A Voice for People with Special Needs: Samah Al Shaghdari

Samah Al Shaghdari is an activist, poet and journalist. What sets her apart, is her drive to achieve more when odds are against her. Samah heads a foundation known as Voice (Sout) that focuses on people with special needs (the mentally ill or the physically handicapped) and other minorities in society. 

Samah Al Shaghdari - Right

Just a few years ago, she participated in a workshop with the Youth Leadership Center to learn how to construct an organization. While Voice is now a small organization educating society on the subject, Samah has a plan to expand it into a radio that caters to the needs of minorities in Yemeni society. Her dream is to have the first Arab channel dedicated to people with special needs within 10 years. She aims to create programs and documentaries that raise awareness of the conditions that minorities are living in. While Samah's dreams are ambitious, she is realistic and knows that only hard work and dedication will make her plans fruitful. Before creating a channel, she aims to negotiate a weekly (or even monthly) show with a local television channel on people with special needs. 

In 2011, Samah participated in the protests and is feeling heavy hearted about the progress that Yemen made in the past year. 

I think politics kills the mind and the heart. Yemen is suffering from a poverty of politicians, because many of them do not know their trade but found their way to it somehow. Therefore, I refuse to join any group because many of them are reactions to delirium (infi'alat), after all, the revolution was just that. 

As an activist, she let me know that ever since 2004, Yemen made it part of the law to dedicate 5% of all jobs in the private and public sector to disabled individuals. However, there are no recent statistics on whether that is the case. Studies reveal that 2 million people in Yemen are people with special needs, which is roughly 10% of the population. Part of Voice's work aims to hire lawyers in order to defend the rights of disabled individuals at work. Overall, she feels that international and domestic efforts are weak in supporting people with special needs. 

There are about 6000 organizations that are financed by the Social Fund from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (Al sondouq Al ijtima'ey), and 258 of these organizations are for people with special needs but only two stand out: 1) Markiz Al Noor managed Abdul Rabou Humaid and 2) Jam'iat Al Aman by Fatima Al 'Aqil (but she passed away). The other organizations isolate the disabled from themselves. They teach women to sew, and draw, etc but they all do it in isolation. There are only very few buildings that care about disabled people... As if this group of people is nonexistent. No one considers how people with special needs will get to the top floors anywhere even in public universities and governmental buildings. 

Samah's uniqueness as an activists is that she herself represents the community that she is fighting for. 

When I was 3 months old, I got sick with fever. My family took me to the doctor and she gave me a shot. While the doctor may have cured my fever, she gave me Nerve Atrophy. I am disabled now. Growing up, I lived my life like a normal person and I don't suffer from any complexities. This is because my father made me love life and learn how to follow my goals.
I began facing problems when my father died. Most of the women in my family got married at 15 and 16, and I couldn't study what I want, I had to fight for things. I was a little late in my career but that is because I had to practice diplomacy with my family as not to lose them. To be an example for others, you have to suffer. 

Samah studied philosophy as an undergrad in Sana'a and went to earn an MBA. She worked with a television channel. She states: 

I always wanted to be a television presenter. In 2008, I presented a documentary called Countenance (Malamih) on Saba'a channel; it focused on young artists, singers, actors, and artistic disabled people. I remember a man called Samih who was an extremely talented disabled artist that no one knew about although he won several art awards. Another amazing character is Liza, a blind journalism graduate, who was struggling in finding a job in the Media due to her disability. The show was ranked as one of the most watched shows on Saba and could have been nominated to participate in the Cairo Film Festival, however it was eventually canceled because of the lack of interest of some senior administrators within the channel.

Samah was one of the main faces in the revolution and made a short film focusing on the feminist movement during the Yemeni revolution that will be discussed in a future post. 

As a poet, Samah published a few collections. Her first collection came out in 2004 and the second in 2010.

My first collection was an experience of creative adolescence (Morahaqa ibda'iyah). It was a daring collection and I faced  many problems in society due to the subject matter it discussed.  I was a woman and I talked about praise (Ghazal), so it was hard... many people tried to use it against me by bringing it to the males in my family...
I am stubborn and I was scared to write some more, but I decided to go to prose (Nathr), which is typically shorter and more abstract, in order to make it harder for everyone to understand. In prose, however, I found myself. 

Samah's 2010 book, The Fabric of Darkness (Naseej Al-'Atma), her poetry is concise and witty. It reminded me of some of the famous quotes of American poet Dorothy Parker. Samah's poem, "A Vision" (رؤيا) is simple: 

To be able to see things,                          لأتمكن من رؤية الاشياء

I will shut my mouth                                           سأغمض فمي

As for her next book she says, 

It is not like fashion, it is not about producing every year, but rather about producing quality. I want it to have philosophical depth so when I am ready, I will produce more.  

Time to Focus

Today a local conference for women titled “The active participation of women in building a modern civil state” was held in Aden; however the only subject worthy of making headlines (at least according to almasdaronline) was that Salem Basindouah, the Prime Minister, encouraged southern immigrants to return to Yemen. Like every other “women” event, an official recognizes and praises Yemeni women’s efforts in society and a general encouragement about further participation in the public sector is championed. These events have been taking place in Yemen for years now; workshops where a handful of selected females are chosen to participate. Unfortunately, the results always leads to yet another event about “women” while nothing solid is established on ground. This is not to critique any efforts made by Yemeni women. Forthrightly, they are hard working, as Yemen has the only interim government in the Middle East after the Arab Uprisings that selected three women as ministers.

Usually women are less likely to receive aid and are far less educated than men, but during the Yemeni revolution, women displayed their inner strength by standing shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts in order to support the future of their nation. Overall, Yemenis are fed up of the deteriorating conditions in the country. We didn’t have to be the next Somalia or Afghanistan. But now, the situation is unstable and while the entire nation will suffer, women will bear most of the burden. In the South, AQAP is forcing women to cover according to their terms and disturbing reports are making it out of the city about gang rapes. The increase of female harassment and society’s negligence is not only upsetting but is foreshadowing of harder times to come. While many events recognize and analyze the many challenges facing women, the Yemeni feminist political agenda needs a tailored approach and an innovation of strategy.

On Sunday, a group of female journalists and other activists raised a lawsuit against Al-Ahmar for libel and defamation which is punishable in Islam. During the uprisings, Hamid Al-Ahmar questioned the virtue of female demonstrators in an interview with The New York Times. In countries like Yemen, it is easy to use the female body against her and usually similar tactics are utilized by men to restrain female public participation. While these women put their trust in the Yemeni judicial system, it is more likely that this lawsuit will take a long time before their demands are realized as Al-Ahmar denies these charges. These women are attempting to defend their pride and their good names but in the bigger scheme of things, Yemeni women do not need a lawsuit against an individual man. Yemeni feminists need to work collectively against more pressing issues like famine, political participation, female education or amending rights within the constitution. Thankfully, Yemen always has a great woman (individual), but now more than ever we need great women working together (as a unit). For instance, Foreign Policy magazine announced that Yemen has been ranked eighth on the recent failed state Index, something that many experts have been predicting for years. According to FP, “The new edition of the index draws on some 130,000 publicly available sources to analyze 177 countries and rate them on 12 indicators of pressure on the state during the year 2011 -- from refugee flows to poverty, public services to security threats. Taken together, a country's performance on this battery of indicators tells us how stable -- or unstable -- it is”. Thus, Yemeni women will face harder challenges, but their focus needs to shift. While the majority of the nation remains divided over political ideology and tribal alliances, women can be the only social group that functions as the glue that is capable of creating a unified vision within the community.