By
Annie Slemrod
BEIRUT:
They told her she was ugly. They refused to play with her, saying her dark skin
would dirty their hands. They broke her teeth. But Meyada kept trying to make
friends at her public elementary school in Mar Elias. Her mother, Sudanese
refugee Ikhlass Jomaa, took to standing outside the playground, where she would
find her daughter “isolated.”
“The
other children would be playing, and she would be sitting alone,” she recalls.
Meyada
would come home crying and hungry. Kids stole the sandwiches Jomaa packed for
lunch, as well as her books. Jomaa, who has been in Lebanon for nine years, went
to see the school’s principal. The principal said she could do nothing.
Born
in Lebanon to Sudanese parents, the now 8-year-old Meyada is not alone. Lala
Arabian, executive director of Insan Association, an organization that works
with refugees and migrants, confirms from her experience what Meyada knows.
Migrant domestic workers, refugees and their children face “a lot of
discrimination and racism ... in Lebanese society,” she says. “Usually they
[refugees and migrants] don’t benefit from social services provided in
Lebanon.”
It
isn’t only the children of migrant workers and refugees who face
discrimination. People of color have come to Lebanon in a variety of ways,
including the more recent post-Civil War trend of a return from the
Lebanese-African diaspora.
Meyada
is hesitant around strangers but content to talk about her best friend Esther,
the computers at her new school, and her ambitions as a cook. But her words
come more slowly when the subject turns to her previous school: “They used to
make fun of me there, I don’t know why. They told me I was ugly.” She doesn’t
want to talk about it.
Jomaa
eventually pulled her daughter out of the public school and enrolled her in one
run by a charity where all of the other students are African. This is one option
for children having a hard time in mainstream public schools. The other is
private school, but Insan’s Arabian explains that to enroll, students must have
“some kind of identification papers from their countries of origin to be able
to register, and they’ll pay much higher fees than at state schools.” Those
without legal residency can’t attend public schools at all.
“I
really feel for her,” says 25-year-old Edith Kitoko, upon hearing Meyada’s
story. Like Meyada, Kitoko was born in Lebanon to African parents. She’s never
been to the Democratic Republic of Congo, although its passport is the only one
she holds.
Kitoko
laughs that while she and her twin sister were “the only Africans in the
history” of her private school, her experience there was mostly positive.
Teachers treated her well, she had lots of friends. Once another student called
her “Sri Lankiya,” a term meant in a derogatory manner, referring to the many
migrant domestic workers who hail from Sri Lanka.
Looking
back, Kitoko says she was protected by the school bubble. “The first day of
university was kind of shocking,” she recounts. When she walked into a
courtyard full of students, “they all turned and were looking at us.”
Since
then, she can recount a litany of nastiness. People assume her father is a
diplomat, because she is educated. They presume she is a prostitute, because
she is African. As she puts it, “a Lebanese woman maybe has a 40 percent chance
of being sexually harassed. I have something like an 80 percent chance.”
There
is often shock at Kitoko’s flawless Lebanese Arabic, which doesn’t bother her
as it once did. Born in Lebanon, she still has to regularly apply for residency
and must get a work permit like any other foreigner.
To
her own surprise, she’s thinking of leaving for the Democratic Republic of
Congo, a home she has never seen. She thinks her skills could be of use there.
Several of her African-Lebanese friends have already left for Africa. Racism
here hasn’t decreased with time as far as she can see, but Kitoko doesn’t see it
as a singularly Lebanese problem.
“I
know some really great Lebanese,” she says, adding that “I love this country
because I was born in it.”
But
she doesn’t feel Lebanese or Congolese: “I’m in a no-man’s land.”
Ethiopian
Carol Assefa has tried to keep her two children with her Lebanese husband out
of this no-man’s land, teaching them pride in their dual heritage. Her kids
have friends of all skin colors and are comfortable with their own, but she
thinks they suffer less because their skin is light like her husband’s.
Discrimination
has its own complexities. One summer, Assefa’s now 6-year-old daughter warned
her older son to stay out of the sun. She was concerned his skin would darken
and people would call him Sudanese.
“So
it is there, inside their minds,” Assefa says. “They think about it.”
Although
the educational problems of Jomaa’s three children are temporarily solved, the
charity where they study doesn’t offer secondary education. Her 6-year-old,
Mawada, has developmental disabilities and needs special schooling, the type of
public services that Arabian says the state doesn’t provide.
Jomaa
has other worries that indicate a wider, long-term concern. Her first priority
is keeping her kids safe, but if children of color and Lebanese remain
separated, their fear and dislike for each other may only increase.
“Sudan is a country that is
both Arab and African ... we don’t know where life will take us right now,”
says Jomaa, whose application as an asylum seeker was turned down by the United
Nations. “Even if we go back to Sudan at some point, I would like my daughter
to remember that she lived in Lebanon for a while and she had Lebanese friends
there, rather than look back on it as a terrible experience.”
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2012/May-09/172777-young-black-and-in-lebanon-youth-of-color-face-discrimination-racism.ashx#axzz1uMmgVfAw
No comments:
Post a Comment