For Children in Beirut Refugee Camp, School Is a Lifeline—But So Is Cricket

Amid uncertainty and danger, students find confidence in Alsama’s school and athletic programs.

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The Shatila refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, was built to be temporary. Established in 1949 to house Palestinians displaced by the Nakba, it was designed as an emergency fix. Tents were set up by Palestinian refugees, under the assumption that they would soon go home. Instead, over the next decades, Shatila calcified into something permanent: a dense, improvised city where permanent concrete structures tents have replaced the tents and canvas, and the horizon has become a tangle of rooftops, water tanks, and wires.

From above, Shatila looks like a single surface—a near-continuous patchwork of rooftops packed so tightly they almost touch. On the ground, it is a maze. Narrow streets funnel people and noise. Electrical cables hang in thick webs between buildings, braided with pipes and Internet lines. Light slips through only at certain angles. In the camp, space is never neutral; it is contested, shared, and constantly negotiated among the residents.

Since the camp’s establishment in 1949, Shatila’s demographics have shifted in successive waves. It remains a core site of Palestinian exile, but beginning in 2011, the civil war in Syria pushed thousands of Syrian refugees into the camp’s already overcrowded confines. Amid Lebanon’s economic freefall of the past several years, throughout which wages have evaporated and public services have deteriorated, refugees are often the first to be excluded from the social safety net and the last to be protected by the state’s support systems. For children, the consequences are immediate: fewer spots for students in each school, more pressure to start working at a young age, and days that stretch on without structure.

In and around Shatila, a grassroots project called Alsama is trying to carve out something for children that resembles normal life. Founded by Meike Ziervogel, Kadria Hussien, Mohammad Kheir, and Richard Verity, Alsama operates classrooms inside the camp, and runs cricket trainings at a sports park a short ride across the city called El Clasico—far enough away that the children don’t walk there, distant enough to feel like a different version of Beirut. Transporting students to El Clasico for cricket training requires effort and coordination. But the distance is part of what makes El Clasico significant in the students’s lives: It offers them a reprieve from the intensity of life in the camp, and physically signals that something different is possible. 

Mohammad Kheir, the cricket program coordinator, says the program began as a way to separate children from the risks that surround them—some students, he explains, are in danger of getting involved in drug dealing or being otherwise exploited. “In the camp, it’s easy for children to get pulled into the wrong path,” he says. “So we started with awareness sessions and introduced cricket, but also sports in general, as a healthier alternative.” 

Cricket, Kheirr says, has a practical advantage over football (soccer); because cricket is a low impact sport that boys and girls can practice together in public. “With football, mixed [gender] training can be complicated, because it’s constant contact,” he says. “Cricket is different: Each player has their own space.” 

Meanwhile, at Alsama’s Shatila-based education centres, students line up to attend class inside a modest building near the center of the camp. The scene could seem unremarkable—children clustered at a doorway, backpacks slung over shoulders—but in Shatila, predictability is not a given. For Syrian and Palestinian children with limited access to formal education, a stable school day is an intervention against being shut out of learning.

Education for refugees in Lebanon is entangled with resource shortages and bureaucracy. Public schools are overburdened. Transportation costs can be prohibitive. The paperwork students need to enroll and stay in formal education is often missing, incomplete, or expired. When education and support systems fail, children drop out quietly and often permanently.

Alsama’s education centers cannot solve these structural crises, but they create a contained counter-reality to life in the camp in the form of predictable classrooms with consistent schedules and rules. Teachers focus on core subjects, but the deeper work is to restore students’ ability to trust and to give their attention to schoolwork despite the instability around them. In Shatila, an environment shaped by daily uncertainty, simply knowing what comes next can be calming.

A wider view of Shatila shows why such spaces matter. In alleys, posters and banners depicting “Resistance” fighters’ factions including Fatah and other PLO-linked groups—alongside Islamist factions such as Hamas—line the walls, reflecting the presence of armed Palestinian factions and their political culture inside the camp. Through the circumstances of their lives in the camp, children learn early on that power exists, but not necessarily for them.

But at Alsama, children are treated not as refugees, but as students whose futures are filled with possibility. At cricket practice, the coaches—some of them former students at Alsama—run drills with a mix of discipline and care. They teach core cricket techniques like batting and bowling, but they also teach the children how to show up, how to take instruction, and how to keep going after making mistakes. Above them, the thin, mechanical whine of an Israeli drone hangs over Beirut—a reminder that even here, on a field meant for play, surveillance and conflict are never fully out of earshot. At the end of a practice, students gather in bright team shirts, laughing and out of breath. 

Louay, an older student in one of the school’s final grade levels who now coaches younger students at Alsama, says he’s seen the sport have a significant impact on students’s lives, especially for girls. “Before, many of them would stay at home all day,” he says. “They weren’t doing anything outside. Now they’re moving, they’re out in the light, running, competing, challenging themselves and each other. There’s real interaction.”

But for girls, he explains, parents’s concerns often present an obstacle. Given the safety concerns and social expectations around mixed-gender spaces within the camp, their mobility and agency is often restricted from a young age. “The hardest part is convincing families to let girls join,” he says. Alsama’s approach is to challenge gender norms gradually, without creating a public confrontation. “We’re trying to break this old rule,” he says, “because we believe everyone has the right to play, girls and boys, and we believe in gender equality.”

According to Kadro, cricket is completely unfamiliar to many students living in Shatila. “A lot of them were deprived of school and of play,” he says. “Many grew up seeing only war in Syria.” What shows up on the field, he says, is their appetites: “You can see how hungry they are to learn, to play, to enjoy life.”

For Oula, a fourth grade student who attends Alsama’s school and cricket program, the sport is more than a hobby—it’s what makes her feel normal. “If I don’t come to cricket, I feel like my energy drops,” she says. “Everything starts to feel heavy and boring.”

Inside Shatila, she says, stress is everywhere. “When I’m in the camp, it feels noisy all the time,” she explains. “The noise fills everything.” The pressure is emotional, but also manifests physically, like a constant vibration.

Cricket training, Oula explains, is a welcome change of pace. “When I come here,” she says, “I don’t feel stressed.” The sport has also changed how she thinks about herself. “I used to feel like I wasn’t a leader,” she says. “But in cricket, I learned to listen carefully, to follow instructions, to work with the team.” Over time, she says, she’s become more organized. “Now I know how to manage myself, because I follow the rules and I focus on what the coach asks from us.”

Oula is far from the only student who has benefitted from the opportunity to develop skills through slow, consistent repetition. “We had a girl who joined when her father didn’t want her to,” Kheir says. “He kept telling her, ‘You’re a girl, you should stay home, help your mother, clean the house, wash the dishes.’ ” She kept coming anyway. Over time, Kheir says, her father stopped seeing her participation as a provocation. Today, she’s a coach herself. 

At Alsama, hope is not an emotion—it’s a practice under constraint. Because political solutions to the refugee crisis have been deferred for generations, Shatila remains crowded. Syrian and Palestinian refugees remain precariously housed, because supposedly temporary solutions have become indefinite policy. Grassroots projects like Alsama exist because government systems have failed Shatila’s residents repeatedly, and because children cannot wait for the government to actually serve them.

Yet, it is the project’s modesty that makes it credible. It doesn’t claim an ability to rescue the children of the camp from the dangers they face. It builds pockets of stability inside a landscape designed to destabilize: a classroom that runs on time; a training session where girls and boys share space; a coach who used to be a student; a girl who became a leader. At El Clasico, where students run drills to build strength and mental resilience, students experience, perhaps for the first time, inclusion that is unconditional.