For a researcher looking at post conflict situations, Nahr el Bared is fertile territory for Knox. Her particular interest is adolescent interaction. “Adolescent reproductive health is under-studied, and there is little data on post-conflict Nahr el Bared. We do know, however, that the population’s quality of life has been drastically reduced; its social fabric torn apart. There is child trauma, almost universal unemployment; the children have lost faith in their parents, and there is no sense of a future.”

One phenomenon that caught her attention, the large number of weddings, especially among the young, will become the subject of her master’s thesis. “I noticed there seemed to be a rash of weddings,” Knox says. “I am not looking for a quantitative increase—my research is qualitative. I want to understand whether or not this [increase] is a response to trauma.”

With the community shattered and displaced, not knowing who your neighbors are and who your daughter might be associating with, perhaps these young girls are pressured to marry, Knox explains. Parents often feel that their daughters are taken care of once they are married. At the same time, marriage is an obvious way to recreate social patterns among scattered families. For the young women, however, early marriage often perpetuates the cycle of poverty. They don’t complete their education; they don’t claim their health and education rights, and they remain unskilled. They have more babies—and they have them at a younger age.

Knox will soon be working with NGOs to conduct interviews with 10 recently married young couples and their families, as well as other women of similar ages in the community, with the aim of exploring a mechanism that would provide alternatives to early marriage for young women.

Architectural post graduate student Rana Hassan is also deeply involved with the plight of the residents of Nahr el Bared. She is currently working as a member of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) design team rebuilding the Nahr el Bared Camp. The team is coordinating closely with the community-based Nahr el Bared Reconstruction Committee. The experience, she says, has taught her much and also provides an excellent field research opportunity.

The plan is to reconstruct the camp as it was previously. To do this, the team has had to document the entire map of Nahr el Bared, identify where each person lived—in which house, on which street. Each house owner was interviewed to get an accurate picture of what his/her house was like. Each house will be reconstructed on the same site, although the footprint will be reduced to make room for wider roads and open spaces. Each building will be designed to recapture the essence of the old one. Every neighborhood and community will be restored.

“It is a huge challenge,” says Hassan. “We have 300 buildings designed now, out of 1,700. I have learned a lot about the participatory approach to urban planning, negotiating with the community and other stakeholders, the donors, the committee, the government, and the army.

“Each architect takes a block, gets to know the families, the area, the design of the block, and then the houses themselves. The people used to build their own homes, so they are informed and knowledgeable; they draw their houses and elaborate for us. It is a unique process, and a rare chance for me to work on something like this. I wish I could see the whole thing through and see how people will implement or change the designs.”

Nezar Chaaban, who worked in Nahr el Bared as a research assistant on Professor Sari Hanafi’s pilot study on modes of governance in Palestinian camps (see page 20), also describes his involvement as a unique experience. Although he had worked with NGOs and had been involved in relief work in the camp after the conflict, this was the first time he was really able to get to know the community properly and to see a picture of life in the camp from the residents’ perspective.

Chaaban conducted interviews with a wide range of people involved in governance in the camp: political figures, local leaders, tribal elders, and community workers inside the camp. The focus was on the relationship between the camp and its neighborhood, the differences between camp dwellers and the urban population, and the government’s dealing with the Palestinian population in Lebanon.

“What we found was shocking and we are really just at the beginning.” Chaaban says. “We always deal with the Palestinians in Lebanon as demographics, as numbers. This was an opportunity to explore their lives. We discovered their social and political structures, their own kind of formal and informal justice, their communities within communities.

“The conflict attacked their very identity; they lost six decades of their memory. This camp was arranged by every village in Palestine, and the people considered it a mini Palestine. Now they have lost their ‘other’ Palestine. We are trying to bring them hope that it will be returned again, but it is about funds and politics in Lebanon and in the region.

“I have an alternative perspective. They are great people, highly educated, with hopes and aspirations,” says Chaaban. “It was a great experience.”

