Bayan Abubakr
Tadamon–The Egyptian Refugee Multicultural Council
Cairo, Egypt
A few days after I arrived in Cairo, the Egyptian police arrested Wael Abbas, a prominent human rights activist and blogger. I had already been feeling apprehensive about spending three months in an incredibly fascist and authoritarian country (although I have lived in the U.S. for a while, so I should be used to it…) while working with refugees and migrants (or, as the Egyptian government sees them, a nuisance to the state).
Upon starting my internship at Tadamon, I have come to learn that it, as an organization, has become used to the tyrannical nature of the state it operates in, that being the only way it could function in Egypt. At the moment, Tadamon’s biggest projects is Malazy. Malazy works to provide safe spaces in the form of centers in Maadi (Cairo) and Mari Girgis (Old Cairo) to migrant and refugee women in need of legal, psychological, and medical support.
My first tasks required me to create a database for both centers to track the livelihood, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and religion of the women Tadamon serves, and to train the staff at both centers to use and implement the database. This database would be used by Tadamon to not only be of better service to these communities, but to apply to grants as well.
Tadamon runs entirely on grants and donors. They have been pretty successful in securing grants from the European Union and the UN, and Malazy is entirely funded by a grant from the EU. However, the Egyptian government has refused to grant Tadamon the money the EU sent to them for Malazy, on the basis that one of our co-partners (another NGO in downtown Cairo) does not really work with refugees (they’re focused on the empowerment of women in Egypt), and therefore, this project could not exist and Tadamon doesn’t need the money. Nonetheless, Tadamon’s staff has taken the blow and has continued with the project while finding ways to legally acquire the funds .
Over the past five months, over 600+ women have used the facilities and resources on hand in both centers. There are plans to expand the project across Egypt, and I am tasked with expanding the database to cover more centers. I am also working on writing a memo (in the form of an interim report) briefing the EU on the situation with the Egyptian government. Other than that, I work between Tadamon’s main center in Downtown Cairo, where I do logistical work, and the community center in Maadi, where I work one-on-one with the refugees who come to attend holding programs, one-on-one sessions with the lawyer, doctor, and psychologist in the center, and development trainings.