Interview with Mohammad by SA ’22 and MM ’22.
Mohammad is a Palestinian filmmaker and freelance journalist living in the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank. The Aida camp, where his family moved shortly after the Nakba in 1948, has been his home since birth. Mohammad is director of media at the Lajee Center, a cultural center in Aida camp, where his own filmmaking and journalism careers began and where he gives youth in the camp the tools and skills to pursue their own photography and film projects to tell their own stories. Mohammad is very invested in making sure the stories of the people in the camp are shared with people outside of the camp, and has produced a large body of documentary work about the camp and the West Bank: films, short clips of events and issues, photographs, and more. While he tells the stories of the camp and empowers the next generation to do the same, Mohammad also studies film production in Bethlehem.
Transcript:
I’m Mohammad, and originally from Beit Jibrin where my grandparents come from after 1948 and I was born and growing up in Aida refugee camp. And I still live in this camp with my family until today. I work as a director of the media unit at the Lajee Center, which is a cultural center in Aida refugee camp, and I work as a freelance, as a journalist, mainly in Bethlehem.
My village, I used to always hear about it from my grandmother, my grandfather and never see it. I just, with the story they’re telling me it’s like, you know when you need to know a place you start imagining how it look like. And once, I went to my village. It was an adventure, was not easy but I made it. It was very very hard, like to see it. I remember the moment just I reached it, I had the feeling, I don’t know like happy or want to cry. I just forget about it, I took my camera and start taking photos as much as I can. I went back to my home, downloading the photos, and showed to my grandmother, and she started telling me “this here was a school” and “this building, it is for your grandfather’s house.”
And for me, I felt like kind of more-or-less I know a little bit more information about my homeland. For me like I want to talk, I want to tell these people this is my homeland but because I am not legal there, I couldn’t say anything because if you’re going to do anything, they will arrest me or they will shoot me or you don’t know what their reaction is going to be. But it was very hard, like to say anything to them. I felt in the moment I am a tourist in my own village.
To see all this open space and in the moment thinking about the space you have in the camp, it’s really crazy. Every year, it gets more crowded, and every year new members from the families come. So we need more space but it’s very hard to have more space. The houses is very close to each other; which is, I could say, no privacy. So like small walls between the families, and if the family talking about something, the second neighbor can hear the whole conversation. So you never feel comfortable.
With the problems we have in the camp, with this difficult situation, I could say one of the reasons make me still ongoing with my life in general: community. We’re about 5,000 refugees living in this camp, but we know each other very well. Personally, I know everyone. I know each person, where he lives, even their children, the new generation, because in the center we work with children. So this is one of the things I like about the camp, that people are united together and loves each others. When you are sad you will find people to support you, stop with you, and to stand with you.
https://soundcloud.com/nancy-kalow/almus-majsak-final-edit-mohammad-alazza
