Families Find Refuge in Shade of a Beirut Park

Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, the general director of Lebanon's national police, said he has reassigned hundreds of traffic officers to stand guard and keep the peace at 762 refugee centers.

"We never thought we would be protecting refugees full time. Instead of chasing car thieves, we are escorting international relief trucks," he said in an interview this week.

"We have organized our life around peace, not war," Rifi said, explaining why Lebanon, after 31 years of conflict, had not built shelters for its population. "Countries with shelters consider themselves in a permanent state of war."

The refugee crisis has caught the Ministry of Health and the government's Higher Relief Council short-handed and unprepared.

"They are really trying, but it all happened so fast," said Brigitte Khoury, a clinical psychologist who has been visiting camps and coordinating with colleagues to provide medical care. "We are heading for the worst humanitarian disaster. What happens when it starts raining?"

The children coming to the centers are in shock, and they and their parents are in denial, said Selim Mawad, 34, the founder of the Sustainable Democracy Center. "They still believe they will return home in a week."

Khaled, a 7-year-old who lives in Sanayeh Garden, smiles, giggles and speaks excitedly about his dreams. "They are recurring nightmares of Israeli planes swooping over his house, hitting his village and friends. He laughs as he tells and retells of his dreams, but he is haunted by them," Mawad said.

When instructed to draw what first comes to mind, some boys sketch helicopters, tanks, missiles and gunboats. "The Israelis are promoting a new resistance. We don't want our kids to be drawn to unorganized violence," said Mawad, whose nongovernmental organization receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and European governments.

To compound the trauma, children and their parents are "brainwashed," he said. They talk of joining the resistance, he said, and when they say they want to become doctors, their parents prompt: "for the resistance." Mawad's 15 volunteers are working with children ages 3 to 17 to help them focus on environmental art projects and communal work instead.

"After producing an individual painting, we ask them to come together to complete one picture, and we tell them this is what the new Lebanon will be about," Mawad said, referring to a project that encourages children to paint the meaning of various clauses in the U.N. Declaration for the Rights of the Child.

"The numbers are vast and the duration of this human tragedy is unknown," said Roger Assaf, a theater director. "There is nothing like war to bring out the mettle of a people. But now the problem outsizes their potential."

Until recently, Assaf was developing plays that touched on war themes, including "Maaaarch!," a play about soldiers going to war, not knowing their enemy but determined to eliminate it. "Umwelt," or "Day of the Insect," is about a woman whose husband disappeared during war. But to her, he is always present, a big insect clinging to her back, her head and her life. He is neither living nor dead, just missing.

Then there is "Sanayeh Garden," about a man who survived a militia massacre during the Lebanese war and later is suspected of killing his landlady. Innocent but mentally confused, he turns himself in. He is hanged at Sanayeh Garden without a trial.