Tha’irat
Tha’irat means women revolutionaries. In Bar Elias, the revolution happens every day: feeding hundreds of families, and making room for women to ask what they are owed.
The Kitchen
Five women run the kitchen in Bar Elias. Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian and Bedouin, they cook side by side to prepare over 70,000 free hot meals a year for families facing displacement and poverty. What leaves their kitchen is the food of home: stuffed vine leaves, courgettes and aubergines, rice dishes, slow stews and fresh bread.
A Saturday at Tha’irat
Three women from the kitchen team also lead the Tha’irat sessions, which bring together a group of twenty women aged sixteen to seventy.
The sessions do not happen in the kitchen. They happen at The Great Oven Home, because what is said here needs the closeness of a living room, not the clatter of a relief kitchen.
Every Saturday, seven of the women cook, taking turns from week to week. They divide the work between them: someone rolls vine leaves, someone watches the stew, someone lays the table. The others stay close, with coffee, chatting and teasing whoever is at the stove. When everything is ready, the food rests and the session begins. For two hours, the women talk about their rights, their mental health and the unpaid labour that fills their days. Then everyone sits down to eat what they made together.
What the sessions open up
The question that comes up most is also the simplest: what are my rights? Many of the women had never been invited to ask it. Over a year of Saturdays, they learn to answer it, for themselves and for each other.
Some sessions borrow from applied theatre. In one role play, a participant committed to her character so completely that her partner burst out laughing and begged her to snap out of it. Rehearsing a difficult conversation is easier among women who can laugh together.
Safe Spaces
Another fifteen to twenty women come to The Great Oven Home outside the year-long programme, welcomed by the same three women who lead the Saturday sessions. Some come because they need to talk. Some have a question no one else will answer, or a problem they cannot solve alone. Safe Spaces welcomes them over tea, informally, for psychosocial support and, where needed, a referral to specialised organisations that can help further.
Tha’irat is run by The Great Oven Lebanon with the support of Cuisine Sans Frontières.
*This video was produced in 2024. Since that year, we’ve increased the number of meals served daily.
