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2020_WHD_Casestudy_Maya_Ibrahimchah
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Resource ID
73746
Access
Open
Contributed by
Chandra Prasad
Uploading member
CI Secretariat
Consent form provided?
Yes
Region
Middle East
Style
Documentary, Portrait
Focal point
Looking at camera
Moods and Emotions
Informal
Image size
1800x1800
Source
Digital Camera
Country
Lebanon
Theme
Humanitarian response
Camera make / model
X-T2
Keywords
Advocacy, Disease
Named person(s)
Maya Ibrahimchah
Credit
KARIM SAKR
Copyright
CARE
Date Image Taken
17 January 20
Caption
Maya Ibrahimchah, the humanitarian work that makes you happy
Coming from a privileged background, Maya Ibrahimchah set up a food bank just a bit less than two years ago. With the crisis in Lebanon, Beit el-Baraka, her organization, has become one of the most active in the country.
“If I don't do humanitarian work, I'll be very sad. It's by supporting others that I am happy. It is through humanitarian work that I came to know the true meaning of happiness, the meaning of my life. According to me, extreme happiness is helping people around me change their lives, allowing them to feel safe, and giving them a chance. This is very most important because each of us deserves a chance,” says Maya Ibrahimchah, president and founder of the Beirut Beit el-Baraka, an NGO created in January 2019 and which set up a supermarket unlike any other in the heart of the Lebanese capital.
In this supermarket, canned food, bread, oil, sugar, salt, flour, pulses, cookies, shampoo, soap, and other well-known-brand products are arranged on shelves in recycled wood. In refrigerators with transparent windows, yogurt, cheese and labneh (a Lebanese dairy product), and meat are displayed, while at the entrance of the store vegetables and fruits are displayed.
Here clients do not pay for the chosen products; they take them home free of charge, they take them with dignity.
All started a month earlier, when Maya Ibrahimchah was preparing a big party in an imposing and old dilapidated villa in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, for her husband's birthday and to highlight the importance of preserving the old residences in Lebanon, a subject that is also dear to her heart.
"I had curtains specially made by a tailor for the occasion and almost every day he would tell me to come the following day. And every day, under a bridge in the neighborhood where his workshop is located, I used to see a woman sitting on a Samsonite suitcase. She looked scared. Every time I walked past her, I told myself that this lady did not fit the landscape. And one day I parked my car, walked over to her and asked her if she was okay. She replied in perfect French (French is still spoken by a Lebanese elite) with ‘don't worry about me’,” recalls Maya Ibrahimchah. This incident prompted her to sit next to the woman who stayed silent for a long while, tears flowing from her eyes.
The woman with the Samsonite suitcase was a retired teacher. She had spent her life working in a well-known school in Beirut. She was single. Her allowance had little by little depleted, which triggered her eviction from her accommodation and made her stay three weeks in the street, one single suitcase for luggage.
That same evening, Maya Ibrahimchah provided her with a room to sleep, an apartment afterwards.
Thanks to this woman, the founder of Beit el-Baraka is introduced to other former teachers or retirees in the same situation; people who have worked all their lives but who find themselves in poverty a few years after their retirement because they have exhausted their end-of-service allowances and their savings; let’s note that in Lebanon social security and old-age insurance are inexistent for people who have not worked in the public sector.
Kindness and happiness
Before October 2019, the date of the uprising in Lebanon, 328 families regularly benefited from the association's support; today there are 1012. In addition, since last October, 182,000 people throughout Lebanon have benefited at least once from the help of the NGO and this through the distribution of food parcels.
Since last October, commodity prices have climbed 169%. Today, the majority of the products including the most essentials such as milk, rice and sugar have tripled in price.
In Lebanon, the Coronavirus lockdown has amplified the biggest economic crisis the country has been going through since 1990.
In a few months, the value of the Lebanese Lira fell dramatically on the foreign exchange market. From 1,500 pounds last October, the US dollar is now at around 8,000 Liras today.
According to the World Bank, 50% of the Lebanese population now lives below the poverty line, this percentage is expected to reach 70% in September.
With the crisis, it is no longer the elderly and retirees who have exhausted their savings only who are now benefiting from Beit el-Baraka's help, but all those in need.
Faced with the demand, Maya Ibrahimchah organized a Webinar in cooperation with SEAL (Social and Economic Action for Lebanon) in the United States, during which she managed to raise one million dollars from the Lebanese diaspora around the world. Thanks to the money collected, she was able to send aid in Lebanese army trucks to all of Lebanon, exactly to 351 villages through 95 NGOs.
“The more money we collect, the more requests we get for help. The more an association grows, the more it needs funding,”says the founder of Beit el-Baraka.
"I appeal for donations all the time, but I never accept money from politicians or their families or anyone who might be involved in embezzling public funds," said Maya Ibrahimchah.
“I grew up in a mixed family, half Christian and half Muslim. I had a German grandmother who instilled in me a sense of duty to society. Young, I took my time to build my life. Until the creation of Beit el-Baraka, I helped families in need only for Christmas and for Fitr,” she says.
“But since I was very young, I have been outraged by injustice, whether through my readings of French existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir or through the devaluation of the Lebanese Lira in the beginning of the eighties,” she adds.
Today, the Lebanese Lira is in its third devaluation, the first having occurred during the 1980s, the second during the 1990s, after which the country became highly dollarized.
“I have witnessed the injustices imposed on the middle class. It had inflicted a real blow on me during the nineties, I was 20 years old and I saw what the devaluation did to our neighbors who were part of the upper middle class, doctors, university teachers and business owners,” she said.
"To be fulfilled, a woman must first of all be fulfilled as a woman and that before being a wife and a mother. Lebanon is a patriarchal society and most of the families raise their daughters telling them 'you must marry a rich man from a good family and have children'. As if life ended there. I personally believe a woman is a woman first, then a mother,"she adds.
Mother of a young teenage girl, Maya Ibrahimchah stresses, “The values that I instill in my daughter are those of kindness. I tell her to be good and kind, to stay on the right path and away from hypocrisy. We must also seek happiness. When we are good and happy, we can own the world.”
Marker lat / long: 34.1, 35.9 (WGS84)