Amal Al-Shawahneh was elected to lead the women's committee at her centre in Zarqa. She turned a title into a workforce.
The vote was the easy part. What Amal Al-Shawahneh did with it afterwards is the story.
She was forty-eight when the women of her centre elected her to chair their committee, a position that, in the wrong hands, is an honorific. A name on a letterhead. Someone to sit at the front at events.
“Everyone who strives gets their share. My volunteering and my work at this centre is a service to Zarqa, and to the women of Zarqa.”
She read it differently. To her the chair was not a reward for standing still; it was a set of keys. The centre gave her the room, the resources and the training, and she used all three to build something the town had not had: a steady, organised supply of volunteers.
The initiatives she designed were aimed squarely at women, at pulling them out of their houses and into the life of Zarqa, giving them a reason and a role. In time the numbers moved. More women volunteering. Then more young people, drawn in behind them. Cooperation where there had been none.
Her hardest problem was not recruitment. It was temperament.
She had, suddenly, a great many people of very different ages who all wanted to be the best, and that energy can curdle. Ambition without a channel becomes rivalry, and rivalry inside a volunteer group will quietly destroy it. Amal's work was to take the desire to stand out and bend it, deliberately, towards the collective: to make competition a thing that produced initiatives rather than resentments.
One of the young women she leads put it plainly: “Under Amal's leadership we learned that competition can be a positive thing. It pushes us to be better, and to serve our community.”
That sentence is the whole management philosophy, arrived at without a management course. Do not suppress the ambition of the young. Point it somewhere.
What Amal has built is not a project with an end date. It is a habit. A group of women and young people in Zarqa who now expect, as a matter of course, to be involved in what happens around them, and a committee structure that will outlast the person who currently chairs it. That is the difference between an activity and an institution, and it is the harder of the two to make.
Asked at the end of her interview to sum it up, she reached for a proverb rather than a slogan: “Everyone who strives gets their share. My volunteering and my work at this centre is a service to Zarqa, and to the women of Zarqa.”
She is not describing a role she was given. She is describing one she decided to take seriously.
