It is Mona Hamza Muhaisen who introduces me to Hassan Abdel Jawad, a friend and neighbour in Dheisheh camp. Muna was to become renowned as the founder of the 'Across Borders' internet project linking children in refugee camps, and as author of an excellent book about Dheisheh camp under the Second Intifada, as well as many articles about camp life and people. At the time of this recording she was living in the camp with her husband Ahmad.

Hassan was said to be one of the most imprisoned men in the West Bank. He had been deported to Jordan and imprisoned there too. He had even been imprisoned after the Oslo Accords, in a period supposed to be the beginning of the 'solution' of the Palestinian conflict. This had been the hardest of his prison experiences because the international support that had built up for Palestinians during the 'first' Intifada was undermined by Oslo. He spoke of the harsh effects for his wife and children of his continuous absence in prison, how they lived waiting for him to come home, only to have him re-arrested soon after.

The small formal reception room crowded with arm chairs but empty of children or domestic clutter emphasizes how space in camp homes must be multi-functional, with the furnishing of community activism, a small business, or social visiting layered onto general living space. In most of my recordings with women, the room is full of children, relatives or neighbours. I miss them here but recognize their absence as a sign of Hassan's status. Another clear sign of his community activism is that he speaks much about the general situation and history of the refugees, so that his own personal story appears as merely an illustration of this broader collective picture. He is a 'public' man, and as such has suffered an extraordinary deformation of his life. But they too - his wife and four children - have suffered from his absence, maybe more deeply. He speaks about this: the thought of their suffering seems to have left more lasting effects on him than the torture he was subjected to in prison.

His wife, though without qualifications, was forced to work. He feels his children's futures have been jeopardized by the absence of father and guide.

After he stops speaking about his own life, he asks me to re-start the recorder so that he can talk about his parents. His mother had heart trouble and died rather young, cut down by having three of her sons deported. Any evocation of maternal suffering always opens my tear ducts. Tears trickle down my face, and I have to blow my nose. Hassan chides me. This is all part of the struggle, he says. But I wonder how people who have gone through so much suffering feel when the struggle seems to be over (as it did briefly for some Palestinians after the Oslo Accords), and 'normality' reasserts itself in the form of competition, individual ambition and desires.

Hassan Abdel Jawad speaks:
"I am Hassan Abdel Jawad, a refugee, one of the residents of Dheisheh camp. I was born in 1958. My family fled from -- after the war of 1948, like other people scattered from their villages in Palestine after the Nakbeh of 1948, waiting for a solution to their case, and at the same time to be able to get some of the international aid offered by [inaudible] against the cold of winter. Years of hardship! No work, no jobs were available for those people, who were in their thousands. Not only in Dheisheh camp but in many other camps. We lived our childhood in very harsh circumstances, educational and health. The new generation, children, separated from their families who left after the Nakbeh, scattered and homeless in many different regions. The human being, in whatever situation he is in, tries to find a job from which he can live, so he can carry on life and provide for his children. But in that period there wasn't a minimum of life's requirements. We lived as they say on struggle. Many children died due to the unavailability of health care, the unavailability of food, and because of the climate, the cold, the harsh winter, and because they were living in tents. There wasn't sufficient aid. Everything was lacking to these families..."