Thumos spreading →

by Anna Sophia Habib

Shatila refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon, February 2017

It’s been ten days since I’ve returned from Lebanon. The image of the Shatila refugee camp we visited almost two weeks ago now has latched on to the surface of my memories. There, I saw a truth that is often swept aside, avoided, repealed or reconstructed. This is a truth friends and family in Beirut may not want me to tell because it pulls the curtain away from what Lebanon works so hard to hide, revealing what’s behind the vibrancy of its mainstream. (Friends and family: please don’t misunderstand me. I love our city and I will share its beauty, but I cannot turn away from what is just as real, from what we would rather forget.)

To tell the truth of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon is to force ourselves to sit with a discomfort so profound that it could easily paralyze the most dedicated social activists among us. 3,000 Palestinian civilian refugees at the Shatila camp, and its sister camp, Sabra, were massacred in September 1982, only six months after I was born and a few miles away from our home in West Beirut where my father, then General Secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches, was actively engaged in the emergency response effort. Thirty-five years later, the Shatila camp “shelters” 30,000 refugees, now both Palestinian and Syrian, in a shantytown that would make section 8 housing in DC look relatively well-maintained. The water in the camps is too salty for humans to drink or wash with. The European Union has promised to provide tanks of clean drinking water, but the people still wait. The electrical engineering was so hastily planned that young men who try to assist in repair work are often electrocuted to death. The “main street” is an alley only a foot or two wider than the rest of the dank camp alleyways, a total of ten feet at most. Families live in one to two rooms with no windows and shoddy electricity. Children are severely deficient in Vitamin D and other nutrients. They attend UNWRA schools (which provide free education to Palestinian refugees) with oversaturated classrooms of peers whose parents and grandparents were exiled from their land in Palestine with no right of return. Parents suffer from unimaginable symptoms of desperation and PTSD, a pain so deep they feel compelled to desert their children to make their way to the Raouche, a cliff that juts out of the Mediterranean sea, where they hope to take their own lives.

30,000 refugees in a shantytown smaller than your average U.S. high school building—a camp originally built in 1949 for only 3,000 refugees.   No support from the Lebanese government, and barely any from the international community. This is just one out of twelve refugee camps in Lebanon.

I don’t think I can capture what I want to capture for you in words. I think if you had to witness this degree of international neglect first-hand, you might feel how I feel when I take my hot shower, drink clean water out of a sink in a cozy home, open a fridge full of fresh sanitary foods, drive down clean, organized, safe streets. I’m not talking about the guilt of privilege here. It’s more of a sense of shame—shame for what is happening to our humanity... Or, maybe the most accurate word here is the ancient Greek word “thumos:” a righteous anger at the injustices of the world, a deep urge to fight oppression, a spiritedness or courage to make it right somehow.  When you see this rugged oppression of human dignity, it eradicates the option for hopelessness or apathy or resignation. Those emotions almost feel like luxuries. They are coping mechanisms that we often lean into to satiate our own pain, our survivor’s guilt or the guilt over our own privileges and luxuries. I think “thumos” is an implosion of rage, grief, horror, pain. It is the raw truth of your own humanity— the one you feel when you are faced with the cruel reality of what humans are capable of doing to other humans. Not the cruelty you visit through a screen, but the one where you see it and smell it and hold its hand.  It’s the urge to scream so loud that maybe you can shift the paradigm of injustice. In that raw emotion, there is a crisp clarity of resistance. There’s an active form of hope.

For me, that active hope will continually be inspired by a face I will never be able to let go of: Jamila (“beautiful” in English), the Shatila camp director for Beit Atfal Assumoud, a non-sectarian, non-governmental organization that provides social services and educational programs for families in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.   She’s a sixty year-old social worker, born and raised in the camp. She witnessed the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and suffered through the two-week-long violence between Amal and the PLO when the camp was cut off from all food and services. She said she only drank water for those two weeks so the children could have whatever scraps of food were left. Her face holds the same grit as the hands of a farmer or a mechanic. She is a freedom fighter through and through—and I mean that in the literal sense. She has fought for the dignity, humanity and freedom of the Palestinian families and children in the camp since she was a young woman. She never married, but has worn a wedding band for years. She says it’s to keep suitors away: “I’m married to my work. I have 5,000 children.”  Her smile has saved lives. She didn’t tell us that directly, but I know it.  The first thing she said when we walked into her grim, damp office at Shatila was how important it is to keep smiling at the children and the parents she works with. “If you don’t smile, they will lose the hope.”

I don’t know how compassion fatigue hasn’t broken her. In my own private family life, I have slipped into the void of vicarious trauma. When depression, anxiety and mental illness surround you from the moment you wake up to the moment you try to close your eyes again at night, it feels like your own roots, the ones that you have tended to over years and years, are drying up and nothing can quench that desperation. And for Jamila who was born and raised in perpetual desolation, I can’t imagine how much the pain has compounded her roots. I wonder if what keeps her going is what I’ve seen happen at the intersection of hopelessness, when you think nothing you do will overcome the injustice you’re up against, but then you catch a glimpse of someone else’s courage edging through.  They say trauma is contagious and I have felt that in my bones—the legacy of our family traumas and that of my adopted sons’ traumas—but, I think courage is also contagious. Call it mirror neurons, or epigenetics, or thumos spreading, or straight, simple human compassion. Whatever it is, it’s a thread we can’t risk losing.  

**If you are able and interested in sponsoring a refugee child through the Beit Atfal Assumoud Family Happiness Project that Jamila directs at the Shatila camp, you can: donations to support the work of BAS can be made via United Palestinian Appeal, a Washington, DC-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization: <www.helpupa.org/beitassumoud>. It’s $360 for the whole year. It will provide one child with food, social work services, and recreational after-school programming.**

A little sweetheart whose initial sponsorship paved the way for him to get a cochlear implant and a hearing aid through ProMedica, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Ronald the McDonald House in Toledo, Ohio. Jamila to his left. My mother to her left.