Other AUB students working in the Palestinian camps agree that the experience has had an impact on their lives. For Heba Salem, a research assistant working with Professor Rima Afifi on her Bourj al Barajneh Qaderoon project (see page 21), it has been a transformative experience that has also strengthened her resolve to work with disadvantaged children. “On a personal level I have learned to value what I have. You go there and you see how they are making the best of their lives and enjoying what they have—and they have so little, while we make a big deal about our lives and we have exactly the opposite. I have learned to be more patient, more tolerant; I have learned to see things from both sides.”

On the two occasions Rima Afifi has put out calls for volunteers to help her with Qaderoon, she has been thrilled by the response. The first appeal was during data collection when 20 students volunteered to conduct 680 surveys in two weeks. The second was just recently when she decided to incorporate an English improvement component into the project and asked for volunteers to read and speak in English with the children. In no time Rima had over 20 responses. For Melanie Matter, an AUB research assistant in nutrition, it was just the opportunity she had been looking for. “I wanted to do something, but because I was not confident that my Arabic was good enough, I was hesitant to volunteer before, but this is perfect for me,” Melanie explained on her first morning in Bourj al Barajneh.

Medical student Alaa al Tahan is a veteran volunteer at the AUB Voluntary Outreach Clinic (VOC) in the Shatilla Camp. He started volunteering several years ago when he was a computer science undergraduate and says that the experience helped him to decide to go on to medical school. Now VOC is part of his life. “You build relations with the people. I feel I have to go every Saturday because the patients have become like family. When I don’t come they worry about me and want to know what has happened to me.”

One of the first volunteers at VOC back in October 2001 when the clinic was first founded was Zeina Abdallah. At the time she was a full time employee and part-time student at AUB. She has been the clinic’s administrator ever since, juggling the schedule, rounding up volunteers, and searching out medical donations on a weekly basis. Zeina joined because it was “a good cause, something great. All of us should have a role in the community and help. Even if we have no money, we can give time.”

The clinic was started by three medical students and an engineering student who helped a friend who could not afford to go to a doctor. They realized that there are lots of people who are in the same position and decided to open a clinic to help them. They knew that if they were to attract other AUB volunteers, the clinic would have to be conveniently located, and so they chose Shatilla for its proximity and its mixed population needing help. The clinic is open very Saturday from 9:30 am to 1 pm. Volunteers examine patients, dispense medicine, and offer health and nutritional advice. VOC has an arrangement with a local laboratory that offers special rates for tests and sources its medical supplies from donations, samples, or at discounted rates from NGOs.

The medical head of the clinic is Dr. Mona Nasrallah, endocrinologist, who joined when she returned to work in Lebanon in 2003. “I had always been drawn to humanitarian work,” Mona explains. “The clinic opened my eyes. Before 2003 I had never set foot in the camps and was never aware of the conditions. The clinic has had an immense impact on all of us.”

Most volunteers are first and second year AUB medical students desperate for patient interaction and clinical opportunities. Few continue to volunteer once they get busy with their own patients and so the battle for volunteers is ongoing. These days the LAU (Lebanese American University) Pharmacy Department shares the load so pharmacists are never in short supply. “It is a fine example of cooperation between institutions and disciplines,” says Mona Nasrallah.

Zeina Abdallah draws up the schedule. “We are very organized,” she says. “We want it all properly run in terms of charts, medical history, and medications. But the challenge is finding more volunteers and funds. Every year there is a fundraising dinner, but more money is always needed.”

Nasrallah and Abdallah are hoping the VOC’s recently acquired NGO status will allow them to secure grants and other funding. “We would like to expand. Every week we have to turn people away,” says Nasrallah. “People may not be aware of how badly we need staff. There is an innate problem in our medical training in that we are not teaching our students about community outreach. It is not built into their training, which is a pity.”

Bahaa al Kayyali would like to see volunteer work in the camps become somehow incorporated into AUB’s program. He is one of a group of student volunteers tutoring school children on a daily basis in Shatilla. “There are seven or eight of us at the moment,” he says, “but before there were up to 25. We were running two shifts a day. Many of those people have graduated and it is hard to get new volunteers each semester, but we will be trying. This is why I would like to see this in some way under the auspices of AUB so that when we graduate, such programs would keep running.”

—M.A.

