Housing crisis robs women of right to motherhood

By: Lava Khalid

She lives in the capital’s suburbs.  “Need and straitened circumstances drove us to accept living in the shop that my husband rented a year ago as shelter, and as the cheapest substitute for the properties that we couldn’t and can’t even dream of living in.”  I asked her:  “Why live in a shop?”  She answered me: 

“Do you think that we are the only family who lives in shops?   The housing crisis is worsening and it isn’t just in the capital, which remains a special case because it’s a city that has work.  That’s what motivated us to settle there, even to the point that our only shelter is a shop we were forced into by circumstances - a few metres of length and breadth in which we eat, drink, live, bathe and breathe, to the point that we have become masters at living in such wretched places, even mastered completely how to withstand the restriction of space in the wide scope of the capital.  It doesn’t matter that these results came at the expense of our deprivation of many things, and maybe of our health in a place bereft of even the most basic requirements for healthy living. 

“Look at all the hastily built houses in the big and beautiful city of Damascus.  Isn’t the disaster that half its inhabitants live on the outskirts on peaks and mountainous heights in a peculiar state of permanent settlement?  Strangest of all is the economic destitution accompanying this insane housing crisis.  The rise in prices has driven many families to accept any substitute, even if it means living in a tent begging for a living in order to avoid the crazy prices that prevail in provinces such as Zabadani, which I’ve personally seen and heard stories of.”

Om Hussan is the educated woman who wept for us in order that her lament might reach the ears of those concerned, for her crisis is a general condition and not an individual one.  She continues:

“I left university in order to work in the summer cotton harvest helping my family.  My younger sister obtained one of the highest averages in the secondary school certificate but she will be forced by circumstances to destroy her life and give up her future in order to survive and for her family to survive with her.  I got married seven years ago.  It wasn’t considered essential, and my husband was deep in poverty, working night and day in order to buy us a small house and at the same time helping his relatives and his orphan brothers.  We didn’t think about having children in the first years.  On top of all that, we haven’t been able to change anything in our lives.  We found nothing in the capital except a replacement, chasing what we didn’t have only for a worse and bitterer stage to begin.  The cost of living is exorbitant and my husband’s salary is barely enough to pay the installments on our house, I mean shop, which we rented for a sum of 2500 with water and electricity bills included in Ash Al Warwar.  And this we are envied by many who come to the capital and find neither a shop nor even a lease of residence here.

“My husband used to work long hours in a restaurant on a regular basis until he suffered a slipped disk in his back.  Now we’re looking for treatment and work that will be easier, and also for work in anything that will preserve us our dignity and keep us from depending on others.  It’s a hard quest, but we have to try, in order to live out a lot that we have hoped even if only once might not frown on us.  We are still making every effort so that we can say to our child who we dream will come:

“We strived on behalf of you and your future; no avenue escaped us.  We will provide you with a better house, even if we live in the poorest and lowest quarters, even if it is at the cost of our life and our buried youth, spent fighting poverty and numerous crises – not least of which was that we were content as human beings to live with these sufferings, without attention to our humanity or our dignity.  We live in the margins of a nation where poverty and illness and alienation were guaranteed to destroy any thought we might have of having a child.  Beyond all that, I’m still waiting for my son Hassan, who must battle the cosmos in quest of a world inside me and eventually even a world outside, one that’s never quiet nor has ever known stability, and halts dismayed by the horror of what he is a part of.”

Other Cases and Similar Experiences

Another lady in the same quarter in the area of Wadi Al-Mshariya lives in a shop with her only child.  The quarter expects to be honoured by a second, who will live out his childhood in small alleyways and miserable mass suburbs where it is no wonder that more houses have not been built.  She tells of the struggle:

“Her house – I mean the shop they live in – has been turned into a theatre of war between her and her husband.  He works one day and finds himself in the queue of unemployed many of the rest, because she decided to have a second child.  She didn’t want to repeat the experience of her neighbour Om Hassan, who was driven by circumstances into delaying having children, the same circumstances which prevent so many other women from becoming mothers.”

For many other women, shelter may not be a shop in the poor quarter in some area of Damascus, but they live in the suburbs, and to enter these for the first time is to be amazed by the things therein.  Some parts are built underground like one of the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, and some above ground, small of area and failing to satisfy even the minimum conditions for sound and stable buildings.  Yet others are built in dangling fashion, liable to collapse in any strong wind such as buffets the mountains constantly at their distant peaks – so distant as to be beyond reach of communication in any form.

Other sights, more than painful, greet me in the haphazard quarters.  They are home, and the arena of childhood memories, the people as they play between its discarded rubbish here and there.  Others have a rough road home, a concrete reminder of accidents in blazing summer or winter which frequently send many falling into its holes.   Yet these are only distressing cases in a sea of suffering.  The details of their way of life are a blow to many who ignore the important groups that make up the fabric of this nation and live not in the suburbs but on the margins, as Om Hassan said.  She, along with all the rest, is awaiting the issuing of a law concerning property investment and development in order to solve this crisis as quickly as possible.