August 9, 2016
Jordan
Accompanied by her husband, three sons and two daughters, 53 years old Syrian, Basima Ibrahim, had arrived in Jordan four years ago. During the peace time back at home, the family had decent living and was leading a normal life. Being teacher herself and the husband earning from tailoring profession, they had enough to provide almost all basic necessities of life to their family. The conflict in her area made it impossible to continue staying there and they had to decide to leave.
Reflecting back on the time when they had to flee their country, Basima recalled that still compared to thousands other Syrian refugee, they were lucky to have legally migrated to Jordan. Therefore they had the possibility to bring along few essential items and could rent an affordable house with the assistance of a friend. However, the miseries started when they ran out of the savings, she maintained.
To cope with this situation, her husband started tailoring and she herself started food preparation. However both the professions hardly yielded enough to meet the expenses of the family. It was hard for the husband to capture share within an already saturated market while her food businesses could not succeed mainly due to non-availability of means to deliver hot meals. Therefore, she had to abandon and resultantly the family had to opt for negative coping mechanisms, taking out children of school was one such coping mechanism, she disappointedly narrated.
Nevertheless, she did not lose heart and looked for other opportunities, Basima maintained. It was early last year when she came to know about the EU funded project of Caritas Czech Republic and Caritas Jordan. She started participating in project activities on a regular basis and hence was exposed to its training interventions. Besides other trainings, she got an opportunity of participating in an extensive occupational training under the project. The training took place between the months of April to May 2015. Since Basima already had little experience of decorating clothes, cushions, table runners using pellets and pins, she was enrolled and trained in Accessories module (Handicrafts). “The training not only validated my current skills but further enhanced my technical capabilities concerning this particular trade”, Basima satisfactorily shared.
Basima further went on saying that since now she is more skilled and knows that Caritas Jordan has already pledged for the provision of needed support (equipment and materials) to establish the business, we will have the possibility to lead a decent life again. She is determined that once the business starts up, the first thing she would do is to put her children back in school.
Sima, the Project Assistant Caritas Jordan who has been in touch with Basima for the last more than a year, considers that Basima’s story is not an ordinary one. Rather she terms this to be a story of hope and resilience for all those who are going through such difficult times. Sima considers that Basima is someone who not only participated in the training enthusiastically but is fully determined to establish her business once the material support is provided. Her struggle to cope with the situation without losing heart can have inspirational effect particularly on fellow Syrian women who are passing through such difficult time.
Help to the Syrians in Jordan is financially supported by Europe Aid, Caritas Swiss.
