English
Women on the frontline
syria
“Our last day in Hamouriyah felt like it was going to be the day we all die”- Dalal, 20.
yemen
“There was this girl who came to deliver here. The poor girl had her first baby at the age of 12”- Sahar, midwife.
gaza
“Sometimes, I go to the hospital and I can’t find my medicines”- Sarah, 31.
iraq
“I was forced. I was just a child, only 15 years old. I didn’t want to be married”- Nadia, 18.
jordan
“I fear for my family in Syria, [I fear] that I’ll lose them in a blink of an eye”- Reem, 26.
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On the frontline
Wars are usually associated with images of violence and grief, with once-safe homes crumbling as tent cities go up. The sounds of bombing and wailing can drown out most other voices. Women become almost invisible, their everyday needs often dismissed as secondary.
The Arab States region is home to some of the world’s worst conflicts and humanitarian crises. Last year, Yemen was declared the worst human-made humanitarian catastrophe on the planet. The Syrian crisis is entering its ninth year and continues to be the biggest source of refugees in the world. Palestine is suffering the dire consequences of a decades-long occupation and a blockade that effectively cuts Gaza off from the rest of the world. The list goes on: Libya, Iraq and Somalia, and countries like Lebanon and Jordan, where the conflict in neighboring Syria is causing a raging refugee crises.
“A Woman Even Here” is a series of documentaries exploring the faces and lives behind the numbers and showing a glimpse of women’s experiences in conflict and humanitarian settings. Women are sometimes forced to flee while pregnant, walking for hours in life-threatening conditions. They often have to give birth without adequate medical support. Crises exacerbate their vulnerability to sexual violence and compel them to endure the loss of pride that results from something as simple as menstruating with no access to sanitary pads.
Two-thirds of all maternal deaths happen in humanitarian and fragile settings. That means over 500 women lose their lives because of pregnancy and childbirth every single day. At any given moment, pregnant women make up at least four per cent of any population, even during wars or in fragile settings. Without adequate support, pregnancy and childbirth threaten women’s lives just as much as shells and bullets.
In 2018 alone, UNFPA was able to deliver life-saving reproductive health services, supplies and information in over 55 countries affected by humanitarian crises worldwide, including in the Arab region.
UNFPA supported existing medical facilities in providing emergency obstetric care, deployed mobile clinics to deprived areas, trained midwives to serve in difficult-to-reach locations, procured life-saving medicines and equipment, and established safe spaces to provide protection services and support to girls and women who survive violence.Along with other humanitarian organizations and national and regional partners, UNFPA advocated for making the needs of women and girls a priority in humanitarian responses.
Building a life out of the ruin
Dalal was only a child when war broke out in Syria. Now, at 20, she is internally displaced, a widow and the sole provider for her only son.
“I worry all the time about how I will raise him, and whether I’ll be able to give him what he deserves,” Dalal said.
As the Syrian crisis enters its ninth year, countless women like Dalal are trying to come to grips with their new roles as sole breadwinners. One in three Syrian households are headed by women, at a time when opportunities are scarce and the risks of exploitation and poverty are higher than ever. To make things worse, the war forced women like Dalal to leave school, which further complicates their ability to find work.
Dalal married at 16. At the time, she didn’t think she was too young and loved her husband dearly. But looking back, she says she would have chosen to finish her education first.
“He was loving, understanding and kind – an irreplaceable man,” Dalal said of her late husband. “But I lost my husband and my son was orphaned, and now I have to play both roles: mother and father.”
She had no time to deal with her grief. Her hometown, Hamouriyah, saw heavy fighting, and she had to flee.
“Our last day in Hamouriyah felt like it was going to be the day we all die,” Dalal said.
Being displaced, Dalal explained, was “like watching our future wasting away before our eyes, bit by bit.” Seven years of displacement felt like years lost in the blink of an eye.
Resettled in East Ghouta gave Dalal the time to assess her situation. Grief struck hard. She isolated herself and started to slip into depression.
While receiving reproductive health services from a UNFPA-supported safe space for women and girls, Dalal learned that she could get psychological support. She had the strength to ask for help, which enabled her to deal with her new situation. Soon after, she found a job.
