{"id":3471,"date":"2015-12-04T22:35:09","date_gmt":"2015-12-05T03:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bizwomenrock.com\/?p=3471"},"modified":"2015-12-11T15:47:41","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T20:47:41","slug":"wartime-entrepreneurs-50-syrian-women-find-a-way-to-export-aleppos-famous-soap-to-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bizwomenrock.com\/beta\/wartime-entrepreneurs-50-syrian-women-find-a-way-to-export-aleppos-famous-soap-to-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Wartime Entrepreneurs: 50 Syrian Women Find A Way To Export Aleppo&#8217;s Famous Soap To The U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By:\u00a0<a class=\"link ng-binding\" href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/elizabethmacbride\/\" target=\"_self\">Elizabeth MacBride<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The point in the interview when Jehan\u2019s voice cracked a little is when she talked about the women back at home, in Syria. They are the 50 women she leads\u00a0in a\u00a0cooperative, packaging Aleppo\u2019s famous laurel soap in handcrafted crochet.<\/p>\n<p>Amazingly, they drive their fanciful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.karamfoundation.org\/scentsofsyria\/\">Scents of Syria<\/a> line by taxicab to Beirut, and from there and with some help, sell it to markets in the United States, Dubai and Hong Kong. They earn enough to pay each of the women about $150-200 a month.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The women, many refugees who had fled other parts of Syria, work in Jehan\u2019s living room. \u201cIt was a mixture of joy, and happiness and singing together,\u201d she said through a translator. \u201cEverybody would be telling stories about their homes. Then the singing and laughter would turn into tears.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"article-0-inread\" class=\"inread ng-isolate-scope inread-active\">\u00a0The work goes on \u2014 but without Jehan, who asked to be identified by her first name only. She\u00a0fled Syria for Istanbul after an arrest by regime forces. She spent several days in detention, in a 9\u00d76 meter cell with 30 other women, until her lawyer and her family were able to win her release. There\u2019s no way for me to verify her story, but this is a common tactic used against women and their families, as detailed in this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/news\/2014\/07\/02\/syria-wars-toll-women\">Human Rights Watch report<\/a>.<\/div>\n<p>\u201cIf your family can pay, you get out. If they can\u2019t you stay,\u201d she said. Jehan made a point of telling me there are many elderly women in the cells: \u201cWe stood so they could sit,\u201d she said. And she reported witnessing torture, including rape,\u00a0while she was there.<\/p>\n<p>Amid the flood of refugees, and the fear provoked by terror attacks in Beirut and Paris and elsewhere, the individual stories of Syrians and Iraqis only slowly come to the fore, especially the stories of women. But many of the approximately 2,000 Syrian refugees resettled in the United States have been women heads-of-households, widowed by the war or with injured husbands.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve met <a href=\"http:\/\/200kfreelancer.com\/buzzfeed-refugee-sentimentality\/\">refugees in the region running microbusinesses<\/a>, including Badria Qatlish, who last summer was living in Zarqa, Jordan, with her husband and six children. Her husband had been unable to find work, so with the help of Atlanta-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.care.org\/\">CARE<\/a>, which runs a microlending program in Zarqa, Qatlish started a business selling Syrian kubbah \u2014 a wheat pastry stuffed with ground meat \u2014 to neighbors in the small city.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/elizabethmacbride\/2015\/11\/29\/wartime-entrepreneurs-50-syrian-women-find-a-way-to-export-aleppos-famous-soap-to-the-u-s\/\" target=\"_blank\">CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE THIS ARTICLE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By:\u00a0Elizabeth MacBride The point in the interview when Jehan\u2019s voice cracked a little is when she talked about the women back at home, in Syria. They are the 50 women she leads\u00a0in a\u00a0cooperative, packaging Aleppo\u2019s famous laurel soap in handcrafted crochet. Amazingly, they drive their fanciful Scents of Syria line by taxicab to Beirut, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1128],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advice-from-the-best"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Wartime Entrepreneurs: 50 Syrian Women Find A Way To Export Aleppo&#039;s Famous Soap To The U.S. - Biz Women Rock!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/bizwomenrock.com\/beta\/wartime-entrepreneurs-50-syrian-women-find-a-way-to-export-aleppos-famous-soap-to-the-u-s\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wartime Entrepreneurs: 50 Syrian Women Find A Way To Export Aleppo&#039;s Famous Soap To The U.S. - Biz Women Rock!\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By:\u00a0Elizabeth MacBride The point in the interview when Jehan\u2019s voice cracked a little is when she talked about the women back at home, in Syria. 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