I grew up in Lebanon’s largest refugee camp, the one most often in the news due to what often appears like “madness and mayhem”: Ein El-Helweh. But for me, it is simply “home.”

Thirty-eight years later, who but the survivors remember?

I watch the scenes on TV and taste the dust of missiles.

Zeinab was literally thrown by the blast.

I had been accepted, but then came the news: “I am terribly sorry, but we don’t hire Palestinians.”

I never thought I would feel the degree of sadness I have experienced the last few days, during the clashes taking place in Ein El-Helweh camp.

Home should be a safe harbor. But in my camp, there are snipers and the voices of bullets.

Nelson Mandela once said: “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” But what if you don’t have the right to obtain that “weapon”?

When an attempted terrorist attack recently occurred in Lebanon, the media were quick to blame a refugee. Why are we the first to be suspects?

It was about three years before I finally gathered the courage to ask my mother to share the story of her visit to Gaza with my father.