By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press

SAADNAYEL, Lebanon (AP) — The small crowd broke out in
giggles when a young male actor, dressed in a towel and a wig, strutted
around the dusty open market in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley during a street
performance. He was portraying a Syrian woman coquettishly complaining
of how she has no privacy with her husband in a crowded refugee tent.

The mood turned from comedy to tragedy as the troupe of
Syrian actors moved to the next act: A refugee girl with a heart
condition dies because no Lebanese hospital agrees to admit her on an
emergency basis. While some among the Lebanese watching were
sympathetic, one family walked away, grumbling in protest. “There are lots of lies,” Mohammed Razzak said of the
performance. “As a Lebanese, I don’t get the assistance they (Syrians)
get.”

The range of reactions at the Saadnayel market was
precisely what the directors anticipated, even desired. The Caravan, a
street performance project touring Lebanon over the next six weeks,
gives Syrian refugees the chance to tell and act out their own stories
and experiences and present them to Lebanese who often see the Syrians
as little more than a wave of the needy and poor that has overwhelmed
their country.

“We still deal with the Syrian crisis through numbers:
‘That many people died today. That many entered Lebanon,'” said Sabine
Choucair, a Lebanese clown and the artistic director of the Caravan. “We
don’t see each other as humans.”

“We want to start a dialogue,” Choucair said.

More than five years into the war in neighboring Syria,
the influx of refugees hasn’t stopped, and Lebanese and Syrians alike
are grappling with the new reality. In this tiny nation, there are 1.1
million registered Syrian refugees, one for every four Lebanese, and
that’s not counting the tens of thousands more unregistered refugees
also living here. Nearly one in four of the total 4.8 million Syrians
who have fled abroad from their country’s war are in Lebanon.

Attitudes in Lebanon have hardened, as many Lebanese
complain that refugees are taking jobs, causing property prices to rise
and flooding the market with smuggled goods that sell at a fraction of
the price.

The Caravan, which started in early 2016, is a “megaphone” for the Syrian stories, said Choucair’s co-director Ailin Conant.

They first recorded more than a dozen video clips of
stories told by refugees and shared them online. The hope was to grab
the attention of a hyper-connected world audience, said Conant, artistic
director of London-based theater company Theatre Temoin.

Now they’re taking the show on the road. The troupe of
six actors is touring in a van, giving their half-hour performances in
markets, informal settlements and intersections. Because they are not
allowed by Lebanese law to work and travel outside of their areas, a
troupe of Syrian professional actors with work permits also hold their
caravan show where the refugees can’t go.

Nessim Ghroum, whose EU-funded group Drama, Diversity and
Development is a main backer of the Caravan, said the project doesn’t
belittle the Lebanese woes.

“The crisis is there and people have to live with it,” he
said. “You can have different attitudes toward this reality … You can
pretend it is not there, you can be angry about it. You can feel
bitter, violent. The attitude we are promoting is compassion and
understanding.”

For the Caravan’s actors, the show is a chance to get
closer to their Lebanese hosts, not as needy refugees but as a talented
group who can crack jokes even about their own misery.

“We want to change the idea Lebanese have of Syrians,” said Hanan Dergham, 15, the only female actor in the cast.

Dergham said she wants to show her own community that
there’s no problem in young men and women mingling. Many among the
refugees are from largely conservative Sunni populations in rural Syria,
where women and men mainly mix under supervision in family gatherings —
a stark difference from their generally more liberal Lebanese
counterparts.

At 10, Dergham and her family fled the central Syrian
city of Homs after her father was imprisoned by the government and an
airstrike killed one of her aunts and her children and left Dergham’s
sister badly burned.

She said the play has also been good for her. “People
will forget the past and think about the future. They must forget the
past that is making their hearts dark and begin to have some light in
their lives.”

Many at the Saadnayel market stopped to watch the
performance a little before walking away to escape the summer heat. One
act that drew laughs was the story of a young man on a motorcycle who
was stopped at a checkpoint because he is suspected of being an illegal
Syrian migrant. As it turns out, he’s Lebanese. In another act, a child
tells the story of a dragon that eats people, but in an analogy with the
Syrian conflict, the dragon ends up exploding from all it ate.

Some in the audience were cynical.

“There have already been books and books written about
our sufferings,” scoffed a Syrian refugee woman selling lingerie in the
market.

Others were touched.

Abu Abed, a Lebanese vendor, said the story of the girl
who died broke his heart. “It is a good idea to let them tell their
pain,” he said.

Razzak, who walked away angrily from the play, said he
had been briefly detained before for criticizing Lebanon’s policy of
taking in Syrians. He acknowledged Syrians’ painful experiences but said
his country suffered a 15-year civil war from which it is still
reeling.

“We know their pain,” he said. “Each country has its own.”