LONDON: Israa Ababneh was skeptical when her uncle signed her up for a plumbing course at a vocational center in North Jordan.
“At first I thought what am I doing here? It’s just for men and it’s hard.”
But she stuck it out for three days and mastered the basics before moving onto practical skills.
“That’s when we started to have fun, learning how to cut iron pipes, connect them and fix leakages behind a wall.”
The 27-year-old is one of a growing number of women taking up plumbing in Jordan, raising eyebrows in local communities where social norms prevent many women from working, particularly in roles traditionally occupied by men.
Some 81 percent of women in Jordan are unemployed, according to a report by UNHCR.
The country ranks 134th out of 142 in terms of women’s economic contribution, according to a 2016 study by the Jordan Strategy Forum.
At first, Ababneh and the other female plumbers she works with found these patriarchal attitudes prohibitive — particularly when people refused them work because they were women.
“They used to laugh and say we couldn’t do it. It was like a challenge.”
Now, she said, clients call specifically seeking female plumbers.
“A man just mends the faucet and leaves a mess but when a woman does it she fixes the problem and leaves it clean.”
Women plumbers can also gain access that is off limits to men, carrying out work in households where male family members are not present.
This means leaks can be fixed faster with less water lost – a big benefit for a country where water availability is among the lowest in the world.
Jordan has an annual water supply of just 150 cubic meters per person, well below the official UN threshold for “absolute scarcity” set at 500 cubic meters.
“Water is a highly sensitive issue in Jordan,” said Bjorn Zimprich, project manager at German Development Agency GIZ, which initiated the Water Wise Women’s Initiative to train female plumbers in the country.
“There have been a lot of awareness campaigns and people know that water is scarce but with regards to behavioral impact there is limited impact.”
Most Jordanian households subsist on just one water tank a week so fixing a burst pipe quickly can make all the difference for families dependent on limited supplies.
With between 40 and 50 percent of Jordan’s water lost through its aging distribution network, due in large part to leakages and theft, there is an urgent need for more efficient maintenance.
Conservation is a key concern on the training program, which aims to raise awareness surrounding water scarcity among local and refugee communities across Jordan.
“People from Syria, Iraq and Palestine are all living in this country and sharing the water,” said Ababneh, pointing to the additional pressure on Jordan’s limited resources created by a refugee crisis.
“We go into schools and tell them how to stop leakages and advise households on using water-saving devices,” says Ababneh, who is now part of a professional female plumbing cooperative.
The women work in pairs, with different teams responding to calls around the country.
Plumber Ala Abu Heja, 32, hopes that this could help pave the way for more diversity in Jordan’s labor force.
“Before, a female plumber is not something people here would accept.
Now we’re seeing some females working in electricity, plumbing and mechanics so these initiatives will influence the entrance of women into other occupations traditionally dominated by men.”
More than 160 women have now graduated from the program, which runs separate sessions for male trainees.
Nargis Al-Mahmoud, 23, arrived in Jordan in 2013 after bombs destroyed her home in Dar’aa, Syria. With little means of generating an income in Jordan, her husband signed up for the course.
“He was really struggling to understand the theoretical part but reading his notebook one time I said, are you kidding? This is something I can do.”
The daughter of a handyman, Al-Mahmoud already knew her way around a toolbox and she enrolled in the program, eager to pursue a career in plumbing. “The first time I went to a house they started to make fun of me and I ran out crying. It was really bad. I told my husband and he said just stay at home, we don’t need this.
But Al-Mahmoud was determined to put her new skills to use. “I didn’t do all this training just to sit at home,” she said. After fixing a few things for free to showcase her skills, Al-Mahmoud’s client base began to grow and she is now working alongside her husband to expand their budding family business.
For Abu Heja, the opportunity to earn and contribute to the household budget has had a personal as well as a financial impact. “I now have a source of income and a greater sense of self-respect,” she said, a feeling shared by many graduates of the program. “In the past, we felt shy and restricted, but now we’re working, we feel we can go wherever we like and do what we want. It’s really built our confidence in a way that we never thought it would.”
Jordan’s women plumbers fix pipes as men leave puddles
Jordan’s women plumbers fix pipes as men leave puddles
‘Protect our people’: Armed Syrian volunteers watch over Damascus
- Local committees have taken over some of the deserted checkpoints, with the authorities’ approval
- Committees had been set up to patrol neighborhoods to prevent crime until the police could take over
After Islamist-led militants ousted former president Bashar Assad in early December, thousands of soldiers, policemen and other security officials deserted their posts, leaving the door open to petty theft, looting and other crimes.
The new Syrian authorities now face the mammoth challenge of rebuilding state institutions shaped by the Assad family’s five-decade rule, including the army and security apparatuses that have all but collapsed.
In the meantime, Damascenes have jumped into action.
In the Old City, Fadi Raslan, 42, was among dozens of people cautiously watching the streets, his finger on the trigger of his gun.
“We have women and elderly people at home. We are trying to protect our people with this volunteer-based initiative,” he said.
