Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work

6. Paying for the Honey

200 6 Paying for the Honey Managing Work and Family If you want the honey, you have to risk being stung. —Syrian proverb Madam Zahara lives in a building on the first level of the mountainside neighborhood of Muhajareen. For twenty years, she has been an active volunteer and promoter of education and charity work supporting poor families in Damascus. She calls these families victims of “hidden poverty” because they have a place to live and do not appear to be as poor as they really are. “Because the state helps to keep prices low for the basic things that people need, and because people always live with family, never alone, we do not have a problem with homelessness or people starving in Syria. But some people are very poor. They cannot find work, or they work for very little and cannot feed all of their children. We have a saying, ‘We are a family that eats bread’—it means the family is so poor, they can afford bread only at the state bakeries, where it is very cheap.” As part of her efforts to help the poor, Madam Zahara and a group of friends have worked with UNICEF programs to create jobs for women and have raised money to help support a local orphanage. The first project involved training women in traditional embroidery and dressmaking. Most of her work has focused on organizing volunteers to help with training , raising funds to buy sewing machines, and using her connections to get women started marketing their work. The orphanage for which she volunteers is funded by private donors and houses approximately one hundred boys who have either been transferred from government Paying for the Honey | 201 orphanages or given over by families who cannot care for them. The boys go to the local government school in the morning and then return to the orphanage to study, eat, and play during the afternoon and evening. There is no formal religious teaching, but the building does house its own mosque as well as a video room, a play room, and a language lab that was donated by one of the foreign embassies. Our hope is to keep children from having to work on the street washing cars or selling gum. Children should not have to do this work; they should be in school learning some skills and how to read so they can live. When I began this work, there were not so many poor children. Now there are more. My husband travels a lot, so I have time. When I started this work, I asked him about it, and he said, “Go ahead and do this, but I don’t want to hear about the complaining, what one woman says to another. I don’t care if you do it, but I don’t want it to make trouble. Keep the trouble inside.” He supports my work. This is good. A woman needs a man because sometimes she is guided by her emotions too much, by her heart; she needs him to help her think. Madam Zahara is grateful for both her husband’s support and his travel schedule. The latter means that she has more freedom to attend fundraisers in the evening or to be at the orphanage in the afternoon. Her work includes strategizing with other elite women about how to leverage their resources and connections into programs that provide long-term help for the poor. Some of her other efforts have involved coordinating fundraising events with the wives of embassy personnel to help families with specific and usually temporary financial needs. Although some people have been critical of these efforts, she remains undeterred because she believes that people trust her and that the work fills a gap in what other charities are providing. Her work as a philanthropist and volunteer is deeply meaningful to Madam Zahara. The networks it provides are also important resources for her family and helps to extend their good name in the community. Rather than spend her days sitting and talking about the coming and going of relatives and neighbors, Madam Zahara fulfills a moral responsibility to help the poor. “It is better than what some of my neighbors do, sitting and 202 | Making Do in Damascus thinking only of money and decorating,” she says. “God requires us to help the poor.” . . . When I first met Lama in 1994, she had just finished...