Revisiting the gritty symbol of Palestinian survival - Shatila

In July 1974, I came to Beirut, a recent college graduate hoping to make a career in journalism. Soon after I arrived, I started teaching English pro bono to a lively group of girls in a nearby Palestinian refugee camp.

One afternoon a week, I would walk into the heart of the camp from a bustling central square where taxi drivers, shoppers, and men returning from work competed noisily for space with vendors selling colorful fresh produce from rickety carts. From the square, a maze of narrow alleys led between thousands of tiny one- and two-story concrete homes. These were the refugees' shelters: it was 26 years since these families had arrived in Lebanon, fleeing from the 1948 fighting inside what had been Palestine.

I would orient myself inside the camp by looking for the yellow-painted mosque that soared above the concrete shelters. I would take a couple of turns and arrive at the home of two of my students: ever-smiling Khadija, who studied hard to make up for her polio-induced lameness, and her giggly younger sister Najat.

Once inside their shelter's heavy door I climbed steep concrete stairs to a space set out as a living room - but along one wall was stacked folded bedding, to be pulled out and used there at night. On a tiny balcony fragrant jasmine, roses, and herbs were planted in old powdered-milk tins.

As the other students trickled in, Khadija or her mother would bring me bitter Arabic coffee and some candy or pastries. And we'd spend 90 minutes conversing in rudimentary English.

When I came back to Lebanon for two months this fall, I wanted to find out what had become of the refugee camp and - if possible - to locate Khadija, Najat, and their friends. I have worried a lot about them over the years.

The camp where they lived was the site of an ugly Israeli-orchestrated massacre in 1982. Then, between 1985 and 1988, it was under almost constant siege from surrounding Lebanese militiamen.

The camp's name? Shatila.

Any place on earth can change a lot in 30 years - but I recognized almost nothing about Shatila. Where the camp had once been sprawling and low-rise, now it had a much smaller footprint, but its buildings towered seven and eight stories high. From the outside, it looked like a single looming structure, a concrete prison sticking up from the lower buildings and market stalls around it.

Inside, where previously there was room in the alleys for neighbors to gather and talk, and enough sun for every family to keep a healthy row of plants, now the individual buildings are so tight-packed that cars cannot enter and pedestrians have to turn sideways to pass each other, and so tall that only a gray, diffused light reaches to ground level, even in midmorning.

The head of a camp women's organization who was showing me around, told me that the pervasive damp and lack of ventilation make respiratory problems rampant. She took me to three special places in and near Shatila.

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