From: Now Lebanon, March 2, 2011

Without a doubt, Jamal Krayem Kanj has had an interesting life. He was born 10 years after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and grew up in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. As a youth, Kanj flirted with the idea of joining the armed resistance in Syria, survived Israeli airstrikes and fled war-torn Lebanon to finish schooling in Iraq, before eventually settling down in the USA. If Kanj were to put all this down in writing, then it’s definitely worth the read.
To our benefit, Kanj recently published his book, Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, which documents his experience as a Palestinian refugee from a personal perspective. On the book’s Facebook group, which has just under 2,000 fans, Kanj says that “connecting people in the West with the personal experience of Palestinians in refugee camps was my main motivation [for] writing the book.”
Kanj details, but does not dwell on, the harsh conditions growing up in the camp. “Many nights [I woke] up with headaches and blackened nostrils from breathing the kerosene smoke while we slept,” he writes, since at the time his family lit their home using kerosene lamps, but he has “no memory of lacking any of life’s pleasures.” This, he explains, is due to the fact that “it is not possible to lack what you have never experienced.”
Indeed, his childhood seems to have been mostly a happy one. His accounts of fishing with dynamite, having close encounters with sharks, enjoying early “wink relationships” with girls and hunting birds using a muzzle-loading rifle give the book a lot of color in the opening chapters. But more gripping is his account of leaving the camp, unbeknownst to his family, at the age of 11 with several other children to join the military wing of the Fatah Palestinian group in Syria. After being rejected, Kanj and his fellow aspiring revolutionaries find themselves penniless in a foreign country, having no idea how to make it back to the camp.
To read more: http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=246120#ixzz1I4hX44s6