“Women of the Land of Sun” by Fatemeh Sadeghi
We cannot be happy alone. When we live in a region where there is war and damage all over the place, we can't be happy either.
Leila Arshad, Civil Activist and the founder of the House of Sun
As the neo liberalization of economy has dislodged governments from their social duties, NGOs in the global south have taken on the burden of social services provision. This NGOization of prosperity seems to explain appropriately the overwhelming discourse and activities that in recent decades have promoted and aided local civil society with the help of charitable organizations. It is impossible to give a comprehensive evaluation of NGOs and the outcome of their activities in this short piece. Some recent examples, nevertheless, such as the experience of NGO activities in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, might offer some lessons. That experience seems more indicative not only of the failure of the U.S. in Afghanistan but also of the failure of NGO activities to promote civil society in that country.
After the downfall of the Taliban in 2001, many Afghan civil society activists were eager to help improve their country torn apart by thirty years of civil war. However, due to the lack of central government funds and opportunities, they ended up becoming NGO employees set up by foreign actors. Thus, their activities and priorities did not originate from the local Afghan context but were instead set up by foreign donors and charities, who often lacked local knowledge and expertise of the country In Afghanistan foreign, NGOs were only able to operate when they were funded. In other words, the NGO activism became a profit-making economic activity. Consequently, grass root level volunteer activities became gradually obsolete.
NGO activities mostly suffer from the narrow horizon of outlook, which limits the impact of their activity. Therefore, in the absence of structures and comprehensive plans for development and social welfare, they might fuel corruption. It comes as no surprise then, that a large portion of the funds originally allocated to the Afghan NGOs eventually got transferred abroad or pumped into war zones. [1]
The case of NGOs was a bit different In Iran. As a result of the spread of NGOization of civil society, in Iran NGOs started appearing in the early 1990s. However, many of them were forced to stop their activities either because of government pressure or lack of expertise. One of these organizations, which worked with homeless? women and children, remained active for many years, and left a brilliant career in the field of women and street children.
The Association of the Women of the Land of Sun, known as the House of Sun (khaneh khorshid), is a relief center that began its activities as the first DCI (Drug Information Center) in Iran. Established in 2007 in a poor neighborhood in the south part of Tehran, it initially started to provide health care to women with addictions. The House of Sun hosted different women: drug addicts, HIV and Hepatitis patients, victims of domestic violence, homeless women, and residents of the neighborhood who needed support and social services. Gradually it became a center where women were not only helped with these problems, “but could also return to find a way of life, and above all hope and dignity”, as a recovered client relays. It became their home.
Many women usually receive a variety of support including legal, educational, nutritional, hygienic, mental, and emotional. Because of their addiction, they were unable to find permissible social activities to meet their family needs. To secure drugs supply, they were involved in criminal activities that multiplied their problems. Many of them had unprotected sexual relations and contracted diseases such as HIV.
The clients of the house were often victims of various forms of domestic violence, and most of them were encouraged by their husbands to work and pay for addiction. About eighty percent of clients were between twenty and forty-nine years old, while half of them are barely able to read or write. They were either generally denied basic education or were forced to drop out of school before completing primary school due to severe financial and family problems.
Suffering from physical and psychological conditions caused by addiction, these women were unable to find and hold a job. Most of them lacked skills, concentration, and interpersonal relations. Many of them also struggled with mental disorders and were often dismissed from their jobs where they were deemed to be lacking in responsibility. Given these circumstances, vocational training and job creation were also introduced by the House of Sun to economically empower women.
Leila Arshad, the director of the House of Sun, started working in this neighborhood a decade before the revolution. “In the 1970s” she notes, “I was working as a student in the area, and twenty years later I returned to work for street children who had just appeared in the city and whose issues were not given much attention. Our idea was to find these children and provide them with education, because Convention on the Rights of the Child considers schooling as a basic right of children. But when we interviewed the children, we realized that education was not their priority, because they were hungry and suffered from many diseases. We also realized that street children are a product of the addiction of their mothers. That’s how we founded the first DCI for women.”
But even to help women is not an easy job in a society, where women suffer from gender discrimination. “Working in the field of women in societies and situations like ours is much harder than men, institutions that serve women are more marginalized, and they experience more pressure and stigma”, notes Leila Arshad.
Gradually, the House of Sun became not merely a place to help drug-addicted women, but also their children, because the improvement of family relations destroyed by addiction turned out to be an important part of recovery. It covered more than six hundred female and child clients and provided methadone therapy to more than hundred female drug users daily. It also offered free social services such as psychological counseling, social work, medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and education. The hope was enabling these women back to normal life with the help of vocational training, possibility of employment, intellectual assistance, and housing and shelter. The aim was to help increase women's human dignity, because drug addiction, they found, is caused apart from other reasons, by humiliation, negligence, and stigma such as failure in making and running a family in the middle of economic hardships. Recovery, therefore, means not only to get rid of the conditions that the victims are trapped in, but to retain dignity as well.
The economic crisis in Iran aggravated the situation of the lower classes. The spread of addiction, homelessness, disease, and hunger have reached an unprecedented level as the inflation and sanctions pressure escalated. The outbreak of the Covid-19 also worsened the situation, so much so that many of the activities of the House of Sun were suspended. It became legendary, so that the activities of these women are even illustrated in a documentary called The Backyard of the House of Sun directed by the Iranian director, Rakhshan Bani Etemad.
The holistic view of the House of Sun and its long-term vision makes it distinctive from most of the NGO activities in the global south. Far from being trapped in stereotypical attitudes such as women's empowerment, they realized that addiction was not just one problem; it is the last ring of a chain of problems: unemployment, humiliation, family disintegration, hopelessness, depression, violence, illness, and even lack of identity and citizenship. Even if a woman could temporarily put addiction aside, she wouldn't be able to return to normal life in the long run, because the structural problems that drove her to addiction remain. Therefore, until the "cycle of injury" is stopped, addiction will not be overcome. Empowering addicted women is not successful unless the larger socioeconomic inequalities and discrimination in which women are often trapped, also improve.
[1] See Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan, U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2011, pp. 1-5.