By: Elizabeth MacBride

The point in the interview when Jehan’s voice cracked a little is when she talked about the women back at home, in Syria. They are the 50 women she leads in a cooperative, packaging Aleppo’s famous laurel soap in handcrafted crochet.

Amazingly, they drive their fanciful Scents of Syria 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.

The women, many refugees who had fled other parts of Syria, work in Jehan’s living room. “It was a mixture of joy, and happiness and singing together,” she said through a translator. “Everybody would be telling stories about their homes. Then the singing and laughter would turn into tears.”

“If your family can pay, you get out. If they can’t you stay,” she said. Jehan made a point of telling me there are many elderly women in the cells: “We stood so they could sit,” she said. And she reported witnessing torture, including rape, while she was there.

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.

I’ve met refugees in the region running microbusinesses, 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 CARE, which runs a microlending program in Zarqa, Qatlish started a business selling Syrian kubbah — a wheat pastry stuffed with ground meat — to neighbors in the small city.

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