As part of a video shown after lunch, a group of Arab-American teenagers laid it on the line.
“My culture is protective–and that’s what I like about it,” said one, describing a life built around family closeness, respect for the elderly, feasts, fasts, a sense of community and a strong tradition of working out problems, if they occur, within the confines of the home.
“People just don’t know us,” said another, describing her ongoing problems in dissuading new friends from old stereotypes.
That was the theme of a workshop held Friday for about two dozen social workers and other professionals at the Midway Center of Metropolitan Family Services in the diverse Chicago Lawn neighborhood, long a port of entry for Palestinians and other Middle Easterners in Chicago.
The day, aimed at removing “barriers to service” to Arab clients, included small suggestions, such as “ask before you shake hands” with a female. If you knock on a front door, wait a while for those inside to answer, long enough for females in the household to don proper attire.
But it was also a time to talk of larger, more difficult issues.
What about nursing-home care for the Arab elderly? The use of foster homes in cases of domestic turmoil? Shelters for women fleeing abuse? And the struggle between parents, seeking to instill old-line values, and their children who want to be “out there” in the secular culture that surrounds them?
Addressing the last topic was “Benaat Chicago: Growing Up Arab & Female,” a video shot by a dozen teenagers on the Southwest Side.
The title, which translates as “Daughters of Chicago,” reflected the dual pulls of their daily lives. At school, some classmates teased them about head scarves. Parents, suspicious of American ways, distrusted all after-school activities, even hanging out with girls.
“I’m not like a toy,” said one on-screen teen, angrily rejecting the notion of arranged marriages, or even arranged dates.
On the other hand, noted Aiseh Said, it is not unknown for a local Arab-American family to transport a daughter to states where marriages can be performed with brides as young as 12. “You can’t deny people their legal rights,” said Said, a clinical social worker who trained at Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But,” she noted, “you can try to dissuade them.”
Some Chicago-area mosques, she reported, now require six weeks of premarital counseling.
Louise Cainkar, a sociologist with UIC’s Great Cities Institute, was introduced by Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the Arab American Action Network, one of the workshop’s sponsors. Cainkar reported an increase in incidents of harassment of Arab-Americans since 9/11, including the destruction by arson of the network’s community center at 3148 W. 63d St. in December 2001. Its library and research files were lost.
These days, to build trust in a fear-filled time, community social programs require a softer initial approach, observed Ida Anger, the center’s senior program director. The place to start is with low-key conversation, not with the filling out of intrusive forms requiring detailed personal information, she suggested.
Also helpful would be social-service facilities geared to Muslim sensibilities, such as nursing homes where the Arab elderly could follow their traditions, including fasting until sundown during the sacred month of Ramadan, or foster homes where young girls could be properly sequestered.
“We had a case where a teenage girl was placed [by the state] with boys in a Christian home. It was not the right decision,” said Said. “We are encouraging some Muslim families to obtain a license and become foster parents,” she added. “People need to know how to deal with the system.”