“Ms. Rasha helped me a lot,” Dalal said about the counselor she met at the UNFPA safe space. “She pulled me out of depression and convinced me to get a job to support my son. Most people in Syria need psychological support, men and women alike.”
Dreams for my daughter
In her small house in Aden, Sahar Salem spoke of the war in Yemen. She recalled the closed shops and empty bakeries, the silent taps with no running water, and the single available hospital women sometimes fail to reach before it is too late for their babies.
After a painful divorce, Sahar lives with her daughter, Sondos, a brother and her mother. A trained midwife, she is the family’s sole breadwinner. In war, midwives like Sahar can make the difference between life and death for many Yemeni women who are cut off from reproductive health services.
Her own experience with childbirth was traumatizing. Sahar developed the dreaded obstetric fistula, a hole between the birth canal and the bladder or rectum. Caused by prolonged obstructed labour without access to timely, high-quality medical treatment, fistula leaves women leaking urine, feces or both. It often leads to chronic medical problems, depression, social isolation and deepening poverty.
“When my husband heard the news, he said I was no longer good enough as a wife and that he did not want me anymore,” Sahar recalled. “He divorced me.”
At first, Sahar was desperate because she was told she had to travel abroad for the fistula repair surgery. She couldn’t afford it. But then she learned that UNFPA supports free fistula repair surgeries in Yemen. Her surgery was successful, and her husband wanted her back.
“I swore I would never return to him. He abandoned me,” Sahar said.
After the surgery, Sahar decided to become more proactive so that other women in her community don’t have to go through the same pain. She became one of 163 midwives supported by UNFPA across Yemen to provide reproductive health services from their homes to women in deprived communities.
Two thirds of all reproductive health facilities in Yemen have stopped working since the war started. Many Yemeni women cannot access or afford to seek care at the few functioning facilities that remain. Trained midwives like Sahar can avert two thirds of avoidable maternal deaths.
Still, Sahar believes the war’s impact on the lives of women and girls is likely to last for generations.
“There was this girl who came to deliver here. The poor girl had her first baby at the age of 12,” Sahar recounted, noting that the girl hemorrhaged for a long time before she was finally able to take her baby home.
Sahar dreams that her daughter’s future will be different, full of opportunities and kinder to women.
Life under siege
Sahar El Nabaheen was born into a humanitarian crisis that has only grown worse over the years. Adding to the violence, fear and uncertainty that are part and parcel of life in Gaza, a decade-old blockade has caused a raging economic crisis with a youth unemployment rate as high as 60 per cent. Amid the unfolding disaster, family planning might be dismissed as secondary.
For Sahar, lack of access to regular, high-quality family planning information and services has all but defined her life. At 31, she lives with her husband and their six children. With her husband unable to find work, Sahar's family of eight live on virtually no income.
Sahar suffers from thalassemia, a chronic blood disorder that requires life-long treatment, including occasional blood transfusions. In pregnancy, thalassemia can lead to anemia and may cause pregnancy and childbirth complications if women don’t receive adequate medical support.
The blockade has made it difficult to find essential medical supplies like the medicines Sahar needs to treat her condition. “Sometimes, I go to the hospital and I can’t find my medicines,” she said. “But I can tolerate it. There are others who can’t afford to wait.”
Well aware of her situation, Sahar decided to use contraceptives after her first daughter was born. But an older woman in the family told her she didn’t need contraceptives, because some women don’t conceive while breastfeeding. Sahar had her second daughter a year later.
Afterwards, she decided not to leave things up to chance. Sahar's husband started using condoms, but soon she fell pregnant for the third time. She sought medical advice and experimented with several family planning methods, but could not find regular and reliable contraceptives – and had three more unplanned pregnancies.
Sahar now visits a UNFPA-supported safe space for women and girls, where she gets a steady supply of reliable contraceptives for free. She is also part of a vocational training programme that, Sahar hopes, will one day enable her to generate additional income for her large family.
She hopes that by the time her children grow older, they will live in a different reality and will get the chance to finish their education and find employment.
Planning for the future, Sahar said with a smile, is a luxury she can’t afford: “It is enough to worry about getting through the day.”
