Portfolio at NYU

Posted 06.15.03
With No Help Forthcoming, Arab Community Helps Itself

By Megha Bahree

Her head covered with a scarf, Linda Sarsour stood in line with her four-year-old son at the Greenpoint Bank in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A white man entered the bank, and after lingering for a few minutes broke the queue and went up to the teller. He stared back at Sarsour and shouted, don't want to be in line with these kind of people; look at what they've been doing to us; they killed four Americans yesterday. These f***ing a**holes are trying to take over our country and what kind of a bank is this that services them?

One teller hastily helped the man with his request to get him out of the bank, but none of a score of people who witnessed the harassment came to Sarsour's aid or defense. The man left the bank before Sarsour and stood directly across the street as she made her exit. Her office at the Arab American Association was just up the road, but instead of going there, she got on the first bus that came along. "I didn't want him to see where I work; he could then always come back and harass me again," she said. "My son wanted to know what I had done wrong that he was screaming at me. I couldn't explain to him that it was because of the way I dress and who I am."

Ironically, Sarsour deals almost daily with the emotional repercussions of incidents such as the one she experienced. As an outreach counselor for the Arab American Association of New York, a non-profit organization that provides social services to the Arab American community, she works with women in the community, accompanies them to appointments at hospitals, courts, schools and refers anyone who requires mental health counseling to the counselors in her office. She has seen an increase in harassments, hate crimes and offensive racial profiling directed against members of the Arab and wider Muslim communities in New York City, especially since the war in Iraq started, and struggles to work with the limited facilities available to her community.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, before 2001 anti-Islamic religion incidents were the second least reported. But in 2001 there were 481 incidents, more than a 1600 percent increase, and became the second highest reported among religious-bias incidents.

"This community has been affected by the same thing as all New Yorkers - September 11 - except it's had it much worse," said Monica Tarazi, New York Office Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a grassroots civil rights organization. "We are not just dealing with the fear of September 11, but also the fear of its backlash, fear of hate crime, fear of violence, and harassment, and now a fear of the war in Iraq and a fear of the backlash from that. But very few social services, especially mental health counseling, is available to them."

And students in non-Islamic schools, such as Edward Morton High School in Brooklyn, are one such category of targets. Last October in a class on American Experience while discussing how the American president can deport anyone he considers dangerous, the teacher in charge made two Muslim girls, among other students, stand up so that their classmates could examine if they were "dangerous".

"He wrote the word "dangerous on a piece of paper and kept holding it up against us," said one of the girls who had been made to stand (she requested that their names be left out otherwise they could get into trouble). "I really don't care about his method of teaching, but to tell me that I was dangerous is not right and not justified. He is a teacher, he's American, what message is he telling the kids by making the comment? What are the kids learning about us? Personally I think he's racist, even though he says he's not, and he's ignorant. I didn't drop out of the course because the semester was almost over, and it was too late to change the class. I tried to change his class, but all other classes are full, and so I'm stuck with him."

After 9-11 the City's Mental Health Association set up Project Liberty, a federally funded program, to offer crisis counseling to victims. The program has been aggressively marketing its counseling services in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Spanish and English. But so far both Arabic and Urdu, the languages spoken by the Arab and Muslim population of New York City, have been ignored. In fact, there are very few counselors who can even speak these two languages, and there are only two organizations that even offer mental health counseling to Arabs - Arab American Association of New York and the Arab American Family Support Center in Brooklyn. The latter is well funded and caters to anyone who speaks Arabic, irrespective of his or her religion.

The Arab American Association, however, is attempting to prioritize the largely ignored Muslim community. The group has sent a proposal to Project Liberty requesting for funds to conduct crisis counseling for the victims of 9/11, culturally sensitize caregivers, and address the needs of the Muslim community. And while they await the decision, they have started their own outreach program.

The association has collaborated with Healthy Connections, a program of the Lutheran Health Center, to train different sections within the community to help them recognize signs of trauma and anxiety so that those people suffering from it can be treated accordingly. The training will be given at Al-Noor and Al-Madinah Islamic Schools in Brooklyn, the Muslim Youth Center, the Arab Muslim American Federation, as well as three mosques in Brooklyn.

