Mariam

She was born into a family unlike any other around. Her father grew up in Iraq, where his father had moved to work for an oil company. Her mother - the daughter of a blind Cuban father and a strong mother who carried her five children on her back. In her childhood, her father decided to do something no one in the Nazareth of that era understood: invest in his only daughters as people typically invested in sons - in education and inheritance. Within an old world, he created a new reality. In a home where her parents did not fulfill their dreams of higher education, Mariam and her sisters fulfilled theirs.

As long as she was in Nazareth, she felt herself an Israeli Arab. When she moved to Jerusalem and worked in aid organizations in the Palestinian Authority, complexity unfolded before her: the pain of nations, stories of occupation, separation fences, fears, tensions. She did not feel she belonged to either side, but precisely out of that non-belonging grew her ability to see both sides in their fullness. Out of the gap, her capacity to hold a dual truth without choosing a nationalism that negates the other stood out.

" If I could, I would change all the generalizations, racism, and hatred. We are all human beings - Jewish, Muslim, Christian. We all need help."

Alongside national struggles, Mariam also knew personal battles. When she was pregnant and the family was filling with new life, she suddenly discovered that her body was fighting her from within. She had no family nearby, no one to assist. She traveled to chemotherapy treatments on public buses and returned home exhausted to care for her children. Wavering between side effects, despair, and hope, Mariam conducted a searching negotiation with God, which always ended in the feeling that her life was entrusted in His hands. Three years after successfully finishing chemotherapy treatments - she became pregnant again. Her doctor looked at her as a medical miracle. And that is how she saw it too: not only had her body fully healed and recovered, it also granted her an unexpected gift.

After overcoming cancer, she decided to fulfill her childhood dream: to become an attorney. She worked full-time, raised three children, studied at night, funded her tuition independently, and graduated with honors! Since then, Mariam's natural place has been at the Peles Center, in a multicultural team. There she feels comfortable, without having to explain who she is, as if the place was tailor-made specifically for her.

"There are difficult situations, but there is also always something to be done, and I believe in miracles. So that helps me."

She meets people who have lost everything, impatient clerks, exhausting bureaucracy. But she knows that what remains in the end is not the struggle, but the impact. For Mariam, success begins from the very first moment. When a person arrives in despair with a situation too complex for their capacity, and she gently tells them: "There is hope. It will take a little time, but we will move step by step." For Mariam, telling a person there is hope is already the beginning of success. Like the young man who walked in to see her with an enforcement file weighing like a heavy burden on his neck, and his car, his sole source of livelihood, impounded. Where everyone saw a wall, Mariam opened a window. She sat with him for hours, writing down on paper together: expenses, income, debts. A repayment schedule, priorities. A new path: here we pay, here we cut. And then, in a moment of soft truth, he told her how all his life he felt inferior to others, but "you treated me as an equal among equals, and that changed my heart."

"I learn from the people I accompany about how strong one can be, even when the struggle is sometimes within yourself, in your internal coping."

Mariam knows how to fight for rights and also how to run long distances with people. Especially with those suffering from physical and mental disabilities. She is someone who moves unmovable systems, someone who does not despair over the most complicated cases. Finding solutions that doubtfully anyone else would find, simply because she refuses to give up. She has eyes that see and a heart that believes there are no impossible situations. Mariam, after all, believes in miracles. And she has no doubt: God's hand holds people.

"Through the heart, I manage to love and give everything I have to give."