The kids clap at the end of a game.

Sport class was filled with smiles, laughs and joy.

A young girl in sport class at TYO.

A TYO participant.

Another TYOer.

Participants in TYO’s Core Child Program serve themselves the salad they have just prepared.

A participant in TYO’s Core Child Program and Fazia waving in the background.

Mahmoun playing in the bleachers, anticipating his turn on the field.

A group of the energetic youth.

One of the participants in TYO’s refugee camp outreach soccer program where children from many different neighborhoods play soccer together in El Askar.

A soccer participant.

A soccer participant.

A soccer participant.

One of the local boys from El Askar refugee camp.

A group of local boys hangs outside the indoor concrete field.

Me with two of the daughters of one of the mother who invited Ilona and I into her home.

All four of our friend’s children in their home.

Raiz with his cousin in the family’s home.

Raiz in his home.

The headboard of the bed in one of the family’s two rooms.

As we were preparing for bed there was a huge boom. We ran out of our room. “What was that?” We thought a bomb had gone off. It turned out to be fireworks.

I am observing a class party. The four and five year olds in the core program are having a party. They are making salad. Cut.Cut.Cut.Chop.Chop.Chop. Mix.Mix.Mix. Mmm.Mmm.Mmm. They clap as they eat. They sing as they eat. They shriek as they eat. One girl with beautiful long pigtails licks her plate. Another girl shares some of her salad with a friend. I notice Fazia staring blankly at the wall behind me. I wave. I make funny faces. Finally she grins. She hides her face. The teacher calls her. She turns back around focused on the task in front of her…her salad. She looks back at me again with that blank stare. I walk over. She is quiet, shy. The volunteer at her table calls her name. “Fazia!” She snaps back. She is in the moment again. I wonder where she went? What she thinks about? How one second she can seem so close and the next be somewhere else?

We sit in on a focus group Suhad organized to gage the kids’ impressions of the first two weeks. She talks with four kids – three eight year old girls and one six year old boy who insisted he be part of the group. They are very expressive flapping their arms, singing, smiling. I wish I could understand what they’re saying…they are saying they like it here, they have nothing to do at home.

Outside talking to Suhad a boy catches my eye. He is slouched up against the wall. He wears a stripped shirt. It is too small. He looks dirty. He is bruised. I walk over to him. A volunteer runs out. “What’s wrong?” The volunteer tries to take him back inside. The boy recoils. He starts to cry. I crouch down. “Hi! What’s wrong?” He is saying something, but I don’t understand. I ask the volunteer for the multicolor ball he is holding. I motion as if I am going to throw the ball. I pretend to roll it. He looks up. He wants to play. We play catch. I throw too hard. “Whoops!” He has difficulty catching it. I smile. He laughs. Another volunteer comes out. Again the boy recoils. He looks down. He doesn’t want to go inside. He starts to cry again. He wants to go home. When is the bus leaving? I give him the ball. He holds it tight. The volunteer says something and then suddenly the boy with the colorful ball marches inside proud, wiping the tears out of his eyes. I see him a few minutes later run out to get the ball. He looks happy. He is playing with the other kids.

What is normal?

“There is no space at home for kids to play. They cannot enjoy themselves at home so they play in the streets. TYO is a huge space. TYO has structure. There are classes. There is routine. It becomes habit. Imagination, physical activity it all becomes habit. Enter any camp and you can’t see where the streets end. They twist. They turn. They are dark. They are narrow. Kids don’t have enough space to see. Homes are close. Homes are small. Kid’s can’t see. There is a relationship between vision and anxiety. There is a relationship between vision and imagination.

Imagination is hope. When you imagine you are healing yourself. We have tanks. We have invasion. But you ask them what do you wish you had? I wish I could be at the beach. I dreamt that I was a queen. I dreamt that I had a party at TYO. They are wishing. They are dreaming.” Suhad stops. She collects herself.

“In each part of my heart one of those kids lives. I need them just to laugh. When I see their eyes shinning…”

I find myself standing in a brightly light room facing a smiling woman with shoulder length brown hair and beautiful brown eyes. She is still wearing her aerobics gear from her morning class at TYO.

