At my hostel in Beirut, I met Nanna from Denmark – an adventurous girl who had the idea of visiting a Palestine refugee camp in Beirut, called Shatila. Shatila is not really a camp as in tents, but more a permanent settlement within Beirut where refugees from Palestine (some already there since 2 or 3 generations) have basically set up everything as nicely as possible for their new life here. There’s shops, restaurants, barbers, everything. But there’s also lots of poverty of course. This is a much poorer area than the Beirut I had seen earlier, so I left my DSLR in my backpack and only took some quick shots from my phone, out of respect.

At first we felt a bit odd, walking through Shatila as tourists, two blond girls clearly standing out from the local crowd. But the Palestinians soon made us feel very welcome. We were greeted with smiles everywhere and people wanted to know where we’re from. Luckily for me, Nanna speaks Arabic very well, so she acted as an interpreter for me. Some of the closer encounters certainly wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been there with her Arabic skills. Like this, we got invited for coffee and shisha and the owners of the little cafe refused to take any money from us. We also had some delicious Lebanese pizza, called Manoosh.

I really enjoyed my time in Shatila, especially meeting all the friendly Palestinians. It felt a bit like being back in Nablus, Palestine, unfortunately without the knafeh. I am well aware that daily life is difficult for the people living in Shatila, but at least we were able to get some lunch and drinks there and therefore support the local economy a little. For the really adventurous there’s a hostel where you can stay at in Shatila!