Blog: The Middle East

House of Ruth, Jordan

The ladies at House of Ruth were happy and did good jobs.  They made beautiful items.

Banan was one of the ladies who lived in the village and went to the House of Ruth every week. She was married and had three children (two sons, who were three and ten years old, and one eight year old daughter). Banan was a homemaker and didn’t work. The only outside type of work she did was making handmade accessories at the House of Ruth.

As the second in a three-part series exploring the ongoing crisis gripping the lives of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Middle East, this story focuses on Lebanon. First we explored the unique challenges of the Holy Land, and the third installation will examine Turkey’s attempts to provide hospitality to the refugees. The series studies the ties that bind those countries struggling for solutions.

Vocational Training Program, Jordan

Abu Rateb was a Syrian refugee from Daraa who fled with his wife and nine children from the brutal situation in Syria. He had struggled to survive in Madaba with his family for four years. Because of the laws in Jordan, refugees were forbidden from working and prohibited from providing for their families.

Refugee Families in Jordan

Victims of Violence

We spent some days visiting with families in their home to gather and talk over either a cup of coffee or tea prepared in Syrian way. Besides the basic needs they could not access in light of their current situation as refugees, one important thing they needed was to be heard. They needed a way to express and let out all the sorrow and sadness they had inside their hearts because of what they witnessed back in Syria.

More than four years ago Syrian refugees in search of mercy began fleeing to neighboring countries to escape unspeakable mayhem in their homeland. Early in the crisis, compassionate outreach was abundant for those broken souls, with Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey opening their borders, and through 2013, Israel provided field hospital medical care to at least 700 severely wounded and critically ill innocent citizens who were delivered to or collapsed at checkpoints.

**10th Leper Village, Holy Land

After attending our Transformational Community Development (TCD) training for a while, two ladies shared with us why they appreciate the lessons:

“Especially from the lectures on Effective Parenting, I learned about relationships that bond.”

Not so long ago, thousands of families in Syria and Iraq found their lives turned upside down. A need for safe harbor drove them to nearby Jordan. Within a year more than half a million were living in an unfamiliar land.

Dzia’s Journey

Dzia* was named after her great-grandmother, who came to Syria in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide, toting Dzia’s grandmother - an infant at the time - and two great-uncles at her side on the arduous journey. As a second generation Armenian-Syrian, recently Dzia found herself in a position eerily similar to her great-grandmother’s.

Refugee Families in Lebanon

GHNI-Lebanon is working to help and give hope to many women and children living in the camps to minimize their suffering and sorrow. At this point, we are achieving it by giving electricity training courses to equip and build their skills and guide them in this career, as they are not allowed to go to school.

Many have known the corner of the world we call the Middle East as a place of consistent tumult filled with intermittent bursts of violence. This land harbors some of the most beautiful and intriguing sites for tourists and explorers, but foreigners are often warned to tread the ground gingerly for fear of getting caught in life-threatening violence. Currently, savage acts are holding the lives of the innocent in the balance as they cry out for relief...for an end to depravity and a beginning of a sustained way of life.