There are two rooms. One is a salon and the other is a bedroom. The room is empty. There is very little furniture. There is space for her kids to play. The kids run up. Hammad bought bazooka gum. He hands me a piece. “Shokran! Thank you!” He still frowns, uncomfortable with us being in his home. I look at him. The gum comes with a tattoo. I show him. He inches forth slowly. He holds his arm out to me. We stick it on. “Wow!” He jumps up and down with excitement. Another, another…He shoves another wad of gum in his mouth, and we repeat the tattoo procedure. “Wow!” He laughs. We cover both his tiny arms in tattoos. “Wow!”

The mother serves us coconut cake. “Zaki! Delicious!” She smiles. “Afwan! Welcome!” Hammad starts to feed me some of his cake. I feed him some of mine. “ChuggyChuggyChuggyChuggy…ChooChoo! Here comes the train! YumYumYumYumYum!” He giggles…He repeats, “yumyumyum!”

I give the two girls a coloring book. For me really, they ask? They approach the coloring book with care. At first they are shy. What color should they use? What page should they start on? They start with black. “No! No black! Too sad!” They quickly change to blue, pink, purple, red…

We make hats. We make paper monsters. We make boats. We make planes. Annie photographs the kids at work. She sits with the mom in the bedroom. They talk. They talk of what happens after Annie leaves. They talk of attachments formed.

I play with the kids. I play with the baby. He pukes on me. He looks at me. “UhOh!” He starts to try and eat my t-shirt. I laugh. He smiles. The mom lends me a black t-shirt. Hammad runs to me. He jumps on me. We play airplane. We play circus boy. I spin him. I dip him. He climbs on me. He runs away and returns with a toy machine gun. He pretends to shoot me. He feeds me the gun. The gun could be a stuffed animal or piece of paper…It seems to be his only toy. The girls have a doll each. Hammad has a tiny gun.

It is time to go. Hammad hangs on to me. He grabs my neck. “Laa!” He wants me to stay with him. Don’t go, he says. “Tomorrow! I’ll see you tomorrow!” I slowly free myself from his grasp. He is upset. When I first met Hammad he frowned all the time. Hammad is three. But today, today he opened up. He embraced me.

.

Ilona and Fazia as we say good-bye.

Mahmoun cuts an apple in the family room.

Farida lying in the family room.

A home in the neighborhood, very close to Farida and Fazia’s home.

We are asking Farida a few questions. Fatoon gets her to stand still as David zooms in on her face…smudged, blackened by dirt. Here eyes dart around the room. Finally she smiles. She is missing her front teeth. Her hair is covered in linen. The braid not hiding the fact that she has not had her hair washed in almost a month. “Hi Farida! Keefik?” “What do you want to be one you grow up?” She stands there. She smiles at the camera. She looks at Fatoon. She seems to be saying ‘what are they asking?’ I don’t think she has ever thought she could be anything…what a crazy question I’m sure she’s thinking. Next question. “What is your favorite part of TYO?” She immediately says, “painting.” She tells us she likes coming everyday. She loves everyone here. She likes playing with other kids. When she doesn’t come, she says she plays with her sister Fazia in their small house. She likes to come everyday.

Suhad, TYO’s psycho-social specialist, described some of the psychosocial problems the kids that attend TYO face…acting out, inability to communicate or express oneself, physical abuse, neglect, trauma…Problems that come from living under occupation, in poverty, and sometimes dealing with sporadic invasions. Problems of occupation are exacerbated by poverty…huge numbers of kids living in two rooms. There is a lack of support in these communities. There are not enough services to help parents.

She tells us a story of a girl from Al-Askar camp. This girl was happy all the time. She seemed like a happy kid. True, she had moments when she would refer to the PLO, but she seemed like a happy person. It was her eyes that gave her away. In her eyes you could see she was a very sad person. One day in art class the children were making cards. She was making a card for her father when she broke down crying. She said, “I am a different person. I am not like this kids at all.” Her father is in prison. She said, “sometimes I dream that we just open the door and he is with us.”

Fazia did not talk. She did not interact with the other kids in her class. But, she would smile. When Suhad approached the mom she learned that school was not important to the family. The kids had tried to go to school but they did not succeed. No one accepted them. They were beat up. They were unable to communicate. They were involved in street disputes. They are called stupid. They call them rubbish because their dad is a street cleaner. They are unaccepted. When you approach them they attach themselves to you. They want to keep you. They see it in your eyes that you accept us. They see that you respect them.

