Bits of Palestine in Lebanon

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Wednesday, October 13, 2010 | flickr photos

I am a 34-years old traveller, and travelling is what I do for most of the year, either around Europe for my professional job (I'm an engineer), or in Africa and Middle East for my volunteering jobs with some Italian associations and NGOs.
Travelling means first of all getting to know different people, establishing relationships of empathy, exchange and mutual understanding, getting to see their places through my eyes mixed with theirs. Because a place is never just a collection of buildings and landscapes, and every landscape tells the story of the people who live in it, if one has the will to listen to it.
To me, travelling also means understanding myself and my identity, because we can understand who we are only if we accept the challenge to observe how we're seen by people that are not similar to us.

Photography is the most beautiful way to document the human journey which is part of every travel, and to share it with others.
Of course I would like to become a better photographer, because being a better photographer (and not just somebody who takes more impressive pictures) always means having a better and deeper understanding of the stories you're telling, or, in other words, being a better person.

My photo gallery shows some pictures taken during two trips in Lebanon, where I was volunteering with an association that helps educating kids from Palestinian refugee camps around the country. So it is a short story of a place within another place, of living without belonging, of lives that are waiting to get somewhere else, and of people and identities that last longer and are more concrete than the places around them.