SOURCE: CHICAGO TRIBUNE

BY: ZAK KOESKE

As the children of immigrants, Itedal Shalabi and Nareman Taha have spent their lives straddling the line between two worlds.

Born in the Middle East, but raised mostly in the United States, Shalabi and Taha have made a career out of bridging the cultural gap between East and West, Arab and American, traditional and modern.

The women, who run an Arab American social service agency in the southwest suburbs, help clients navigate our country’s complex benefits system, which can be confusing even for native English speakers familiar with American institutions and culture.

“The Eastern part of the world is about ‘my family.’ I am the last person to worry about what I want. I put my parents, my siblings, my husband, my kids all ahead of me,” said Taha, a 42-year-old Palos Park resident of Palestinian descent. “Now you’re coming to the West, I’m putting myself first and everybody behind me. How do you bring both worlds together?”

Shalabi, 50, of Bridgeview, and Taha founded Arab American Family Services in early 2001, shortly after getting to know one another while working for a behavioral health company they felt was doing a disservice to the Arab community.

“They weren’t really invested in the community,” Taha said. “It was, for them, a moneymaking business that we said ‘we didn’t want anything to do with this.’ But we did want the service and the love and the pride and the passion, so we said … ‘let’s just start our own business.’

“(Our parents) didn’t have an agency like ours to come in and say ‘how do I navigate through the system?’” Shalabi said.

Seventeen years after its founding, Arab American Family Services serves nearly 13,000 families throughout the Chicagoland area and employs more than 30 staff members.

In addition to helping connect families with benefits and services, the organization offers programming in areas like domestic violence, mental health, immigration and elder care.

The female-led agency’s ascent has faced some push back from more conservative elements within the Arab community that haven’t always been comfortable with women holding leadership positions.

“We told the men we want a seat at the table, they didn’t know what the heck to do with us. They still don’t know what to do with us,” Shalabi said. “We’re strong women and we’re independent and we want to make a difference in our community, too.”

She said that, from the beginning, the agency hasn’t wavered in doing what it believes is in the best interest of the community and future generations of Arab Americans, even if it has meant bringing issues like domestic violence, child abuse and mental health to the forefront.

“It’s always like we were coming at issues that, while everybody wanted to sweep it under the carpet, we were sweeping it right back into the mainstream,” Shalabi said.

While the women said they’ve butted heads with local imams and community members who hold more patriarchal views, they recognize the importance of meeting people where they’re at, without passing judgment.

“Everyone has their perspective and everyone has a different outlook on how they take on solutions,” Taha said.

Being able to approach their clients’ issues from a place of understanding has enabled the women to bridge the chasm that can exist between Arab and American cultures, they said.

In one recent instance, after the agency placed a “promiscuous” woman in a domestic violence shelter because she feared what her father would do to her, the man came seeking information about his daughter’s whereabouts.

While Shalabi said she refused to reveal the daughter’s location, she understood the father’s perspective and treated him as a concerned parent and not an offender.

“Those are the kinds of things where mainstream says you shouldn’t talk to a perpetrator, but we don’t look at him as a perpetrator in that stand, (but as) someone who’s a victim of his own culture and his own lack of knowledge and his own view of ‘how could my daughter do this,’” she said.

Shalabi’s introduction to social work arose out of a situation where traditional Arab culture collided with the American legal system.

After high school, she’d been living in an apartment building where, as one of the only English speakers, she served as a translator for many of the other tenants.

When the Department of Children and Family Services removed the son of one of her neighbors after the woman burned the boy with a heated spatula, Shalabi got involved, attending meetings between the woman and the agency.

“I ended up going with her to a lot of these sessions and a lot of these trainings,” she said. “Everybody would say, ‘Are you her social worker?’ I’m like, ‘What the hell is a social worker?’”

The experience moved her to enroll in college, where, in between raising three boys, she studied social work and eventually graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Taha, who also attended UIC, had been on the pre-med path there until taking a neuroscience class that inspired her to switch to psychology.

After finishing school, her best friend — who happened to be Shalabi’s cousin — put the women in contact. A short time later, they launched Arab American Family Services with the goal of giving community members a place to get culturally-sensitive social assistance.

Shalabi credits her and her partner’s embrace of client-centered care — which she said can be difficult for some culturally conservative Arabs to accept and understand — with their upbringings.

“Both of us have open-minded fathers,” she said.

The women also take pride in knowing that community members view them as strong female role models, Taha said.

“So many people will come and say, ‘I tell my daughters to look to you two,’” she said. “People look to us as the model of Arab, Muslim women who have really built something for the community and who carry our identity, our culture, our faith with such pride and respect.”