Ghanem Jabar Hatiyah

A former Iraqi soldier and father of two young children, Ghanem has never before held a puppet but is still an instant success at the Irbid Kindergarten’s Community Learning Through Play Day. Surrounded by young children rapt by the performance, Ghanem is clearly enjoying himself, too. As a volunteer in Save the Children’s Khatawat program, Ghanem is not only helping children in need, but he has found an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment.

At first appearance, Ghanem seems an unlikely candidate for volunteering to help little children. He’s a big man with a deep voice, a weathered face and hands rough from hard work. But his smile lights up with a youthful excitement when he describes the impact his involvement in Khatawat has had on his life.

“Although I am 45-years-old, I never before felt like this, like I have a role in life. Now I have more energy and a curiosity to learn and develop myself.”

Ghanem grew up poor in Iraq. He dreamed of going to university, but life was too hard. After high school, he joined the army to support his family, and five years later he was seriously wounded in the Iran-Iraq war. Without any help from the government, Ghanem struggled to recover and make a life for himself. He spent years as a migrant worker going back and forth between Iraq and Jordan until he married Maysoun, a Jordanian woman. They settled in Irbid, Jordan where he now owns a small shop and volunteers for Save the Children’s early childhood education program, Khatawat.

“I always wanted to find a way to help others, but never before did I have such an opportunity as Khatawat. I had never heard of child protection before. I suffered a lot as a child, and it makes me feel good to make children happy so they will not hurt like I did.”

A war zone is no place for children, as any Iraqi parent who fled to Jordan can tell you. The negative effects of social instability and violence on children are numerous. Their cognitive, emotional, social and physical development are all at risk when they are denied a safe environment in which to learn and play.

In the Khatawat program, Save the Children helps vulnerable families, both Iraqi and Jordanian, by providing tuition for their four and five-year-olds to attend safe community kindergartens where they receive a quality early childhood education.

Save the Children’s Khatawat program package includes major renovations to the school and playground, a complete set of classroom furniture and learning equipment, toys and art materials for the children, training and on-going guidance for teachers, and support for community, parent and volunteer activities directed toward strengthening the social network that cares for children.

With regular training and coordination support from Save the Children, Ghanem has visited the homes of families with young, out-of-school children to explain the benefits of the Khatawat program and help them enroll their children. He earned their trust by being present at every stage: on registration day, at the parents’ orientation, and on the bus with the children on the first days of school. He also participated with them in a Save the Children psychosocial workshop aimed at helping parents cope with raising children in a stressful situation.

In the first year of the program, more than 100 children in Irbid will have access to kindergarten due to the recruitment work of Ghanem and other volunteers, and even more children will benefit from activities like the Community Learning Through Play Day. On the day of this interview, one hundred and fifty children and their parents spent the day at the school planting flowers, painting, eating together and participating in fun activities that taught kids and their parents about traditional Iraqi music, oral hygiene and traffic safety. Ghanem entertained the children with puppets that another volunteer had made for the event. 

Before he joined Khatawat, Ghanem was shy and lacking in self-confidence. 

“I wanted to be alone most of his time. But being a volunteer has built my confidence. I feel more human, like I have value.”

Ghanem wants more for his children, as any parent does, and through this program he found a way to support their growth, as well as his own. 

“We are grateful because this program has given our children a chance to be happy. Save the Children provides a safe place for them to play and learn. It is much more than we even imagined for our children.” 

Snapshots from San Francisco

• Ah....the hearty baked goods of corner coffee shops of Noe Valley. 
• My vibrant college-age cousins. Sweet ripe peaches, they are.
  
• Walking around the sunset district talking to PW on the phone as Sara got her acupuncture. View of Golden Gate bridge. Odd urban-suburban California neighborhood, quiet on an afternoon.
• Bringing on Sara's contractions with the belly massage the acupuncturist had taught me.
• Watching the last debate of Obama/McCain (with fellow Obama supporter, Mom) and sipping a stiff gimlet while S walked back and forth behind us, pausing to bend over and moan through contractions. 
• Driving S&B to the hospital: S miserable and vomiting. High drama! (BTW, high drama reverses the effects of alcohol).
• The awful anxiety of watching a loved one in severe pain, coupled with amazement at my little sister's determination and strength.
• Watching Sara recite Brown Bear Brown Bear to Elliott in her arms as they stitched her up. For real.
• Brandon giddy and attentive with fatherly love.
• Crying while in line to check my luggage.

so good to see

my little sister, a mother!

No Caribou Barbie Here. But there is Fulla.

Coming Home, Sort Of

When I first got to San Francisco, I had the usual reverse culture shock. (Or is it just straight culture shock now since most of my life is away from the states?) The stores were mesmerizing. I thought Amman had everything. What it has, I understand more clearly now, is a lot of stuff I don't want. The corner grocer in the Noe Valley neighborhood where Sara and Brandon live was dreamy -- all food you'd want, nothing you don't want. "The perimeter of the usual grocery store," said Sara. Fresh organic produce. Good cheese. Creamy yoghurt. Lots of choices of freshly baked bread. And the baby store wasn't overwhelmingly large; it just had the soft, natural fabrics; the chic designs; the chew toys you can feel confident about AND that the child will actually chew on.

