Thank you.
Good morning, all. I would like to start by thanking Development and Peace, who invited me here to Canada to share my story and to talk about the work that I do in the Darna centres in Syria, which serve the vulnerable Syrian families who have chosen to stay in Syria as the war continues.
I would also like to thank the committee for inviting me here today.
I am Rand Sukhaita, a woman from Syria. I'm a pharmacist and a mother. I'm from northern Syria, from a small city called Idlib. I fled to Turkey almost four years ago with my small family. Before this, I moved between cities, trying to find a safe one in which to give birth to my baby. The first year in Turkey was the hardest, because I didn't know whether I would be able to go back to Syria soon or have to stay there. I was following the news every day. It took me one year to realize I wasn't going back to Syria soon.
I then decided to think of the Syrian people who were left behind, who are facing every day all kinds of struggles, from displacement to bombing and shelling, to chemical weapons from the regime and his allies, to the extremists who destroyed all the villages' valuables and interfered in their personal freedom. In spite of all this, they are still trying to make a better life and a better future. They are struggling for their freedom and dignity. This relates to the Darna centres' mission, which is to construct a society that lives with dignity.
We have three centres in Syria, one in the south and two in northern Syria, in Aleppo and Idlib. Unfortunately, we closed our centre in Aleppo after the evacuation happened in December.
Darna means “our home” in Arabic, which is the main goal for the centres. Besides access to services, the centres provide a safe space for families and individuals, so they can rebuild their social networks—lost through displacement—and find a sense of belonging to a community again. All of our centres apply an open door policy, so that anyone from the community can come to access the service. Our staff can provide service or refer them to any other service provider in the area. That is why the centres are not operated as a stand-alone service but as part of a holistic approach that seeks resilience for the community.
The centres provide vocational training, English, computer, and business courses, as well as sewing workshops for women. Women there are trained to sew clothes so they can find a job in the local labour market. From the lessons learned from our work, we know that it's important to couple skills development and income generation programs with psychosocial support and protection programs in order to enable women to overcome the trauma they have experienced in war and adopt to their new role. In addition, we have to link the skills development training with local labour markets so that they have job opportunities afterwards.
Syrian women are more vulnerable to discrimination, poverty, and social exclusion than their male counterparts due to social cultural norms present in the region. Many have found themselves for the first time ever as the sole breadwinner for their family, given the death or incapacitation of or separation from the primary male earners. Yet those who have found themselves in this situation also tend to lack the skills, capacity, and confidence to procure income-generating work. This often puts women in an impossible position of having to provide for themselves and their families.
We know that when women generate an income, they make better decisions with their income. Their priority will be mainly to provide education for their children and to have access to the community. That's why we should start working with women and listen to them if we want to achieve peace. We should include women in each step of the process.
It's very important to work to empower women so they can deal with their new role. At the same time, we should be preparing their community—husbands and families—to accept them in their new role, and to accept that they can go out of their home, work and generate income, make better decisions, and support their families. This is the main challenge we're facing now inside Syria in some areas. Even though I believe that war is the worst thing that can happen to human beings, it's a real opportunity for real change.
After the revolution, I started to see women acting differently. They worked in organizing the demonstrations, in field hospitals, as teachers, and even in civil defence. They documented human rights abuses. They were arrested and kidnapped. They worked in media. Here, I'd like to give an example of what happened in Aleppo during the evacuation. The only activist who raised what was happening in Aleppo was a woman called Lina al-Shami.
Let me tell you about Hannan, who is married and is the mother of three children. She has had to support her family on her own ever since her husband suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed. She recently took an 11-week sewing course offered in one of our centres. She says, “Through the training course, I personally evolved a lot as a person. I am no longer Hannan the shy, but Hannan the responsible woman who provides for her family. I have more confidence in myself. Even my husband looks at me differently. I did not imagine that one day in my life I would be in that place! Today, I dream of teaching sewing or running a learning centre.”
The Syrians need us to share their stories and show their daily bravery in facing this crisis. They need us to believe in them, invest in them, and build their capacity to strengthen Syrian civil society so that it can develop new leaders in order to make the change. We need to directly support Syrian organizations, to invest in Syria, and to build its capacity to make real change with less short-term intervention, and more resilience-based approaches.
Let's think about the civilians who are facing the extremist groups in some areas. How can they do this without our support if they are left alone without any tools to do so? How will the next generation be able to resist without access to education? We should know that only the Syrians themselves will be able to build their country again. Any solution that doesn't include them will not be successful.
Believe me when I say that are a lot of Syrian women who struggle daily for their lives and their dignity and for a better future, and they provide role models for how women can be and should be. This week, as we celebrate International Women's Day, I would like to remember the thousands of women who faced death under torture and the thousands of women who have been disappeared.
Thank you.