*Name changed to protect privacy
Pregnant on the move
Nadia was only 16 and five months pregnant when she grabbed her toddler and fled her house in Huwaija, Iraq. ISIS had taken over the town two years ago. Now, persistent bombing drove Nadia and many other families from their homes in the middle of the night.
Growing up, Nadia had pictured a very different life for herself. She had a single, simple dream: to become a teacher. But the fighting forced her out of school. When disasters strike, girls are more likely to leave school than boys their age – and 90 per cent more likely to do so than girls who live in conflict-free countries.
Only a year after ISIS' arrival, Nadia was married off.
“I was forced. I was just a child, only 15 years old. I didn’t want to be married,” Nadia said.
Eight months into the marriage, she was already pregnant with her son when ISIS took her husband. He was never heard from again. She was 16 when she became pregnant again from a second marriage, and had to embark on the risky 15-hour journey on foot to reach the Debaga camp for internally displaced people.
Halfway there, her group stopped, too scared to move forward and unable to turn around. They set up an impromptu encampment in the middle of nowhere, and stayed for a few months.
“I was afraid I was going to miscarry, and I ran out of milk for my toddler,” Nadia said. “Most families were ruined.”
As she was getting closer to her due date, Nadia’s group decided to make a final push for Debaga and finally made it to the camp. Pregnant women on the move and in difficult-to-reach areas run a higher risk of maternal mortality and morbidity. In humanitarian and fragile settings, over 500 women die every day from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
Upon arriving in Debaga, Nadia went to the UNFPA-supported reproductive health clinic, where she delivered her daughter. She now frequents a safe space for women and girls in the camp, also supported by UNFPA. There she learns sewing and has a chance to socialize with other mothers.
Today, 18-year-old Nadia finds it difficult to speak of the future.
“I don’t know how to describe my dreams to you,” she said. “Life in the camp is sometimes good and sometimes not, but I dream of going home.”
Life interrupted
Despite her best efforts to build a life out of the ruin, Reem*, a 26 year-old Syrian refugee, is still grappling with an unshakable anxiety about her future.
“I fear for my family in Syria, that I’ll lose them in a blink of an eye,” Reem said, “I hope Syria is safe again so we can return, but I’m afraid of being displaced again. I’m afraid of being forced to go back and then have no income to provide for my children.”
Ever since she had to flee Daraa and arrived at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan seven years ago, that sense of urgency still follows Reem every day.
Despite her best efforts to build a life out of the ruins, Reem, a 26-year-old Syrian refugee, is still grappling with an unshakable anxiety about her future.
“I fear for my family in Syria, that I’ll lose them in the blink of an eye,” Reem said. “I hope Syria is safe again so we can return, but I’m afraid of being displaced again. I’m afraid of being forced to go back and then have no income to provide for my children.”
Ever since she had to flee Daraa and arrived at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan seven years ago, that sense of urgency still follows Reem every day.
“It started as a joke, as we watched the camps in Jordan on television. Then, it turned into our reality,” Reem recalled. “They said it was going to be difficult to carry all our things to the border, so I only took a change of clothing. I had a photo album; it was my childhood. I regret leaving it behind.”
But it is safer in Zaatari, Reem said, recounting how scary things had become in Syria before she escaped. Back then, a checkpoint near their house prompted her parents to “shut doors and windows so nobody could see us.”
The “things they do to girls” – the sexual violence against women that typically increases in times of war and humanitarian crisis – loomed larged among Reem’s fears, and forced her to leave school in Syria. Her secondary school was in a nearby village, and she had to take a bus to reach it.
“We heard that villages and buses were attacked and that girls were abducted,” Reem said.
Humanitarian settings exacerbate women’s vulnerability to all kinds of threats: sexual violence, dropping out of school, child marriage and death in childbirth. After marrying in the camp, Reem delivered her children safely at UNFPA’s maternity clinic. She also receives family planning services there, which helped her regain some measure of control over her life.
Today, Reem looks at her life with mixed feelings.
“My aspirations were bigger than this. I had hoped to finish my education. But halfway through, everything changed, and then I married. I didn’t think this would happen to me,” she said.
Since the opening of UNFPA’s delivery ward in Zaatari refugee camp in 2013, there have been 10,000 deliveries in the camp – and not a single maternal death.
*Name changed to protect privacy
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