Jaya, one of our Student.Go interns, is working with the Dom Research Center. She has created a series of Blogposts for them based on interviews with Amoun Sleem, founder of the Domari Society in Jerusalem. We are pleased to share her video and written posts with you here.

Conversations with Amoun: COVID-19 and the Dom People (click to view video).

Hello and welcome to the first of a series of interviews with Amoun Sleem, director of the Domari Society in Jerusalem. I hope this interview series helps you to learn more and inspire you as it did for me! We are starting off the series by discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the Dom people. For people all over the world, COVID-19 and the resulting pandemic wreaked havoc on our lives. This has also been the case for the Dom people. Amoun shared with me that many of the Dom people work as day laborers and rely on that work as their source of income. Jobs that may have been abundant before the pandemic became scarce. In an effort to provide some relief from the dire circumstances, Amoun and the Domari Society worked tirelessly around the clock. She reached out to other organizations to provide aid such as food to families in need. Children were also impacted due to school shifting from in the classroom to online. With less access to technological tools such as WIFI or a computer, as well as losing the interaction and assistance often found in the school setting, many students fell behind. Also, many women lost their sources of income during this time. The Domari Society serves as a safe haven for the people of the Dom community. The Domari Society did not close, rather shifted focus to providing humanitarian aid. Amoun shared her hopes in the coming times for acquiring funding to have other options of programs for women. As we saw during this time, many businesses and establishments had to close their doors in an effort to take safe precautions. Events and some work could still take place on a smaller scale with less people. Because of this, Amoun hopes to equip women with skills that they can do one-on-one as a service. She hopes to offer classes such as hairdressing, catering, sewing, etc. Thank you for checking out this first part of the interview. Please share your thoughts! Hope you join us for the next post in the series! Jaya, Summer Intern