A displaced woman trained by International Relief and Development (IRD)/Blumont has resolved a dispute in al Shahama Camp in Salah al Din province, Iraq.
Fatin, the trained woman, is from Shirqat district in Salah al Din. She and her family were displaced in 2014 when ISIS overran large swathes of Iraq. She now lives in al Shahama Camp.
IRD/Blumont trained Fatin, along with 17 others in al Shahama Camp, for five days in April and June on how to help resolve disputes between and among internally displaced persons (IDPs) and host community members.
Fatin recently applied what she learned at the training to resolve a dispute between a couple.
The dispute involved a neighbor in the camp. The man’s wife thought a girl of one of their neighbors was courting her husband.
The wife’s suspicion was baseless. The girl had only spoken highly of the man with other women at a point where women gather to collect drinking water in the camp.
One day, the man’s wife intercepted the girl on her way to gather drinking water. She asked the girl not to talk about her husband again. The girl, angered at the accusation, took revenge by beginning to loudly speak highly of the man.
This only increased the wife’s suspicion, and she began to have arguments with her husband. The dispute between them got so intense that the man’s wife left him and went to live with her relatives.
This is where Fatin stepped in. First, she gathered information about the dispute. She then found common ground between the involved parties and later convinced the man and the girl to meet the man’s wife and to put an end to the dispute.
They met at a tent of the relatives of the man’s wife. Fatin reconciled them. The girl apologized to the wife and the husband explained that there was nothing going on between him and the girl.
“If we want to solve an issue, we must inform the conflicting parties of the common ground between them. If they continue fighting, they may destroy it and they would not live in peace together in the future,” Fatin said.
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This training was a part of IRD/Blumont’s Conflict Resolution and Resilience Building (C2RB) program. C2RB improves the lives of individuals in Iraq by identifying and implementing solutions to mitigate violence and conflict among IDPs and host communities. It is funded by UNHCR.
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