Making her way quietly around Shatilla, in search of hidden parasites which undermine the health of residents, Samar Khoury from Johns Hopkins University is working on her PhD under the supervision of Dr. May Jurdi from the Faculty of Health Sciences. A former AUB undergraduate, Samar is trying to build up a picture of pathogens in the Shatilla water supply where very little water treatment takes place other than filtering and reverse osmosis. Using a combination of questionnaires to measure household hygiene practices and water analysis, she hopes to assess the presence and impact of three key parasites and devise how best to keep them at bay. Samar explains that currently chlorine, the easiest way to cleanse water, is not used because people do not like the taste. As a young mother herself, Samar is deeply frustrated by the fact that just two minutes of boiling water could eliminate many dangers. It is a message she is eager to get across once her results are analyzed.

The Palestinian Student Experience at AUB

In the speech she gave when she accepted an honorary doctorate from AUB in June 2008, Hanan Ashrawi (BA ’68, MA ’70) described her AUB experience as one that went “from coffee and conversations at the Milk Bar, to spontaneous exhortations at the Speakers’ Corner, to protest marches through Bliss Street, to thoughtful seminars in Fisk Hall, to the blessed calm of the library…” There have been some significant changes since those days—in the region, in Lebanon, and at AUB too. The coffee and conversations now take place in the cafeteria or on the steps in front of West Hall and there are fewer protest marches through Bliss Street. But much of the rich diversity that helped to make those conversations at the Milk Bar and the thoughtful seminars in Fisk Hall so precious can still be found at AUB—and are still appreciated by AUB students.

Like any group at AUB, the University’s Palestinian students are a diverse group. Mohamad Abou Salem from Haifa was born in Saida, spent his entire life in Lebanon, and hopes to enter a master’s program in aeronautical and space technology after he graduates. Doaa Hammoudeh was born in Jerusalem, grew up in the United States, and decided to attend AUB when her family relocated to Palestine. Hisham Jibreel moved to Lebanon from Saudi Arabia with his family when he was 13 years old. Wissam Doudar is the father of three children, the field laboratory services officer at an international NGO, and a full-time student in the Faculty of Health Sciences MPH program.

These young men and women share some of the concerns of all AUB students, from an enormous pressure to succeed academically to the frustration in finding a place to park near campus (hopefully in that order.) Jibreel, who is a third year electrical and computer engineering student, says that his biggest problem at AUB has been the cost of tuition, which, even after financial aid, requires that he work after class to help relieve some of the burden on his family. Lack of financial support actually prevented Doudar from pursuing an MPH degree the first time he applied—and was accepted to—AUB in 1992. He was finally able to enroll 15 years later (in 2007) and is on schedule to graduate with an MPH, Health Management and Policy, in September 2009.

Farah Issa, who is majoring in mathematics, says it is also thanks to financial aid that she is at AUB and remembers arriving at the University “with a lot of hope as well as energy. I was extremely happy.” Although her daily commute to and from Saida prevent her from participating in many Palestinian cultural activities on campus, she is a member of the Palestinian Students Union and is proud of the way the Palestinian community often comes together to help each other as it did, for example, during the Nahr el-Bared Relief Campaign.

Fahed Abou Nada, who is majoring in physics, is involved with the Palestinian Cultural Club on campus. Although he says that he and his fellow Palestinians are “distinguished by their cause that they always carry in their hearts,” he appreciates the fact that AUB is a place where you can see “a Kuwaiti sitting with an Iranian, a German with a Pakistani, or all of them together.” Many Palestinian students will tell you that they especially enjoy the diversity of AUB’s student body. Although some of them also report that they have not always felt welcome as Palestinians in Lebanon—or at AUB—many Palestinian students have also found, as Hammoudeh explains, that AUB students “are curious about life under occupation and life in Palestine in general.” A business student minoring in communication and sociology, Hammoudeh is hoping to go on to graduate school and eventually work in development. She describes her time at AUB as both “challenging and rewarding. It has been academically fulfilling and the cultural life of Beirut is vibrant and very enjoyable. Living in a country as diverse as Lebanon and drenched with history also allows for understanding and respect for different cultures, which is crucial in an increasingly globalized society.”

—Special thanks to Rania Murr in International Student Services.