In the evening of Monday 17 August the Work Brigade 2009 started from Rome. The Italians members have been reached during overnight stopover in Budapest and on arrival in Beirut by some other members from Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom, and on Tuesday 18 they went all together to Sidon to meet the comrades of the Lebanon-Palestinian Nashet association. In the morning of Wednesday 19 the Brigade entered into the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh.
The brigade came back to Europe in the morning of Friday 4 September.

Our project has attracted the interest of the Lebanese media, and our Brigade has been interviewed by several newspapers, including Al-Akhbar, Daily Star, Addiyar and Al-Binaa and by the Al-Manar TV.

Look at the Report and Pictures sent by our Brigade from the labor camp in Ein el-Hilweh (updated to September 3rd and with new pictures).

 

An economic disaster is hitting the wealthy West which is bound to change our way of life. It was about time! Indeed, we were sick and tired of this opulence.

It is not religion but money which is the most powerful opium of the people. The diabolic mechanism of material well-being had to stop to make people understand in what kind of maddening matrix they were stuck. Nonetheless, there is danger ahead.

The fear of plunging down can fuel the most spiteful feelings that human beings harbour. The police state is not just a devilish machine standing outside and against people; it also worms its way into the mind of the "citizens", by now transformed into subjects-consumers, causing them to withdraw into their dismal loneliness and cry out for "security". In order not to slide down to the bottom of the heap, they are readily accepting a new foreign enemy: the Islamic resistance.

This gloomy and chauvinist plea is about to end the myths of freedom and tolerance on which the West fancied to ground its superiority. Therefore, the resistance, which has been carried on so far by the peoples robbed, aggressed and tormented by the imperialist wars, is not any longer up to them alone. Now that the First World is shattering into pieces, we must learn a lesson from those who have always been doomed to resist hardships by any means while keeping the torch of their dignity burning.

Hence, we have not founded Sumud in order to run away from the West, but rather to better fight for a future of brotherhood and solidarity. We want to experiment the politics of positive facts and contagious examples. We want to change ourselves, because it is impossible to change the world without also changing the people living in it.

It is not as "missionaries" that we are answering Gaza's cry for help and travelling to Palestinian refugee camps. We do not have anything to teach them, nor do we want to convince them of the hypocritical values in the name of which the West, Israel and their puppet regimes have martyred them and caged them in ghettos. We are going there because they have asked us to help them resist, and in order to bring back to the West a part of the anger, the hope for liberation, and the humanity which managed to survive inside the Resistance.

For us, anti-imperialist voluntary work means bringing our bodies to the hell where the damned of the heart have been thrown, sharing their thirst for justice, and breathe together with them the air of freedom which has kept them alive. Sumud means belonging to the international community of the last, because the whole mankind will only be free when they have cut loose from their chains.

WORK CAMP IN EIN EL-HILWEH (Lebanon, August 2009)

The concrete and ambitious project we are proposing to everyone who shares our spirit, is to take part in a work brigade in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh, in the south of Lebanon. Ein el-Hilweh is a real ghetto where the almost 100.000 Palestinians have been living for generations in a terrible situation.

One of the main goals of the brigade is very practical: we will work hard in order to restore an old building formerly used as an office by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), half-destroyed by Israeli rockets, to turn it into a place for cultural and political activities for the youth of the whole refugee camp.

Of course, we could not thing of carrying on this project without the cooperation of the people who are directly involved: our partners, the Nashet youth association, composed of both Palestinian and Lebanese, has discussed the idea with the other groups of the refugee camp and guaranteed their contribution to the full success of the project.

WE NEED € 25,000

Restoring the building presumes finding founds. Sumud isn't an ONG, it isn't subsidized by state governments or by European Union or UNO. The money that will be used to erect the building destined for the political and cultural activities of Ein el-Hilweh Youth will be clean, they will not come from the same institutions that support or back the aggession to the Palestinian People. We will be able to reach the needed amount of money only if many people partecipate.

You can donate by clicking on the button below; you can use your Paypal account, your Credit Card (normal or prepaid) or an online credit transfer.

If you prefer to use more traditional paying ways, you can do a credit transfer to our bank account.

current account made out to:
Sumud: volontariato e resistenza
at: Banca Popolare Etica
IBAN: IT19U0501802800000000127032
.
BIC: CCRTIT2T84A

 

If you are interested, you can look at our Project for the renovation of the 'Sumud' center.