Train and Empower 50 Refugee Women in Jordan

Hello generous donors!

I would like to begin this report by thanking you all for your generosity and moral support throughout this fundraising project! As you know, we launched our appeal for refugees in Jordan on World Refugee Day, earlier this summer. Thirty-three of you have donated $6,751. This has yielded more than $10,000, after bonuses were added.

The money is going to the Hope Workshop, a women’s craft cooperative that helps refugee women in Jordan to learn new skills and earn an income. The Workshop has been created by the Collateral Repair Project (CRP) which provides emergency aid and psycho-social support to refugees from the wars in the Middle East. As we pointed out in the appeal, Jordan does not allow refugees to work. But the Jordanian authorities also understand the importance of helping refugees deal with the boredom and despair of exile. CRP addresses that need, and the Hope Workshop is one of its most successful programs.

When I arrived in Jordan as a Peace Fellow of The Advocacy Project (AP), the Workshop had about 40 members. Roughly the same number had applied and were on the wait list. I was lucky enough to spend 10 weeks in Jordan getting to know these women. I interviewed them, broke my fast with them, and watched them grow in confidence. All of them had fled from war and violence. Some had lost family members. Many were separated from loved ones. All showed enormous resilience of a kind that I had never encountered before.

I was inspired by their ability not to give in to despair or lose faith. Hearing their stories and being their friend gave me an additional incentive to raise funds and advocate on their behalf. I produced profiles of several Workshop members for the AP and CRP websites.

One of our goals was to bring more women into the Hope Workshop. We also wanted to expand the products made at the Workshop. Before this summer, the women worked mostly on cards, keffiyeh gnomes, and knitwear. Your funds have enabled us to provide new training and make new products. By the time I left they were working on advent calendars for both Christmas and Ramadan which are now being ordered faster than they can be made! All of the materials used by the Workshop this year were purchased with your donations.

My second goal has been to build an embroidery program, picking up from an initiative started in 2016. As you may know, AP helps women to describe their story through embroidered squares which are turned into advocacy quilts and exhibited at events. Twelve Hope Workshop members produced 27 squares in 2016. These have since been turned into two spectacular quilts.

We decided to offer the same opportunity again this summer, and more than twenty Workshop members signed up. Using your donations, we enrolled four of the Workshop leaders - Ashwaq, Hiba, Huda (photo) and Ameera - in embroidery training at the prestigious Tiraz Museum. Here they learned the Syrian Raghme stitch, the Iraqi filling technique, and Iraqi couching, as well as the history and tradition behind these different styles of embroidery. All are interesting. For example, the Syrian Raghme stitch (photo) is dying out across the Middle East. As I wrote in one of my blogs, we are hoping to preserve this wonderful tradition.

They then went back to the Workshop and shared their new skills with other members. Your donations paid for the training and the materials - needles, thread and cloth – which they used to produce their embroidery.

This work is now well under way. I have since seen some of their squares and they are spectacular – if scary (photo). The quality of work is superb. Once completed, their squares will be assembled into quilts by quilters in the US and widely shown at events. Through this, we hope, Americans will understand how perilous the refugee’s journey can be. We want all future refugees who seek help from the CRP to have the same opportunity to tell their story through embroidery.

Of course, in learning embroidery these ladies also hope to earn some money. With this in mind we have asked them to produce a second square that describes their hopes for the future. These will be assembled into a quilt in the US and auctioned at a large conference in 2018.

Finally, thanks to your generosity, we have been able to recruit an associate in Jordan to help the ladies manage their business and report back to their supporters. This shows how the appeal is helping to make the Hope Workshop more efficient and profitable. With no end in sight to the refugee crisis, it is important that the Workshop continues to grow and improve.

After this report, I will be handing over all future updates to the very capable staff at CRP and AP. My time at CRP will always be in my heart and I hope to see the women I worked with again very soon. Inshallah!

The Hope Workshop thanks you. AP thanks you. I thank you.

Best, Reina

Links:

• Middle Eastern Refugee Quilts