A day in a camp

I met Akhmed at the poker night hosted at my temporary apartment every Thursday. He is Palestinian. Both he and his father were born in a refugee camp (Burj El-Barajneh – one of 12 set up by the UN in Lebanon). He’s a boozer.

(To my surprise, alcohol is readily available and not terribly expensive if done right. Beer in a store is around 75 cents per bottle for the cheap stuff produced here in Lebanon. Al Maza, the diamond, is a pilsner that luckily tastes better than a Miller product even if it uses rice. Liquor is more expensive, and bars can be very pricey. The night of the Super Bowl, my beer cost around $6.75.)

Akhmed is an interesting fellow. He is a Fatah leader, the Palestinian party led most famously by Yasser Arafat, and seriously distrusts Hamas. (He doesn’t want fucking Iran and Syria, Hamas patrons, carrying out a proxy war with America only to leave the Palestinian people on the back burner.)

He’s warm and friendly and his eyes look like sideways half-moons when he smiles, which is frequently. He also has a penchant for rock throwing – weather at Israelis across Lebanon’s southern border or at the Egyptian or American embassies in Beirut, he told Jules and I with an its-your-government-not-you smile.

His camp is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It is one square kilometer, inhabited by around 18,000 people, he said. I only saw one small road and a labyrinth of walkways between three- and four-story houses no more (but frequently less) than five feet in width. Scores of electrical wires create webs barely overhead. At one spot what looked like one hundred wires converged on what looked like a circuit breaker on a pole. The thing buzzed like a hive of bees holding a session of British Parliment.

Posters – mostly of Arafat – were everywhere. Akhmed pointed to one poster of a young man, explaining he was the most recent “martyr” – a suicide bomber who attacked Eliat, Israel, last month. Akhmed’s house had at least three pictures of Saddam Hussein (I didn’t get a full tour). Palestinians love Saddam because was an advocate for their rights (and I’m sure volleying scuds at Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War didn’t hurt).

Jules and I paid him a visit on Sunday. We sat on the lower roof of his house, drank tea, talked, watched men working with trained pigeons and listened as neighbors a few roofs away fire a gun into the air a few times. Akhmed said they were shooting at birds (not the trained pigeons). I saw no birds above the house.

The training of pigeons is a much-loved hobby. Pigeons become like children for the men who train them. They fly in circles in 10- to 15-bird flocks. To get the birds to fly faster the owner has a slingshot (not a “Y” with a rubber band, but a rope with a palm-sized hammock in the middle). He’ll put a lemon in the hammock, hold both ends of the rope in his hand, whip it around in a circle parallel to himself and rocket the lemon at the pigeons to scare them into getting a move on.

Akhmed said the lemons travel two or three kilometers. (I’m not converting to feet or miles because I can’t remember the conversion and don’t care to look. Do your own homework if you care.)

“So somewhere lemons are just falling down?” Jules asked. After a slight pause and either an I’ve-never-thought-about-it or a who-the-fuck-cares look, he said, yes.

To get the birds back, a process that takes around an hour, their owner whistles like a bottle rocket you can hear from blocks away and tempts the all-male flock with a clipped-wing female. Each trainer has one female for his flock.

Akhmed’s neighbor held the flapping female by her butt and feet, waving her up and down like a child with a sparkler. Occasionally he’d throw her up into the air, and she’d flutter back to the roof.

It was dark when Jules and I headed for one of the roads on the perimeter of the camp to wait for a taxi. We were in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Akhmed had pointed toward nearby areas the Israelis bombed the past summer.

He said he and his family stayed in the camp for the first ten days, heading to stay with friends in Beirut for the remaining 24. The road we waited on had a sign welcoming us (in French and Arabic) to Haret Hreyk, a Hezbollah stronghold heavily targeted during the war.

One girl in a passing car gave us a wide-eyed, slack-jawed look that made me fear I might have grown a second head sometime that afternoon.