But there are a few problems that the group will have to first overcome including the fact that mental health counseling is a taboo in this community; that there are very few counselors who can actually speak Arabic; and that the outreach so far has been for Arab Christians who, having fled the Ottoman empire, are now well settled in the western world and that most of the care givers, even if they are Arabic speaking, have a westernized perspective and would themselves need "cultural sensitization".

To tackle the first, Sarsour's colleague Ali Gheith, a Palestinian-American research scientist at Columbia University in the mental health field who also works with the mental health department of the city, has roped in the services of the Imam at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, and the duo have formed a successful combination of science and faith.

"The mosque plays a significant role in the day-to-day life of the people," explained Sheikh Reda Shata through a translator. The Imam, who is a scholar from the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo, quotes in one breath the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abraham Lincoln and Chinese proverbs. "People listen to the Imam as the words and teachings of God."

Gheith recently got a call from a family in California concerned about their 18-year-old son who had moved to New York and was now in Elmhurst hospital in Queens. "They said that he was a boy with typical teenage problems and did not have any psychological problems and that someone had put the evil eye on him," Gheith recalled. Gheith told them that before he called the boys' doctor he would prefer to call the Imam and discuss it with him. "The minute I said that, it opened the floodgates, and different family members were calling me with his medical history," he said. A conversation with the doctor revealed that the boy was suffering from schizophrenia.

The Imam then talked to the family and told them that the disease had a proper medical treatment and it wasn't the evil eye. He managed to convince the family to take up proper treatment. I spoke to his doctor and he is already 70 percent better," Gheith said.

Another case was of a 16-year-old Egyptian girl (she used to wear the hijab and attended a Muslim school) who after 9/11 started picking fights and became very violent. Her family thought that she was reacting to the harassment that women wearing the hijab had to face, and told her to remove it. They were thinking of sending her back to Egypt because they were worried that she may get lost in the American society. "Her actions were symptoms of bi-polar but knew that the family wouldn't welcome any professional aid," Gheith said. Instead, he asked her father if he had tried any spiritual healing and if he had spoken to the Imam. The tactic paid off and opened a channel of trust as her sister and mother revealed more about what she had been going through. The girl is currently getting proper medical help.

Another solution is to offer these services in places that are considered "normal" for women and children to visit such as offices of pediatricians and gynecologists. "The office of the Arab American Association in Bay Ridge, for instance, is located above that of a pediatrician and gynecologist," he explained. "When a woman takes her children to the doctor, she can easily come up the back stairway to talk to a counselor if she needs to. There won't be any big neon sign to embarrass her."

These social workers are also planning to educate doctors in the primary care system on signs and symptoms of anxiety and depression, to understand it as a mental health issue instead of a physical one that would only require vitamins or exercise. They will be working with the Arab Medical Association, a grass root organization consisting of Arab doctors. Since most of the victims are women and children, this will be one of the primary target groups.

The other gap in the system is a lack of mental health professionals who can actually speak the language of those who need their help the most. "Healthy Connections had one Arabic speaking counselor. But she's on maternity leave and ever since she's gone, our work has been pretty much at a standstill," revealed Sarsour.

One solution is to use a translator, but that raises moral and ethical dilemmas and the medical community isn't sure if they are ready to exercise that option or not. Gheith himself isn't sure if it is the best solution, but he is seriously considering it since "it may be the only way out for the moment."

Another predicament, a lack of cultural sensitization among the care givers, was highlighted recently when an Arabic speaking psychologist while counseling a Moroccan woman on her marital situation offered to take her to a womens' shelter to get away from her husband.

"In the Arab-Muslim community you never do that," said Sarsour who received a complaint on the issue from the Moroccan woman. "Family is the most important thing and moving out is the absolute last resort and it is avoided for as long as possible. The psychologist was very good and was only doing her job by the book, but she was doing it from a western perspective."

There is no help for the people of this community who, like Sarsour, have to deal with blatant hostility day after day. Gheith sums up their situation when he says, "The terrorist attacks took place in September 2001. This is April 2003, and yet there is no help for this community. How much longer will they have to wait?