EXTRACTS FROM PETER MORTIMER’S BLOG

Jan 3 2009 by Barbara Hodgson, The Journal

What hits you first is the smell of decay ... not the people, who keep themselves and their houses clean, but the huge mounds of rubbish.

Much of Shatila is rubble, buildings bombed and destroyed in the years of conflicts, and simply left to the weeds and the dumped garbage. There are no street names in Shatila, no pavements, no trees, no street lights, no playgrounds, and no parks.

Saturday sees the camp’s football team El Carmel in the semi-final of the Beirut amateur Palestinian League cup. The impoverished pitch, half a mile from the camp, is totally grassless, red soil that resembles a builder’s site, and kicks up into dust clouds at every tackle. Limp nets hang from rusted goalposts.

It took me 10 days to gain access to the school itself, a high concrete fenced building funded by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), only to discover that because of limited space, it was two schools in one – males in the morning, females in the afternoon.

There were huge cultural distances between my world and those of these refugees whose main dream was one day to return to the land (Palestine, aka Israel) they believe had been stolen from them. I was from the affluent West; they lived in one of the most deprived places imaginable.

I have a suspicion that back home people are increasingly unable to have a good time unless reinforced with alcohol, so finding out good fun is possible without the inhibition-releasing properties of booze (not to mention its destructive social and medical qualities) is interesting.

I’ve been to several get-togethers here now. They’re full of energy. People dance and whoop about, and there’s an innocence about them I love.

I am fortified by the oddity of a world premiere of a new play in English performed by 16 eleven-year-old Palestinian girls in a refugee camp school playground.

In many years of drama projects I’ve never known anything so bizarre or utterly draining.