Abu Dhabi’s The National brings us this story straight outta Jordan:
Six young men are standing around a pair of CD decks on a Friday afternoon in mid-September, spinning tunes, shooting the breeze and gently trying to outdo one another with their DJ skills. It’s a scene that could unfold in countless urban environments the world over. What makes this particular tableau slightly unusual is that we are in a women’s centre run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Jebel el Hussein, a Palestinian refugee camp in the northwest of the Jordanian capital.
At the heart of this unlikely gathering is Martin Fernando Jakobsen, a 31-year-old DJ from Denmark and member of the Copenhagen-based collective The Black School. Along with a group of likeminded friends, including his long-time collaborator Simon Dokkedal, he has been taking hip-hop workshops to refugee camps on and off for the last two years. It is, he says, a path that he more or less stumbled onto.
“A while ago my wife got a job in Beirut with the United Nations Development Programme, so I moved out there with her,” he explains. “While I was there, I started thinking about a way to bring our group together again and to give something back to the community at the same time. One day I found myself talking with a lady from the Danish Centre for Culture and Development and outlined to her a plan for a pilot scheme of workshops in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps. The organisation already knew who we were, so agreed to fund it. That’s when the whole idea came to life.”
As great moments in rap history go, I’m not convinced that this matches Tupac and Biggie. Oddly, I also have a piece in today’s National reviewing The Crisis Caravan, Linda Polman’s assault on the aid industry. While I argue that Polman’s reportage echoes a lot of other recent war memoirs and her analysis is too narrow, she takes down feel-good aid projects brilliantly. I wonder what she’d have made of this one?
