Weaving a thread between rugs, rags and rights
How we came to weave together things as seemingly separate as rug-making, recycling, gender rights, and parenting classes.
With the generous support of the Australian Direct Aid Programme.
Interwoven challenges
You’ve lost your home. You’ve experienced the horror and pity of war. You’ve lost loved ones. You’re living in poverty and trying to support traumatised children in a country that doesn’t want you there, a country in the grip of many crises of its own.
Plus, you’re a woman and you are a second-class citizen compared to men.
This is the life of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon.
Interwoven solutions
At Makani, we work with refugee women to transform their lives. In a context as complex and challenging as Lebanon, we know that you have to work with women on all of the issues they face, as they are interlinked.
So we run arts therapy projects to help process the trauma of war and of gender oppression. We support income generation and education to lift women out of the ongoing trauma of poverty, and to build financial independence. We create safe spaces for women to explore their rights, and provide each other with psychological support and mutual empowerment. In short, we work holistically and deeply with women over the long term for transformational change in their lives.
This holistic approach is how we ended up weaving together things as seemingly separate as rug-making, recycling, parenting support, and gender equality, working with 30 refugee women through a new project called ‘Rugs, rags and rights’.
Rugs
“We are working hard to learn weaving and produce good quality pieces that we can sell. I want to learn more about this craft and teach it to my children.”
“I am in love with the weaving workshop. At the beginning I didn’t know anything. Now I know how to make a piece of art through weaving. I also love meet the other women. We make sure that we sit and talk and give each other advice before we start.”
The first element of the ‘Rugs, rags and rights’ project was training on how to make rag-rugs from material destined for landfill. This provides refugee women with a skill that can be used to generate income by making rugs that can be sold in local markets; they can also make rugs to furnish their own homes which are lacking in insulation and warmth during the winter. The workshops were a space of creativity, joy and sharing.
Weaving also functioned as a psychosocial activity - that is, where people do something that supports them psychologically in a group. Calming lacing the needle back and forth across the threads, creating something beautiful, talking and sharing with people who understand you - not just fabric but relationships and communities are woven this way.
Rags and recycling
“We loved learning how to recycle old materials that aren’t necessary anymore. Our grandmothers and mothers did this job, but we haven’t learned until now in this workshop.”
While it wasn’t called ‘recycling’’, the concept of re-using everything is deeply embedded in Arabic culture. The older generation clearly recall the era before the advent of cheap mass-produced goods, when everything was painstakingly handmade, and things were not thrown away as they are now. Even now, so many Syrians are so poor that they cannot afford to waste anything.
The rag-rug weaving workshops gave women another way to get the most out of old fabric. They welcomed this gladly, especially as many remember their mothers and grandmothers weaving similar rugs. This felt like a connection to a heritage that has sometimes felt lost in exile.
Recycling is particularly crucial in Lebanon, where the waste management systems are in crisis. Even before the Israeli bombardment, the collapse of the lire left the government unable to pay the private firm responsible for rubbish collection, leaving it running at 50% capacity and prompting memories of 2015, when some 20,000 tonnes of garbage piled up in Beirut’s streets. Recycling schemes are woefully inadequate, and there is no fabric recycling at all.
Not only can the project participants now reduce their own household waste, but it is reducing scrap fabric from Makani’s embroidery and crochet project Oshana.
Rights
“I loved most of all that we learned how to respond to someone who had bad intentions, harassing us verbally or with inappropriate touch.”
“We learned so much about our rights and the rights of girls, even how we can be in an equal relationship with our husbands. It gave us so much awareness about how we treat others in our families especially our children.”
Once the group had finished the weaving workshops, they moved on to women’s rights. These workshops were run by a qualified psychologist who is a Syrian woman herself and women’s rights activist.
Continuing the psychosocial approach, these workshops were not lectures but a safe and supportive space in which the women could talk and support each other, sharing their challenges and the injustices they have faced. A space for seeing things anew, and for feeling energised and empowered to go out and communicate their needs and insist on their rights.
There was a particular emphasis on the rights of girls, which fed into the last theme of the workshops: parenting classes.
Parenting
“We learnt how to deal with our children in these difficult times. I learnt how to give them space to express themselves and to tell me what they need without fear. I have been implementing what I learnt in the workshop and I have noticed a huge improvement. My children come to me everyday after school and tell me everything that they did and learnt. I feel our domestic life in general has improved so much. My children have more energy and more love for learning.”
“I started doing honesty sessions with my children. They tell me everything they feel and I tell them how I feel. That helped me get to the root of the problems in our lives. I learnt how not to take out my anger and my trauma on my children. I learnt how to deal with those separately, and to be personally more disciplined with my reactions.”
Parenting can be difficult in the best of circumstances, and Syrian refugee women are certainly not living in the best of circumstances. They have been scattered far from their own mothers and aunts, the support network that would have been there to help them raise their children if it were not for the war. They are coping with trauma and anxiety themselves, and so are their children. They live in poverty in areas of high deprivation with nowhere for children to play. Domestic and gender based violence are common. No wonder that the women of the Makani community have long been asking us for parenting support classes.
The workshops were run by a trained child psychologist, again a Syrian woman herself and women’s rights activist. And again, these were not dry lectures but practical and empathetic sessions in which women could share openly the challenges they were facing, and learn tools and strategies to support their children emotionally.
Feedback immediately after the sessions was positive, but it was when we followed up six months later that we understood what a transformational impact these workshops had had - as you can see from Ida and Nirmeen’s quotes above.
The Rugs, Rags and Rights project would never have been possible without the support of the Australian Direct Aid Program. Thank you so much.