TYO is the only place where these kids are respected both as kids, but also as human beings. TYO provides a space where these kids can express their anger, their frustrations, through structured play. In Nablus, you see kids playing in the street without supervision. You see groups in the street who just play soccer, nothing else. The girls sit at home watching TV. TYO provides games with supervision; for example, with sports you develop more skills and emphasize notions of team. You help kids talk about conflict resolution. You teach them communication. You teach them teamwork. When kids leave here they try to teach these principles to their respective communities.

When your environment is not healthy. When you are surrounded by invasion and poverty, trauma means your sensibility is no longer normal. You don’t see things like a two year old, but like an adult. There is no time for childhood.

They put mattresses on the floor every night. There is nothing. It is an empty home. Empty. Nothing makes you feel stimulated. I respected them more when I visited. It is an empty home.

It is a constant challenge. You have to maintain a fine balance between what you want and what people themselves want. As a Nabulsi I don’t want Fazia to grow up in that kind of environment, but you have to try to keep yourself at a distance and understand that your job is to assist them, not to change them. If we try to change their world the way that we want it to be we will fail. We must assist first. You wish they asked for education or toys for Fazia, but this is not important for them. They grew up without those things. Our role is to raise their awareness. To keep Fazia off the street, that is enough for them.

Mahmoun, he is a happy person. He comes here and we respect him. We do not look at him as if he is a strange person. He wants to run as a human being. He wants to be a kid. Adults think how did the family raise this boy? How do they send him dressed like this, dirty, with clothes and shoes that do not fit him?

I realized that only Rahma could read and write, and even then with great difficulty. Rahma slowly signed all the release forms. She is so eager to learn. But, she had to stop before entering her ninth year. She had to help raise the kids. The mom was in the hospital giving birth to another child. She still wants to learn English. She still wants to know things.

Kids playing, that means imagination. The healthy kid can use his imagination. Imagination also comes from the experience itself. You can’t be superman without having watched superman at least once. In our environment kids play a lot with toy guns. This is their life. This is how they grow up. This is what they see. When kids play with their guns they are expressing themselves. In treatment you need to go with it because he is telling you the story. We are talking about trauma…this experience needs to be affirmed. How are you going to assess trauma if you do not give them space to express their story? If you are going to treat him you need to give him opportunity in classroom to tell us his story through play. The tanks he plays with are tiny, but he is terrified. He is telling us how they invaded his neighborhood or how they demolished his house. Our main job is to help them find confidence and security. Without addressing these things we are not dealing with problems, with the fear.

Play is part of treatment. I wish no kids were killed in street. I wish no fathers were lost. But this is their life…

My kids grew up away from the camps, but Israeli soldiers invaded once. My sons still repeat the experience. Repeating means healing. If you don’t express yourself it can be disastrous. It can destroy your life. It makes you vengeful. It makes you want revenge in a stupid violent way. We don’t want violence. We don’t want anyone to be killed. We validate their story. We believe them. We hear them. We heal them. We don’t want violence.

_________________________________

“It is so difficult,” the mom tells us. “There are ten of us. My husband is sick. We want to fix the house. There is no source of income. My husband’s salary is 2000 sheikles. It is not enough. During the intifada, two of my sons were shot by Israeli soldiers. One was shot in the back of the head. He was in the hospital for ninety days. Nobody helped us. I am afraid to send my kids to school. I don’t want them to be shot by Israelis.”

Rahma, Wallah, Farida, and Fazia are all sitting, listening.

“Rahma stopped going to school in her ninth year. She had to be with the children while I was pregnant in the hospital. Ali, my son, was shot in his head. He was only seventeen. Mahmoun is thirteen years old. He no longer goes to school. I am afraid to send him after the intifada. Our situation is so bad that my brother has to help me. We have to spend a lot on my husband’s medical expenses. He has problems in the head. He cannot speak properly, something is wrong with his tongue. I want to fix this house.” She stops.

“We don’t have any money right now.” She doesn’t have the hundred sheikles to send Fazia and Farida to school. She decides it is better to cover home expenses than to send the girls to school.

