The Hendawis | Trainees & Participants
Seenaryo have been working with the Hendawi family via Yaabad Scout for three years now. Farah, Hanan, Nidal and Jihad have participated in Showbuilds, been hired as photographers, facilitators, translators, and artists – and done a hundred and one other things to bring art and culture to people seeking refuge in Lebanon.
A week with these guys means many things to me, they gave us love, power, respect, fun… they gave us everything a person can imagine.
They live in Shatila, a refugee camp set up for Palestinians who fled or were driven out of their homes in 1948. The densely populated camp in the southern suburbs of Beirut is now home to more than 9,842 registered refugees. But this figure doesn’t take into account the many Palestinian refugees who are not registered, or the camps’s non-Palestinian residents, who include poor Lebanese, Syrians, and immigrants from elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia. Originally built for just 3,000 people, Shatila still occupies the same space today — less than one square kilometre in size — despite the vast increase in its population.
Jihad has most recently been working alongside us as a researcher, developer and lyricist on our Early Childhood Education Playkit and a facilitator on our Summer Showbuilds. The Hendawi family have come a long way in their journey with us and we are proud to say that each and every one of them is an artist in their own right.
Read an article about our work with the Hendawi’s in Al Monitor.