To Help Refugees, Help the Whole Community

by Sean Carroll

On a recent trip to Lebanon, my first to the region as the new head of ANERA, I met with a group of youth. Two were Syrian refugees, one a Palestinian refugee from Syria (a refugee twice over), one a Palestinian refugee who’s grown up in Lebanon, and one a Lebanese. Though their stories and backgrounds are different, all of them are vulnerable, living precarious lives, with many of the same challenges. In Lebanon, though, there is a definite pecking order. “It is so upsetting that the dirtiest word now is refugee,” said Alaa, the young Palestinian whose family was splintered by war, with some dead, some still in Syria, one in Europe and the rest now in Lebanon. “What is most upsetting is, we didn’t choose this, it isn’t our doing.”

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