30 women withstand the difficulties and challenges of "Corona" in Lebanon
Displaced Syrian women embroider the Palestinian dress with a British-Swiss design
Fatima Khalifa: "The project is an attempt to withstand the challenges that face the displaced women."
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Syrian hands spin the Palestinian thread on Lebanese land of displacement, designed by the British and Swiss, to produce an embroidery technique that helps refugee women to survive.
From the heart of the Palestinian refugee camp in Burj Al-Barajneh, about 30 women sit in a small workshop, with pieces of fabric and ready-made clothes, engraved with a famous Palestinian stitch.
With relentless determination, a number of women founded Sama, a Palestinian embroidery studio.
Syrian Fatima Khalifa wanders in a camp topped with electrical wires scattered over the roof and among the flags competing with wires, and says that when she fled her country in 2013, she had lost almost everything.
More than seven years later, Fatima intertwines the threads of her life with a simple embroidery technique from the Palestinian heritage, which she and more than 30 other women learned in an art class, in evidence of their resilience to the multiple hardships they face in Lebanon.
Fatima (43 years), founder of Sama Studio for Palestinian embroidery, and participation in a joint embroidery project called "LVB and Sama", hopes that her recent cooperation will help her open the closed doors before her, and other Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian embroiderers, to survive and expand.
She says that this project is an attempt to withstand the challenges that stand in the way of the displaced women.
That collaboration began seven months ago, shortly after the Beirut bombing, which the British-Swiss designer, Larisa von Planta, now collaborating with Fatima, survived by leaving the city two days before.
Von Planta, 27, a graduate of the Department of Sustainable Design at Central Saint Martin School of Design and Art, came up with this idea, after the devastating explosion, when people around the world were looking for a formula to lend a hand to the Lebanese.
Fatima and the women created the design with the help of Von Planta, who calls them several times a day to check progress.
Sometimes clients write the colors they prefer for the embroidery, or where to place the design on the used piece of clothing that they want to recycle, otherwise this embroidery is pure creativity.
The project has not yet provided a reliable and sustainable income for women.
Fatima says her goal is to reach an income of at least $ 100 per woman per month, but this has yet to be achieved.
From August 2020 until now, total project income from 150 recycled items has reached $ 5,505 for Women and Von Planta.
In light of the outbreak of the Coronavirus, which disrupts global transport, and the financial and economic crisis in Lebanon, the project is still in its early stages, with the aim of ensuring three shipments every year to provide regular income.
Depending on the frequency of each woman's work, and the size of the design, the embroidery of each garment can take between a week and 10 days to complete.
Then the dress is sent to the dry cleaning, before it is sent back by mail to its owner as a recycled piece of clothing with a new story to tell.
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