On the streets, there are a mix of people: old and young, gay and straight, preppy, sporty, hippie; Asian, Latino, Black, White. Not that many headscarves, come to think of it, though I did see some. And it's not like there were a lot of African in African dress. But I was impressed by the age range. You don't usually see a lot of hip youngsters at the same place you see mothers pushing baby strollers and retirees doing their coffee/paper/dog-walking thing. Maybe that's just a city thing. You walk. You see everybody, and not just for a brief moment in the car next to you at the red light.

Generally, people are being themselves, openly. The vote's coming up and they have their "propositions" about various local issues, and they talk about them on the radio. Should a teenager have to have their parent's permission to get birth control or an abortion? Ahh. Public discussion and debate. And about things that are important to me.

 

And, I have to confess, it is so refreshing to be around a majority that feels the same way that I do about a lot of things. I am so used to being a minority. Whether it's a non-Muslim in Sudan or Jordan or a Democrat from a red state. Talk about freedom. I could almost be a flag waver if I lived here.

Receiving Visitors

It is important. We have been wanting people to visit us since we started this work. 

An experience just ceases to exist in memory if there's no one with whom to remember it. There are huge chunks of my life that are just plain gone, or else in some kind of dream world (did that really happen?) since they occurred abroad and I'm no longer in touch with those people.

Yes, there is the husband. That's been a huge improvement. But still one needs some diversity in the story re-telling, as well as the story living.

We've had a few visitors already. My sister-in-law and 1.5-year-old nephew left a few days ago after spending about 2 weeks here. We did the Jordan tour. Now, Jordan is a big improvement to Sudan when it comes to tourism, but it is a very small country. We seem to be hitting the same spots. Lovely and interesting as they are, I see the limits of my future: one trip after another to Petra. Seventh(?) wonder of the world. It is pretty cool, but 1) it's full of tourists and touristy shops and 2) one can only explore so much with a toddler strapped to one's back.

That said, it's great to get out. It's great to have people from the rest of our lives come to this life, to get to know it with us.

garden confessions

Living in a high, dry city, we've had the windows open all day and night for months. The screens usually keep out the occasional night-time mosquito. 

The problem is the flowers. In the morning, the dainty 5-petal white flowers smell faintly of honeysuckle. At night, they are nauseating, and no I'm not pregnant. They look like lovely decorative barrettes on a huge tangle of vines across the front wall of the house. But they reek of lilies or worse, old roses. The smell of them can wake me up, on the other side of the house.

We had no idea that the back garden was full of fruit trees until the spring came. Two lemon, two plum, four olive, two peach, and two enormous grape vines that cover the 10x10' trellis. How wonderful! A regular garden of eden! We'll eat them, I thought. What a lovely lesson for the children.

Then the fruit started growing. I had no idea that peaches grow along the branches like giant insect eggs. There were hundreds of them on the little trees. I missed the window for picking them. The weekends I put in the effort to climb and pick were too early and they were impossibly sour. Then they started rotting and falling while I was at work. Then the ants came. And the peaches from the hard-to-reach branches fell and blackened the tables and chairs and tiles with over-sweetness. We abandoned the back garden for a week or more to avoid the carnage.

where nighttime entertainment meets daytime drama

Last night I watched Generation Kill, the first episode. I'm always up for a really good series. And I do feel like I need to watch more films about Iraq, from every perspective. 

The cultural divide between me and the soldiers was grand canyon-like. They are marines trained to kill. There's a lot of testosterone and some talk about the supremacy of the white man.

Meanwhile, I spent the day writing up interviews I'd had with some Iraqis. I got teary-eyed at my desk as I wrote about a an ex-soldier wounded in the Iran-Iraq War who did a puppet show for the Iraqi children at a kindergarten we support. He was this deep-voiced guy with meat hooks for hands. He told me later he'd never held a puppet before in his life. "It gave me great pleasure to make the children happy since I had such a sad childhood myself."

It's going to be a tough on the outside, healing child on the inside kind of story. Corny? You had to meet the guy.

So in the last scene of the GKill episode, these marine kids come across some defecting Iraqi soldiers trudging through the desert, and they treat them badly--pour out their meager ration of water, steal from them, force them to the ground, mock them...

I felt like I was watching invaders attacking my neighbors. It was extremely offensive. The Iraqis were more familiar to me. 

Yet the kids were familiar to me, obviously. They're Americans for god's sake. 

I know TV is not reality. But dehumanization and cruelty to others is apparently a natural ingredient of war, no matter the justification. 

It made me feel naive in my little aid-worker bubble.

People sometimes wonder how I can bring my children into such a dangerous part of the world. But my world, the people we know and hang with, the expats and internationally-minded nationals, are of the same peace-loving, diversity-celebrating mindset that we are. We're all globe-huggin humanitarians. 

the beginning, off to a late start

The usual morning. Sipping coffee. Dressed for work. Trying to rush through my personal emails while Fe is outside with the children. I can hear her talking about how to take care of each other instead of fighting. Miles is conversing on a favorite topic: I am the biggest! I am bigger than Telmo. I am faster than you are. I am the winner!

No need to rush Miles to school. It's August. No need to rush to work. I'm part-time, after all. And I want to meet Thair who's coming to cut back the trees in the garden. This being Jordan, he's an hour late. 

Tardiness comes naturally to me though, and it's definitely a perk living abroad to have people be more understanding about it.

That said, most Jordanians seem to have higher expectations for punctuality than say Sudanese or Sierra Leonians. Infrastructural development makes it easier to get to places on time. Fewer real excuses.

So this is my first blog, naturally a bit late for a person who considers herself a writer of sorts.