As he approaches his ninth decade, the experience of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – and its institutions and employees – still constitutes to this day the focus of the life and friendships of the Palestinian refugee Youssef Abu Al-Naaj, residing in one of the Lebanese Bekaa regions. The educator, born in 1935 in Sahmata, northern occupied Palestine, and who later fled with his family to Lebanon, first worked as a teacher in an UNRWA school in Nahr al-Bared camp in 1954, while his older brother, Ahmed, took over the management of the camp.
After UNRWA completed the construction of Nabatieh camp in the far south of Lebanon in 1956, the young teacher moved to work in the school that was established there. Then, three years later, he married Yusra Ayesh, director of the Social Affairs Department at UNRWA in the same camp, according to a blog he published in 2023 on social media. In the school where his five children, who were born successively, studied, he himself became its director in 1972. As for the children of the aforementioned educator, they did not go to the restaurant that UNRWA established in the camp like the rest of their peers, but they benefited from the service of the clinic that this organization built, and for which it chose doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.
