umkahlil

Thank you to Annie of Annie's Letters for bringing 'A Refugee's Eid' from Dr. Thameen Darby's blog to my attention. What follows is a small excerpt; please go to Thameen's Blog for the entire story. It is well worth it.

In your fresh green village, atop the dreamy Palestinian hills and among your beloved relatives and olive and apricot trees, you must have been used to a magnificent Eid. I can hear the prayers flying from the mosque minaret with the glorious colors of the dawn, awaking the people and the land to a new Eid morning, kids putting on their new clothes, every one visiting every other one in the small village, as people there live as one family. You miss the wonderful Eid. But here my friend, we did not miss many things. Our refugee camp has been refractory to Eid for 52 years.To be honest with you, I never knew the meaning of Eid. All I remember about Eid is that my grandfather and father used to go to the mosque at sunrise to pray, and when they come back our Eid was over. In the camp we have no relatives, which is the case of most other people. My father used to visit Im Ali, our widow neighbor. “She is a branch that had been cut from a tree,” he said every Eid morning.
Few men come to visit us, our neighbors. Apart from this there was no Eid. In a refugee camp, nothing belongs to anything. You can feel that people are detached from their homes, homes are detached from the streets, streets do not belong to the land and if there is a tree, she will be lonely and miserable like a refugee.