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​A shelter for Syrian refugees in Lebanon

Interview with Giovanni Marinelli, the initiator of "Spring Camp "

Ecolodge, green hostel in Taanayel (Beqaa Valley, Lebanon)

Ecolodge, green hostel in Taanayel (Beqaa Valley, Lebanon)

Helping the Syrians from a refugee camp in Lebanon to build a home and some shared bathrooms by themselves, instead of inhabiting tents and barracks built as best as they could at the street borders or on agricultural land. This is the goal of “Spring camp” project, initiated by Giovanni Marinelli, a graduate in Arabic and expert of Syria and Lebanon, involving the camp’s dwellers: Syrian refugees from Homs who are sheltered in Northern Lebanon, seeking peace, safety and dignity.

Through a crowdfunding campaign, promoters aim at gathering 5,000 dollars to build at least a home and shared bathrooms made of clay and straw, with a low-cost ecologic technique to create pleasant, safe and comfortable buildings.

This initiative is meant to ensure a primary good, home, to those who had to leave everything behind to flee war, and above all to draw people’s attention to the plight of refugees residing in Lebanon: 1,173 thousands officially registered as early as on 9 July 2015 by the High UN Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), actually 2 millions according to estimates. Many of them have expired visas, which means they are illegal refugees, and they are exploited and underpaid and reduced to despair. This situation keeps worsening after the recent expulsions carried out by the Lebanese army in 41 camps in the area of Akkar, that was inhabited first by 5.300 people, many of whom did not have any alternatives to living in the streets.

In the absence of big humanitarian groups’ emergency aid, the “Spring Camp” project tries to promote a grass-root solution, in which refugees are actively involved, as Giovanni Marinelli explains in this interview.

How was this project set up?

I have studied Arabic for ten years, three of which spent in Lebanon and Syria, and in 2014 I worked as an interpreter for the volunteers of “Operazione Colomba” (“Dove Operation” of the Peace Nonviolent Corps of the Pope John XXIII Foundation) with whom we explored the camps hosting Syrian refugee in Northern Lebanon, in the Akkar district. We stayed there for three months. One night, by chance, we stopped in a hostel made of clay and straw, built by a Lebanese association to promote this traditional technique, which is typical of those countries although it fell into desuetude over the past decades. I got curious and I bought a handbook about this building technique. I showed it to the inhabitants of “Spring Camp”, our base. The matriarch of an extended family told us that, before getting married and moving to the city of Homs, she had lived in the countryside in a home built by her family that very way. From her tale I started thinking of using this system as an alternative to the barracks of wood, plastic and cardboard in which Syrian refugees usually live.

Whom did you involve in your endeavour?

Participants to this project include Clara Cibrario Assereto, who lived and studied in Damascus in 2009 and now lives in Milan after being a researcher and a project manager at Senseable City Lab of Boston’s MIT until 2014, and Manuela Errol, a graduate from the Brera Academy, who helped us build the site. At the beginning we opted for the crowdfunding platform “indiegogo.com”, with a goal of raising 5,000 dollars and the bid translated into English to find donors also outside Italy. But we realized that this did not work, so now we are trying to raise funds on much more of a local basis. The Comunità di base delle Piagge of Florence accepted to work with us, supporting our project and ensuring the fair management of funds. At the end of our crowdfunding campaign the funds raised will be deposited on the account of the Comunità di base, which will be concretely involved in the realization of the project, and will send a member of the Community to Lebanon in order to monitor the work.

Once the amount is raised, how will you proceed?

The homes will be built and will remain in place under a five-year rental contract that has still three years to run. The rental until 2015 has been paid by a Syrian activist, who managed fundings from the Arab countries, which were though interrupted some months ago for political issues. At this point, also thanks to some donations, the camp dwellers managed to pay the annual rental of the land (3,200 dollars) and will thus be allowed to remain in the camp until April 2016. In the project is realised, the refugees, employed as workers, could manage to collectively pay the rental for the following year with their own wages (until April 2017).

Besides offering a temporary solution to the refugee’s need for a decent housing, do you have other goals, such as for instance proposing a pattern to be replicated on a higher scale?

Our project is experimental. At the beginning we also thought of realising more residential buildings than the first two we had planned. Then we realised our priority was enabling these people to pay the rent and learn this building technique. For this purpose it was more useful to reduce the budget and make a virtually replicable “pilot project”.

What is going to happen when the rental contract expires?

We are not able to make forecasts about this and the fate of the refugees, but if our project succeeds, these people will be able first to remain in the “Spring Camp” for another year, and have a home and shared bathrooms. All of them would like to get back to Syria, the majority of them are from the Bab Amr neighbourhood of Homs, under siege for many years, from which they managed to flee moving from one place to the other across Syria avoiding war zones and then reached Lebanon. Their homes in Homs were destroyed and the ownership of the land would have been left to Iranians. But their wish is to go back home, even though they have lost everything.

Your job is not in the field of cooperation and humanitarian aid. Why did you start this endeavour?

I had many friends in Syria, I care about that country and I wanted to be somehow of help. I accompanied ”Operazione Colomba” to Lebanon because it seemed to me to resume an interrupted thread. Seeing from near the despair and frustration of the refugees pusher me to try and do something. The “Spring Camp” project is no definitive solution, but it is the only sensible and concrete thing that I could plan in that context.

Viviana Vestrucci, journalist

29 July 2015

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