Girls' games? It seems like it, but it isn't.

It's been forty years since security forces set foot in these suburbs.

Allies, Txell Feixas

------------------------------------------

Txell Feixas (45) tells me:

–In every refugee camp, there's always a vacant lot with dirt or some weeds, and a handful of children running after a ball made of rags, and another group of girls sitting around the perimeter, watching them, or helping their mothers in the tents.

–In Shatila too?

–In Shatila too.

(Txell Feixas knows what she's talking about. She's seen it herself. She's backed by six years of correspondent work in the Middle East for the 3Cat platform, which includes immersions in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan... "Should I keep listing countries?" she asks me. "That's enough," I reply.)

This is Shatila: a small Palestine in the heart of Lebanon. A refugee camp built in 1948, a square kilometer located four kilometers from Beirut, designed to house 3,000 Palestinians and now home to 30,000.

(An also infamous place, massacred in 1982).

Read also

–Lebanon doesn't want any more spaces like this, and that's why it's suffocating refugees. Shatila is in its fourth generation, yet its inhabitants still haven't received Lebanese nationality, and can't buy property outside the compound or work in dozens of professions. Lebanon condemns them to being refugees their whole lives. The outlook is one of poverty. But even so, sometimes a ray of light comes in.

And he tells me about the Shatila girls' basketball team.

He speaks to me with his words and also through 'Aliadas' (Capitan Swing publishing house), the 147-page work that is read in one sitting, not because the work is short, but because it doesn't let you escape.

Txell Feixas tells me about the day she discovered the semi-clandestine court.

"We found an entrance with cavernous, damp walls that looked like a wolf's den. The climb, fraught with obstacles, is a metaphor for the difficulties the girls face in making their way," she writes.

–And on the fifth floor of that building, I came across an attempt at a basketball court, a space of freedom for the children, for a bunch of kids who were not only learning to play basketball, but also to be the girls they hadn't been able to be: through sports, they were leaping into another dimension. They weren't just going to be mothers and wives; now they could also dream of one day breaking through the walls of Shatila and even pursuing an academic education, because that's what Majdi, the man who had formed the team and coached it, demanded.

Now, those parents who previously abused them are excited to take their daughters to the airport. Txell Feixas Writer and journalist

Majdi's story deserves a separate chapter.

He is the spiritual father of the team and of some of the girls, and he is also Razan's father, and in that father-daughter relationship a wall of contradictions rises.

Majdi recruits Razan and brings her into the basketball team.

Razan says she feels like her father's toy. And when she plays basketball, she declares herself terrified by the gaze "of those slimy guys fixed on my private parts. I felt genuine panic when they passed me the ball, because everyone was examining me (...) I wanted to go unnoticed, and it turns out I had become my father's trophy, a symbol of his cause."

As bewildered as she is enraged, Razan ends up leaving the team.

Many other teammates, however, continue on. And later, they make it: eventually, they compete abroad. They even play in Madrid, at the Estudiantes stadium.

–Over time, girls take center stage in Shatila. And they loosen the place's rigid rules. Rola got married. Not as a child, but in her early twenties, in love. Amina studied and practices physiotherapy. On Instagram, I saw that Marwa graduated. And now, parents who once mistreated them are thrilled to take them to the airport for an international match. And you know the best part?

-Tell me...

–The magic of the team is that it's no exception: there's a women's cricket group. And another made up of widows who reuse old clothes to weave sanitary napkins. And I've discovered I was wrong when I thought everything there was dark. The Shatila refugees aren't just poor people; they're much more than we think they are.