“Syria needs us right now, we must stand together.”
Local committees have taken over some of the deserted checkpoints, with the authorities’ approval.
Hussam Yahya, 49, and his friends have been taking turns guarding their neighborhood, Shughur, inspecting vehicles.
“We came out to protect our neighborhoods, shops and public property as volunteers, without any compensation,” he said.
He said the new authorities, led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group, have backed their initiative, providing light arms and training.
Authorities also provided them with special “local committee” cards, valid for a year.
Police chief Ahmad Lattouf said the committees had been set up to patrol neighborhoods to prevent crime until the police could take over.
“There aren’t enough police officers at the moment, but training is ongoing to increase our numbers,” he said.
The Damascus committees begin their neighborhood watches at 22:00 (19:00 GMT) every night and end them at 06:00 (03:00 GMT) the next morning.
Further north, in the cities of Aleppo and Homs, ordinary residents have also taken up weapons to guard their districts with support from authorities, residents said.
The official page of the Damascus countryside area has published photos on Telegram showing young men it said were “volunteering” to protect their town and villages “under the supervision of the Military Operations Department and in coordination with General Security.”
It also said others were volunteering as traffic police.
A handful of police officers affiliated with the Salvation Government of the Idlib region, the militant bastion controlled by HTS before Assad’s fall, have also been deployed in Damascus.
Traffic policemen have been called from Idlib to help, while HTS gunmen are everywhere in the capital, especially in front of government buildings including the presidential palace and police headquarters.
The authorities have also begun allowing Syrians to apply to the police academy to fill its depleted ranks.
Syria’s new rulers have called on conscripts and soldiers to surrender their weapons at dedicated centers.
Since rising to power, HTS and its allies have launched security sweeps in major cities including Homs and Aleppo with the stated goal of rooting out “remnants of Assad’s militias.”
In the capital’s busy Bab Touma neighborhood, four local watchmen were checking people’s IDs and inspecting cars entering the district.
Fuad Farha said he founded the local committee that he now heads after offering his help to “establish security” alongside the HTS-affiliated security forces.
“We underwent a quick training, mainly teaching us how to assemble weapons and take them apart and to use rifles,” he said.
Residents said that the committees had been effective against burglars and thieves.
“We all need to bear responsibility for our neighborhood, our streets and our country,” Farha said.
“Only this way will we be able to rebuild our country.”
Macron says West must be cautious over new Syria rulers
PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday the West must not be naive about the new authorities in Syria after the ousting of Bashar Assad and promised France would not abandon Kurdish fighters.
“We must regard the regime change in Syria without naivety,” Macron said in a speech to French ambassadors after Islamist-led forces toppled Assad last month, adding France would not abandon “freedom fighters, like the Kurds” who are fighting extremist groups in Syria.
UN: Over 30 million in need of aid in war-torn Sudan
- Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than eight million internally displaced
- Both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war
PORT SUDAN, Sudan: More than 30 million people, over half of them children, are in need of aid in Sudan after twenty months of war, the United Nations said on Monday.
The UN has launched a $4.2 billion call for funds, targeting 20.9 million people across Sudan from a total of 30.4 million people it said are in need in what it called “an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.”
Sudan has been torn apart and pushed to the brink of famine by the war that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than eight million internally displaced, which, in addition to 2.7 million displaced before the war, has made Sudan the world’s largest internal displacement crisis.
A further 3.3 million people have fled across Sudan’s borders to escape the war, which means over a quarter of the country’s pre-war population, estimated at around 50 million, are now uprooted.
Famine has already been declared in five areas in Sudan and is expected to take hold of five more areas by May, with 8.1 million people currently on the brink of mass starvation.
Sudan’s army-aligned government has denied there is famine, while aid agencies complain that access is blocked by bureaucratic hurdles and ongoing violence.
Both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.
For much of the conflict, the UN has struggled to raise even a quarter of the funds it has targeted for its humanitarian response in the impoverished northeast African country.
Sudan has often been called the world’s “forgotten” war, overshadowed by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine despite the scale of the horrors inflicted upon civilians.
Jordanian FM discusses rebuilding Syria in Turkiye talks
DUBAI: The Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi highlighted on Tuesday the need to help Syria regain its security, stability, and sovereignty during discussions in Turkiye.
Talks also focused on providing support to the Syrian people and addressing the challenge of rebuilding the war-torn country.
He underscored Jordan's firm stance against any aggression on Syria’s sovereignty, rejecting Israeli attacks on Syrian territory.
The minister also expressed solidarity with Turkey, supporting its rights in confronting the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), emphasizing the importance of regional cooperation to ensure peace and stability.
Israel military says three projectiles fired from north Gaza
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said it identified three projectiles fired from the northern Gaza Strip that crossed into Israel on Monday, the latest in a series of launches from the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
“One projectile was intercepted by the IAF (air force), one fell in Sderot and another projectile fell in an open area. No injuries were reported,” the military said in a statement.
