A need no one was naming 

Mariam Danach was already stretched thin when the war escalated. A dentist completing her master’s in pediatric dentistry, and a trained firefighter and paramedic volunteer, she was studying, seeing patients, and responding to emergencies, often all in the same day. 

A visit to a displacement shelter and the women she met there redirected her attention. Pregnant women, recently delivered women, women managing blood clots and pregnancy complications that the emergency response had no capacity to address. And her sister-in-law, who had just given birth to twins. “I know how hard that is,” Mariam said. “Everyone was providing services; food, blankets, hygiene kits, but no one was thinking about the women who were giving birth in the middle of all this.” 

She went home and started assembling care packages. 

Born into this 

The weight of that gap is easy to miss unless you have seen it up close. Let me put it into perspective. 

A woman in her final weeks of pregnancy is not the same as anyone else in that shelter. She fled her home without notice through roads that were overcrowded, dangerous, and exhausting. She arrived somewhere unfamiliar, shared a space with dozens of strangers, slept on a mattress on a school floor, and waited to give birth. 

When the moment came, if she was lucky, she reached a hospital. Once the baby arrived, she returned to that same crowded hall, her body still healing, her newborn entirely dependent on her, with no privacy, no postpartum support, and frequently none of the basic supplies that the first days of a newborn’s life require. The absence of a maternity pad, a thermometer, or formula milk is not a minor gap in those circumstances. It is the difference between coping and crisis. 

This is the reality Mariam had seen with her own eyes. Before she even launched the initiative, women were already reaching out to her about pregnancy complications they could not get medications for. She helped redirect them to the Lebanese Red Cross once she learned it could handle distributions. But the postpartum gap, that specific, physically vulnerable window right after birth, remained entirely unaddressed. 

Package by package 

The care packages she and her friend Arib Bitar put together were precise and practical: maternity pads, diapers, formula milk, gauze, alcohol, vitamins, a feeding bottle, a pacifier, blankets, a thermometer, cotton buds. 

Word spread the way it does in crises; from woman to woman, shelter to shelter. Displaced women from the South and the Bekaa began reaching out directly. Deliveries went to Aramoun, Bchamoun, and further South. As demand grew, Mariam shifted toward working with shelter coordinators, asking them to assess and report back: how many women, how many newborns, boys or girls.

Around 250 packages reached shelters across Beirut, Saida, the Chouf, and the West Bekaa. Everything was funded through donations from friends and family, tracked on Excel sheets, and delivered by people who were also living through the same war.  

A reflection 

What stays with me is that it took one personal experience, watching her sister-in-law give birth to twins, to illuminate a gap that an entire emergency system had failed to see. 

Emergency systems tend to organize around categories they already know how to address. But they are rarely gender-sensitive in practice. A woman who has just given birth in a displacement shelter is not simply someone who needs food and a mattress. She is someone whose body is healing, whose newborn depends entirely on her, and who is doing all of this without privacy, without support, and often without the most basic supplies. That is not a secondary need. It is an urgent one, and it was almost entirely invisible until Mariam named it.

Mariam was clear-eyed about the limits of what a personal initiative can sustain. “What we’re providing won’t last,” she said, “and the children, the elderly, people with special needs, none of them are receiving enough.” She was equally direct about the structural failure underneath it all: “The emergency response in Lebanon was not prepared. It was grassroots initiatives that moved first.” 

In the middle of everything, she made sure that women who had just brought new lives into the world did not do so entirely unseen. 

Yasmine El Berjawi

Specialized in citizenship education, youth engagement, and governance in the Arab region. She holds a double BA in Political Studies and Public Administration from the American University of Beirut (’24), with minors in International Law, Civil Society, and Human Rights. She received the FAS Mamdouha S. Bobst Award and the Dr. Randa Antoun Annual Award for civic engagement and public service.