New York Times
Rawda al-Mazloum, a Syrian who escaped to Lebanon with her five daughters, became a volunteer at a center for female refugees. CreditDiego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
BEKAA, Lebanon — Rawda al-Mazloum remembers the teenage girl vividly. The pregnant 15-year-old Syrian girl was leaning against a window frame at the women’s community shelter a little too insistently. Something about the girl’s demeanor was unsettling. Ms. Mazloum gently led her away from the window by her elbow, reminding her that standing near windows was forbidden at the center.
“You might fall if you stand too close,” Ms. Mazloum recalled saying. The girl replied curtly: “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I would finally have peace of mind.”
Pregnant, displaced, about to be divorced and without a support system, the world-weary girl was in the grips of a nervous breakdown. Ms. Mazloum recognized the girl’s sense of despair — because she had lived it herself.
Ms. Mazloum, a 40-year-old Syrian mother of five daughters, wrestled with societal expectations her entire life, and after she divorced her husband she was left on her own to raise their girls in a deeply patriarchal environment. A few years into Syria’s civil war, she escaped with her girls to Lebanon, settling in a new land and finding an opportunity to become a leader in a way she had always envisioned for herself since she was a child.
She joined as a volunteer at the Bar Elias community center here for female refugees, one of several similar centers run by the International Rescue Committee, the worldwide aid group based in New York. In the Middle East, the group helps Syrian refugees and vulnerable groups across the region and has been operating in Lebanon since 2012 with 420 people on its staff and 250 volunteers.
The civil war in Syria has forced millions of people from their homes and decimated towns. Nearly five million Syrians have registered as refugees, and most of them have fled to neighboring countries, according to the United Nations. Over one million refugees have ended up in Lebanon.
The International Rescue Committee, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, helped 58,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon last year. It provides emergency services such as training for women, education to children and efforts to prevent children from entering the work force or begging on the streets. Refugees receive psychological support, legal advice and financial assistance.
One of the organization’s first programs here was focused on women’s empowerment and protection, which draws on the experience of people, like Ms. Mazloum, who have overcome many challenges.
When refugees arrive in Lebanon, amid an unwelcoming environment of surging xenophobia and discrimination, they often feel a sense of remoteness and alienation, driving many to stay in their tents at resettlement camps. Those who are divorced are stigmatized, making some of them more susceptible to sexual harassment and exploitation. The tent settlements, scattered across the country, offer little privacy and no traditional support system or financial resources.
Young Syrian refugees playing outside the informal Bar Elias settlement camp in Lebanon.CreditDiego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“They come to this country with nothing to their name,” said Zaman Ali Hassan, a program manager with the International Rescue Committee.
The Lebanese women who help the group’s community centers are sometimes met with reluctance when they try to persuade vulnerable women to join the program. But Ms. Mazloum has an ability to break through the obstacles, discussing her own experience as a way to strike up a friendship with refugees and then gradually become a confidante. With an amiable smile and a dependable confidence, she regularly visits the informal tent settlements throughout the Bekaa region to identify Syrian women and girls who are most at risk.
“Rawda is the link between the refugees and the center,” Mr. Hassan said. “Without our outreach volunteers, none of this would be possible.”
At the center, the women can take language, conflict-resolution and computer classes, as well as participate in knitting, yoga and Zumba. There are also programs for adolescent girls on sexual health and healthy relationships, and for women who married young and are now widows and for divorced pregnant girls, who are often stigmatized and sexually harassed. Programs for gender-based violence remain the least funded of all refugee programs, Mr. Hassan said.
The women reach the shelter with various needs, but they show, one way or another, the scars of intense war. Ms. Mazloum’s dreadful memories tend to come in waves at night: The blast of an explosion ripping through her neighbors’ building and her three young daughters covered in white dust, and stumbling out of a bombed-out building. The panicked faces of neighbors fleeing their town, Homs, passing by bodies scattered in the streets, and the cold, damp basements they huddled in as they waited out the shelling. The thick stench of blood and dust that triggered her daughter’s first asthma attack and almost killed her. And, finally, the piercing pain that came out of nowhere and shot through her as she crossed the border into Lebanon.
The International Rescue Committee runs the community center at Bar Elias. “Rawda is the link between the refugees and the center,” a program manager said. CreditDiego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“As soon as I crossed the border, I felt like my Syrian identity had been erased,” Ms. Mazloum said. “This label will follow us everywhere, and it makes our life very difficult.”
Immediately after moving into an informal tent settlement in Bekaa, she started thinking about her next step. She did not want to sit around and wait for the next aid carton to come. She encountered problems receiving donations because most organizations give a priority to widows, and a woman who cannot produce a partner’s death certificate is often left to fend for herself, even if she faces her own challenges as a single mother.
Ms. Mazloum protected her two eldest daughters from marrying until they were over 21 and encouraged her young daughters to learn arts like drawing and photography.
As an outreach volunteer, Ms. Mazloum serves many functions, including easing young women into their new lives, providing information about health care, introducing them to mental health treatment and giving vulnerable women the confidence they need to seek help.
“It’s true I live in a tent now, but this country has given me opportunities I never thought I’d have,” Ms. Mazloum said. “I had many ambitions as a child that I didn’t even dare utter in front of my parents, and now I feel proud I’m playing such a crucial role in my community.”