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Wael has been stateless since the registry office of the town where he lived burned down during the civil war, and all birth certificates were lost. His five children are also stateless: the sons are painters, paid by the hour in Lebanese pounds, a minimum wage, continually eroded by inflation. Wael’s wife runs a small shop where she sells household products for third parties. She has cancer, she cannot afford the necessary treatment and she doesn’t know how to carry on.
Lina has always lived in Lebanon but has always remained stateless. She works as a cleaner by the hour to help her family. With what she earned and some help from her friends, she managed to get two of her daughters to continue their studies. Her mother was Lebanese, her father was Syrian. When we ask her what her father did, Lina replies: “Black magic, he read coffee grounds.” Like her, Lina’s children are now stateless.
Esther arrived from Ethiopia ten years ago, looking for work to help her ailing mother. She found only temporary jobs as a domestic worker. She was repeatedly harassed by her employees. To improve her situation, she married a Lebanese garage owner, hoping to obtain citizenship. The husband, however, never registered the marriage and Esther soon discovered his drug addiction (the pills and white powder around the house were not medicines for toothache, as he said). Furthermore, he was a drug dealer and was very violent, especially when she refused to act as a courier for drugs outside Beirut. Once, he locked her up in a room for days and tortured her with cigarette burns.
Despite this, Esther had two children with him, who were never spared mistreatment and beatings. One day, when her husband was about to throw a pot of boiling water on her, Esther started screaming so loudly that she alarmed the neighbors, who called the police. He ended up in prison but for a short time. A Lebanese association that supports women survivors of violence offered refuge to Esther and her two children, who remained stateless because their births were never registered.
Now Esther works occasionally, with the help of INTERSOS, from which she receives material and legal assistance. She is still afraid to move freely and meet her abusive husband. She would like to return to Ethiopia, but her family was exterminated during the civil war.
Amara arrived in Beirut in 2012 from Addis Ababa, to find a job as a domestic worker. Like tens of thousands of other migrant workers, her stay in Lebanon is framed by the so-called “Kafala” system, a sponsorship that often turns into a form of modern slavery, providing a precarious legal status that prevents them from registering their children of Lebanese origin.
Amara married a Lebanese taxi driver and had three children. She had a religious marriage, not officially registered, because any woman, to get married in Lebanon, must provide documentary proof of being previously unmarried. And how could Amara prove that she was not already married in Ethiopia before leaving the country? For this reason, although the father recognised the three children, they remained stateless, because he could not present the requested documentation to the registry office.