Fatoon explains that TYO’s target groups are the most marginalized. It is those who are suffering most. She speaks of a big family who live in the neighborhood. They are illiterate. They have speech problems. But after they came to TYO their pronunciation improved. They started to smile. They started to act out which can be healthy. They realized there were people who love them. They were no longer afraid of others.

I ask, “Is this Farida and Fazia’s family?”

She nods. She elaborates. Farida and Fazia live in a very poor family. Their home is tiny. The mom and dad are simple people. The kids adopted the parents’ speech problems. The girls were very shy. They didn’t talk. Once they started to come to TYO, they started to change. She started to notice that Fazia is not the same Fazia that came last semester. Fazia now is smiling. She is talking. She is pronouncing letters better. “I hope we can reach all the kids who have such serious problems and have them join TYO.”

One of the reasons kids like TYO, Fatoon tells us, is that it is a safe space. At TYO kids feel that they have a space psychologically and physically. Psychologically they have a space where everyone accepts them and physically it’s a space where every child can run. Compared to houses, houses in camps are very small — nine or ten all are living in the same family with mom dad and kids maybe in one room two room — the kid does not have the space to talk, to play, to express himself, or even to ask a question. There is no privacy in these neighborhoods. Everyone knows everything. The furniture is very simple. They all sleep in the same room. They wake up in the same room. They do things in the same room. It is not healthy. Space is important, even solely on a physical level.

TYO now is like a precious town, a refuge for the kids, the moms. TYO is a different place, in the physical building itself. It is a building outside the camps. Moms, kids, young people, the whole time they are in their houses, streets, or at school. They are ready to go out of their camp. TYO is like a spot of light, a place outside the camp where they can fulfill their needs, enjoy their time. TYO now is a place that it welcomes different people from different camps. It is a chance to eliminate all the borders between the camps and the old city and Nablus. It is a place for everyone where everyone is equal here. It is a place where trying best to fulfill the needs of moms, kids, young people. They are happy coming to TYO. They know it is a welcoming place.

Annie and I ask the mom, “How did TYO help your family?”

“It helped Fazia in reading and writing. She needs more work, but it certainly influenced her pronunciation.”

The father is home. The mom motions to us that he is not right in the mind. Everyone moves to one side of the room. He sits down. He mumbles. We continue.

“They come home very happy. They play games together there and love it. Before kids played in the streets – haram. They took Fazia and this is the best thing they did.” She doesn’t want Fazia to be like that. She wants her to learn. She prays for a good future, Ench’allah.

“There are many wounded people in this family, but no one will help. God willing it will be a good future.”

As we leave Fazia jumps on me. She cradles my head in her tiny arms. She yells, “stay with us!” I rub her back. I don’t know what to say. “Stay with me!” She wouldn’t let go.

1921 is also the year that Mr. Sheka’s first family owned theater opened in Nablus. The family’s first theater was shut down in 1987 during the first Palestinian Intifada and remains closed. Mr. Sheka says this theater had a capacity of 1,300 seats. Its projectors from 1935 remain intact and could operate if the power was turned on. Cinema City currently seats about 200 people.

Mr. Marwan Masri, the owner of Cinema City, said it took 1 year to negotiate the opening of the new theater. The difficulties can be attributed to distributors in Lebanon and Egypt who view Palestine as too unstable for business.

Mr. Masri spoke of Nablus’ three old cinemas which all were built between the 1920 and the early ’40s. All three remain closed. Mr. Sheka noted that entertainment in general is difficult to come by in Nablus. Coffee shops, known as Muqawahs, are a main source of entertainment where locals patron a corruption of the hours. “Nablus,” Mr. Sheka said, has been a closed city surrounded by checkpoints for so long. He continued saying “We open this one [theater] for a new beginning.” Mr. Hamdallah, the Minister of Culture in Palestine, expressed his desire to see all theaters re-opened so that the youth might aspire to filmmaking as a creative outlet for telling their own stories.

In the early 1900s, in front of movie theaters across America, cardboard cutouts of a tramp not unlike The Kid stood holding a sign saying “I AM HERE TODAY.” This message, perhaps more than any other, is important for many Nablusis to say to those who watch Palestinians, as Chaplin audiences once watched the Tramp himself; with a smile, perhaps without a tear.