves, rather than parachute people with aid," said Professor Rami Zurayk of the Department of Land and Water Resources, who is the coordinator between the Task Force and the Relief Campaign. "AUB no longer acts ad hoc to needs," he said. "It reacts in a systematic fashion-and this goes back to the founding fathers."

"We started raising money on campus by soliciting personal donations from faculty and friends," said Professor Marcy Newman, the campaign's leading coordinator and a visiting professor at the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR). Tamara Keblaoui, a business student, was one of the volunteers Newman first mobilized. Now the campaign's volunteers coordinator, Keblaoui helped arrange the first convoy to the Beddawi refugee camp.

"It was totally a mess," she said. "We had no money, nothing." The campaign then began working with civil society groups already on the ground in camps at Beddawi, Shatila, and Bourj Al-Barajneh. "We did intakes to assess urgent medical needs," said Newman. This supplied mostly diapers for infants and medicines at first. A pediatrician at AUBMC, Mona Al Nabulsi, arranged for the donation of medicines; a doctor in the Nahr El-Bared camp presented a list of needs; volunteers in the Shatila camp put together food kits; and in Beddawi a clinic was opened through an NGO.

"It all sort of just fell into place," said Keblaoui. "The campaign runs a website with updates on relief work in the camps…Hygiene kits are distributed to families every week in Beirut-area camps and ours is the only group that has consistently kept up pace with this work."

Newman explained that the group's structure allows it to act efficiently: "We are not an NGO and we choose not to be an NGO, because they can't move quickly and be flexible. We operate quickly and we fill in the gaps…The first day we got to Beddawi, we found that 70 percent of the people were in private homes; and because NGO aid only targeted schools, these people in homes were getting no help at all." To this end, the Relief Campaign helps families that have been neglected by other groups. But with months of fighting and no discernible end to the increasing number of displaced families, the campaign is moving from immediate response to long-term planning. Food and hygiene will remain the priority, said Newman, noting that when the fighting stops the real challenge will begin.

Professor Zurayk has the same concern: "Once the fighting stops, the whole issue of relief will change. Will people be able to return in weeks, or in months?" Long-term projects include a strategy for economic sustainability, which Zurayk is developing by surveying refugee families on their histories and psycho-social conditions.

Maintaining the campaign's political non-alignment is crucial. "We do humanitarian work and we try to keep detached from the 'hot issues' that can take us where we don't want to go," said Zurayk. The campaign takes donations from anyone as long as there are no strings attached, said Mabsout. "We are building credibility, not credit."

There are at least 80 donors listed, with four major donations from foundations and the rest from individuals. The foundations include the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Fund, the Jordan River Foundation, the Middle East Children's Alliance, and Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition. The legitimacy of the AUB institution attracts such donors and the University also acts as an important channel for donors in the United States.