Women for Women International
A Look at Zainab Salbi's Women for Women International Organization
Dec 3, 2008
Zainab Salbi had an unusual childhood: she was the daughter of Saddam Hussein’s personal pilot. Being Hussein’s pilot was not exactly her father’s first career choice; rather, the menacing leader pressured Salbi’s father to take the role, and then Hussein drew Salbi’s family further and further into his inner circle.
It was not easy for the Salbi family to be on the inside of a regime they wanted no part of; Salbi’s mother attempted suicide on more than one occasion, and Salbi’s father became a heavier and heavier drinker as the years went by.
But this story has a happy ending.
After a disastrous engagement and an even more disastrous arranged marriage in America, the smart, tough Salbi eventually achieved her dream of gaining her college degree at an American university and began to put her past firmly in the past. But when she read an article one day about the atrocities Bosnian women were experiencing, the horror of growing up in a war-torn land under a madman’s thumb all came rushing back to her: although for Zainab Salbi the fighting was now over, there were still women all over the world who had to suffer war and its consequences every single day.
A Woman Between a Dark Past and a Bright Future Bridges the Gap for Other Women
When she read the article about the Bosnian women, Zainab Salbi and her fiancé (now husband), Amjad Atallah, decided to do something. In 1993, they co-founded the aid organization “Women for Women International”, based on the idea that women who have been through armed conflicts are best helped through a personal, grassroots aid approach. Rather than giving large sums of money to a government to rebuild its nation, or going into a war-torn region with a specific goal of building clinics or schools, Women for Women gives its aid money directly to the women of the community who are recovering from the trauma of war. It is up to these women to decide how to spend the aid they receive; they might use it to buy new clothes and make-up so that they begin feel human again, or they might use it to buy seeds to plant a new crop, or to start a new business.
What started as a small organization run by two people from their Washington, DC, apartment has since grown into an international effort that distributes over $12 million in aid annually.
Building Connections Between Women Across the Globe
Another feature of the Women for Women organization is that it aims to build relationships between women from war-torn parts of the world with women from stable parts of the world. The idea is that women whose lives have been turned upside down lose touch with what it feels like to be living a normal, stable life. The women who sponsor them provide a window back into that normalcy, an anchor that keeps them from losing hope. Meanwhile, the women from war-torn parts of the world teach their sponsors how resilient and courageous the human spirit can be.
Once a woman signs up to sponsor another woman, she becomes both the direct financial sponsor and the pen-pal of the woman she is paired with for a one-year period. The sponsor gives $27 per month and writes a letter to her sponsee about as often. According to CharityNavigator.org, Women for Women International live up to their claim that most of the money goes to the women, and not towards administrative costs - $12 out of $15 million of Women for Women’s expenses went into their programs.
The sponsee also enrolls in programs that teach life skills, such as rights awareness, leadership education, and vocational training, including job skills training - from beautician to silversmith.
According to their website, over 153,000 have received help from Women for Women since it was founded in 1993. In recognition of their work, Women for Women received the prestigious Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Humanitarian Award in 2006.
Sources:
Salbi, Zainab. Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Women for Women International website
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