Leila Ahmad’s Cheese Kitchen

Leila Ahmad’s “dairy“is her small kitchen. In the scant 3 square meters there are just a few cabinets, a hot plate and a sink with dishes stacked nearby. In this small area, Leila Ahmad cooks a meal for her husband and seven children but she also works here, carefully filling two or three litres of sheep’s milk into plastic containers. She adds bacteria and salt and then lets it stand. Soon, a tasty sheep’s cheese is ready to be cut into pieces and added to glass bottles filled with olive oil. The salt helps keep the cheese longer, Leila explains. In a household without a refrigerator, this is an important matter. Leila Ahmad’s lives in Fundoqqomeh, a village with 3,700 inhabitants close to Jenin in the north part of the West Bank. In the past, although people lived a simple life here, they would not have considered themselves poor. After the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000 – a spontaneous Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, that changed and the inhabitants of Fundoqqomeh and other villages began to endure poverty as their men lost their livelihoods as labourers in Israel. Today, most villagers struggle to survive and 40 per cent of households are dependent on aid. Of course this was never a place where there was lots of luxury, but the situation in the last years has been getting worse and worse. As a result, almost all the shops in the village have closed. Today money earned is hardly enough to cover basic foods costs. That is why Leila Ahmad was happy when her family received three sheep from CARE, financed by ECHO, the humanitarian aid programme of the European Commission. The sheep are now bleating in a small stall. When they arrived the sheep were pregnant so the lambs were sold to buy two more. Now five adult sheep provide enough milk for cheese and yoghurt for the family with some left over to sell in the market. Leila’s grandfather raised sheep but the generations that followed turned away from herding and towards more lucrative jobs in large scale agriculture and construction in Israel. In 2000, 116,000 West Bankers worked in Israel. Today 36,000 have permits to do the same. While Leila Ahmad’s grandfather knew how to keep sheep – she has to learn and so CARE has provided a training program along with fodder for the first six months. After that the profits from selling the extra cheese will hopefully cover the cost of feed. Leila Ahmad had many plans, she wanted for example to expand her house. Today it is just a matter of surviving but the sheep have helped. Her family are no longer dependent food aid while many others around her still are.