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).
The tragedy faced by Palestinian People is, by hardness and length, the icon of every other ones.
It's the particular encompassing the universal.
Conversely, the solidarity with Palestinian People symbolizes the solidariety with all other oppressed and resistent peoples.
The concrete and ambitious project we are proposing
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.
Of course, we could not thing of carrying on this project without the cooperation of the people
who are directly involved because they were born and live in this camp: 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 agreed to start our joint activities with a first important merging of our experiences and goals during our
anti-imperialist volunteer mission within Ein el-Hilweh camp in august 2009.
When and where
This experience will last about 2 weeks, from 18th of August to 3rd of September.
The Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp, hosting almost 100.000 Palestinians, is located in southern Lebanon,
on the outskirts of the Lebanese harbour of Saida
(you can click on the following map to visualize the Ein el-Hilweh camp using Google Maps).
In november 2008 a delegation of Sumud went to Ein el-Hilweh camp to coordinate with Nashet the preparations for the work brigade.
If you wish to have a general idea of the place in which the Sumud work brigade will work,
you can glance at some of the pictures taken by our delegation and collected in this
PhotoGallery.
The name of the camp means "fresh water spring", but in arabic language, 'ayn
denotes both "spring" and "eye", and hilwah denotes both "fresh" and "beauty";
basing on this word pun, the great cartoonist Naji al-Ali (maybe the more renowned citizen of the camp) has drawn this cartoon
dedicated to Ein el-Helwah, the Beauty's Eye:
Work Brigade Plan
Which are the activities in the pipeline?
Our brothers of Nashet sent us in january a first draft of the work brigade plan,
that is detailed here.
If you are interested, you can look at our
Project for the renovation of the 'Sumud' center.
