INT’L WOMEN’S DAY: Liberation Touches a Syrian Village

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

George Baghdadi

SHEEN, Syria, Mar 7 2004 (IPS) - In her shirt and blue jeans, Firial Ibrahim is an unusual sight in the little village of Sheen. That she runs a successful business is even more unusual.
     Newspapers have never reached this village of a few hundred about 160 km north of Damascus. It only recently acquired one computer. Not the place where you could except to find a village woman in jeans.

In her shirt and blue jeans, Firial Ibrahim is an unusual sight in this little village. That she runs a successful business is even more unusual.

Newspapers have never reached this village of a few hundred about 160 km north of Damascus. It only recently acquired one computer. Not the place where you could except to find a village woman in jeans.

For long, Firial did not even dream of running a business of her own. Her family of eight moved to the village after her father retired on a pension of 1,500 Syrian pounds (30 dollars). That would just about buy dinner for two at a decent restaurant in Damascus.

Firial begged for work in the village at first to earn a little money. Then a little ‘firdos’ opened up. The word means paradise in Arabic, and it came to her in the shape of the Fund for the Integrated Development of Syria (FIRDOS), Syria’s first non-governmental organisation offering support for entrepreneurship.

The organisation gave Firial a loan of 45,000 Syrian pounds (900 dollars) to start a hairstyling place. In this little Arabic village, it was quite a breakthrough.

Firial, 28, is a university graduate. But the degree was not much use to her in Sheen. And she could not go it alone in Damascus. “Living alone for a girl is socially unacceptable in Arab tradition,” she told IPS. The move was not ideal, but Firial is now looking at the half-full part of the glass.

FIRDOS has come with support from Asma al-Assad, wife of President Bashar al-Assad. The official part of the blessing makes it a mixed one. And Firial is among only a very few women to have gained anything like this. But it has brought a glimpse of progress in a village that has seen nothing like this before.

Firial got the loan within three weeks of applying for it. “So I started looking for a place near the main square, and I was lucky,” she says.

She found a little place that can take no more than two clients at a time. She named the shop Julnar, after a princess from ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, the legendry set of Arabic semi-erotic stories. In Sheen that name too was a breakthrough.

Firial’s sister Nibal had trained as a hairdresser earlier. Now the two run the business together. It has brought money to the family, and some style to the village.

Awatef Shora, head of the micro-finance loan programme at FIRDOS says the organisation plans to do more “by creating resources of hope that people can draw on to build a better future.” For far too many people, prospects at present are bleak, she told IPS.

Shora believes that even small income like this can be an important step.. “This may generate the income they need to feed and house their family,” she said.. But in time it could also “create jobs for neighbours, and little by little, add to the wealth of the nation.”

Now Samira Azam, 53, has applied for a loan to buy a computer. That could be the second in the village. “After September 11, and during the war in Iraq, we used to gather there to find out what is going on,” she said.

Technology is finding new connections. Some time back she won a washing machine in a lottery. She could not understand the instructions in English. But some women together keyed the instructions into the computer, and got a translation in Arabic.

“I had to pay for that,” she whispered. She did not look pleased that she had to. But some entrepreneurship there, too.

FIRDOS has paid out loans worth half a million dollars in this area, says Mohammed al-Hassan, local coordinator for the group. Enough money to get plenty of little businesses going.

The results are heartening, says Nawar al-Sharaa from FIRDOS. People with no training in business or accounting are suddenly discovering an aptitude for enterprise and industry, she said.

Even if it is a government-led move, women in Sheen are seeing some movement at last. And other villages can see some hope this year on International Women’s Day, Mar. 8.