About Us, And Them.

I remember— back in ‘06, when a bunch of us were helping CRTDA gather signatures at AUB, in support of their Nationality campaign. A boy signed his name on the petition, then he asked me: would this mean that a woman would be able to give her Lebanese nationality to Syrians? And I said: yeah.

So he just scratched his name from that petition and walked away.

Strange how that ability, that power of women to determine who to give their nationality to, scares people. Like we have the power to change the entire demographics of this country. Like we can turn this country into a Palestinian state, into a sub-Syrian state.

Strange how racism works with sexism and with classism. Swayable, easily seducible, women can sleep with the “enemy.” Poor women, women of certain regions/sects, have lots and lots of babies, tipping the sectarian balance to “their” favour. Them. The Syrian workers. The Palestinian refugees. And then there are the migrant domestic workers. The women. The women of da7hyi and the South. The sexually active women. They’re all equally threatening. To the nation. To the middle class. To the family.

Sometimes I think that some men (particularly the very sexist ones) are more aware of our capabilities and potentials than we are ourselves. I don’t mean our abilities to change the distribution of the population in that racist/sectarian way, like that AUB boy was afraid of. I mean our ability to change things for the better. To introduce new ways of understanding things.

And that’s why we’re here. Because we see things differently, because we can see how things are wrong, from the little things that we have grown numb to, like the pressure on women to conform to impossible beauty standards, like street harassment, to more blunt things like how migrant workers are treated, how women can’t give their nationalities to their husbands and kids, how there are no laws against domestic violence and marital rape. And because we know we can/must change that.

That’s why we’re here.

Attending two poverty reports

So, on I went this morning to the launching ceremony of two reports issued by the Ministry of Social Affairs and UNDP. With titles like "The Mapping of Human Poverty& Living Conditions in Lebanon, in 2004"and "Poverty, Growth, & Income Distribution in Lebanon," I knew these were two reports that I didn't want to miss.

The ceremony itself was a classical Lebanese event. It was a bit late, first of all. Many of the people present seemed to know each other, which made me feel like that, in many ways, this was a social get-together for the usual crowd. Mostly older people. Though there were the younger women there as well. Then the event officially started with a national anthem, where people had to stand up and women and men alike had to boast how our country is a "manbitun lil rijal."Anyway... the whole thing was an interesting presentation of 2 important reports (at least because it's good to have that data available to us), though I do wonder why the publication of reports about poverty does not seem to invite low-income individuals. Because such presence would definitely create a different dynamic than having all of us middle class people looking at these statistics and treating them as charts and figures.

Thankfully, there were plenty of handouts for me to take home, as well as the reports themselves. Because there was a lot to process in those two hours. Some things stuck, however. Like, how female headed households represent only 14% of families in Lebanon, but 44% of them live in poverty—mostly those whose heads are women widows. How a change in the health conditions or physical ability of the breadwinner is one factor of sinking into poverty. How many low-income families are actually older couples, or families with many children to support. How there may not be a large number of people living in extreme poverty, but there is a large percentage of people who are living below the poverty line. And, very importantly, how there should be policies that are biased to low-income people and families.

Ya3ni, to make a long story short, these reports are good to have out there, and you usually do get to learn one or two things from attending the launching of them; but mostly, as many of the attendees there noted, it's about what we do with the reports that matters: how we use them to come up with viable initiatives and policies; making sure that all these resources that went into making these reports will ultimately become a good investment into improving the lives of low-income individuals and families and dealing with the socio-economic and cultural problems that locks them into poverty in the first place. 

Deems