Russeifa, a city inhabited by just under a million people living in 37 square kilometers, is located between two main governorates, the capital Amman and Zarqa. Its urban extension extends to the two sides of the cities without any empty spaces. As a district, it is affiliated with Zarqa Governorate, and it is the second most densely populated city in the world after Gaza.
In Russeifa, many major problems remained unsolved, such as the problem of the so-called Pepsi Lake, which is a large hole filled with stagnant water behind the Pepsi Cola factory, where the bottle washing water came out of the factory and collected, causing an environmental problem that remained unsolved until recently, when work began to change this reality.
There was also the yeast factory that poured its waste into the stream of the torrent that runs from Amman, crossing through Russeifa and then to Zarqa, to finally flow into one of the largest water dams in Jordan, The King Talal Dam, in addition to this there is the phosphate factory, the first central point of environmental pollution in the city, knowing that Russeifa was formed mainly due to the presence of the old phosphate factory, and the first human residence in Russeifa was due to phosphate mining in this area. When the phosphate factory was established here, people began building houses and living with their families near their place of work, in addition to other population groups that were living around the stream and working in seasonal agriculture, taking advantage of the proximity of the water.
Environmental problems later emerged due to phosphate waste, which caused many health problems for the population, such as respiratory diseases and others. Pepsi Lake and the yeast factory also caused the same health problems.
“We started our project based on these inputs, and we noticed other risk factors that made this densely populated area suffer from tremendous psychological pressures such as poverty, unemployment, extremism, stress, drugs and all the other problems that a densely populated city can suffer from,” says Wesam Al Mubarak, the project manager.
“For these people who suffer from all these problems, the environment is a privilege, and preserving the environment is not a priority as they could not match the relationship between the environment, the conflicts in their lives and how it affects their mental health,” says Wesam.
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“In our project, we decided to first explain the relationship between the stress they are experiencing and the environmental issues in the surrounding area,” explains Wesam, adding, “We tried to engage the youth from the area through two goals, advocacy for the environment and mental health for the environment. Basically, we call it environmental stress, but it focuses more on the mental health component, psychosocial support, and how the lack of green spaces and other environmental issues affect mental health.”
“We trained 50 young men and women from Russeifa on environmental peace through workshops on conflict sensitivity, do no harm and environmental advocacy. Prior to that, we trained a core team of 10 young men and women from Athar Association. As a basic training on conflict sensitivity, conflict management, do no harm and monitoring and evaluation tools. The core team of 10 young men transferred this knowledge to a team of 50 young men and women aged 18-30 who were selected from hundreds of young people who responded to an open survey we sent to all young people in all five Russeifa districts (Rasheed, Prince Talal Housing Project, Awajan, North Mountain and South Mountain). We also conducted field outreach to attract young people interested in the environment.”
Wesam expresses his surprise at the speed of response from the youth and the government.
In one of the community initiatives, young people collected questions about issues affecting their living conditions to ask the mayor about them, and to tell him about their role and what they need from the municipality. They started by conducting a field survey in the Russeifa areas, and asked people about the issues they wanted to tell the mayor about. They held several social dialogue sessions and an interesting dialogue session with the mayor, and discussed with him and the municipal council, that attended the session, many issues, including the lack of containers in residential areas and their presence only in public places such as schools, hospitals and health centers. During the discussion, they discovered that the municipality needs more money to implement its plans for this project, as the plans are to distribute the containers in five streets and five neighborhoods out of the five areas in the city. This will be done as a competition between the regions, a competition for which is the most beautiful neighborhood, the most beautiful road and the most beautiful area, with them being given 3 months to make this experiment a success.
After the dialogue session with the decision makers in the city, And as the youth had many issues to put in front of the mayor and the Council of the municipality, in the beginning the mayor was aggressive, he thought he was doing his best with his council for the good of the municipality, But when he heard from the youth they convinced him it is a community accountability and is a common responsibility between the municipality and the community, he started supporting their ideas directly And asking them to create social initiatives to be supported by the municipality. This was a great milestone.
As part of their efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues in Russeifa, the youth made a documentary film. The hero of the film is a child who lives in Russeifa as it looked in the past, an area full of farms and trees and a river with clean water that is used for irrigation. When the young child becomes a young man, he begins to describe his suffering in living in a dry area with no green spaces and no water in the river in which the fish used to live. It became a polluted torrent with a foul smell, with a lot of garbage on the banks of the empty river. He also talks about the diseases that affected the city’s residents due to the waste of factories that killed the life of the river.
The river, where fish used to live, is now completely dry.
Due to the dialogue between the mayor and other stakeholders in the city on the one hand, and the Environmental Peace Project and the trained youth representing the project on the other hand, the mayor promised to adopt any ideas that come from these fifty youth at any time, and the municipality will provide the necessary support to implement their proposals for the benefit of the city. An example of this sustainable relationship is when the youth asked to plant hundreds of trees in the city, and the municipality provided them and put its workers to help in planting them and facilitate the required process using municipal logistics.
This was a direct and valuable result of the youth initiative within the Green Impact Project implemented by the local partner, Athar Association, in cooperation with forumZFD.
The environmental marathon aimed to raise awareness among a generation of children, with the aim of spreading awareness among families in the city. It played a vital role in motivating 150 participants from children and youth aged 10 to 15 years to run a distance of one kilometer inside the park to raise awareness of the importance of preserving the environment and running in a clean space inside the environmental park. This area was one of the most prominent environmental challenges faced by the city, which is the “Phosphate Hills”. It was transformed into a recreational space for the city’s residents.
At the end of the marathon, the participating children received a bag containing brochures about what the marathon is and what the environment is, small gifts and seeds to plant in their homes with a small catalog explaining about the seeds and how to plant and care for the plants.
Teacher Nour Hourani expressed the children’s happiness at attending such a public event, stressing that it was the first time she had witnessed such an event during her twenty years of experience in the field of education in Russeifa.
“I will run, it will be great, I will run freely in this park,” says Samer, an 11-year-old student, a few minutes before the marathon starts.
“I got basil seeds in this cloth bag they gave us, and I will plant them in our little garden at home, and my mother will love them,” says Maya, a 12-year-old student girl, happily drinking a free soft drink with three other classmates, holding popcorn in their other hands.
“One of the amazing reactions to our project,” says Wesam Al-Mubarak, “was that we recently received a notification from the mayor that the yeast factory had decided to support the eco-park in Russeifa. Our project may not have been the only one that made this change, but it certainly had a big impact. They have already provided some support to plant trees in the park and bring in children’s swings and other toys and assets to put inside the park. That’s a big change that the yeast factory is supporting the eco-park.”
The eco-park was opened last year in August 2023, built on hills of old phosphate factory remains, by royal initiative. The establishment of the park in Russeifa was good news for all residents, as it was the first place where they could breathe fresh air.
“If we had the will and the money, we could turn this 40% of the Phosphate Company’s land into a clean space,” says Athar’s director Anas Bele. “The royal initiative was the beginning but there has to be a social responsibility from all stakeholders to make a difference. Now, in just one year since this land was acquired, you are starting to see some greenery on some young trees. It’s something that disappeared in Russeifa 40 or 50 years ago.”
Another effect of the pressure of our project is that bulldozers have for the first time begun to sweep stones and waste from the path of the torrent.
For many years, the yeast factory waste was one of the main factors affecting the water quality in the stream due to the large volume of sewage flowing directly from the factory into the stream, damaging the farms on the river bank which was on its way to turning the farms into a health hazard. After great public pressure from the residents, the factory was forced to stop pouring sewage into the stream and move parts of the production process to operate in Egypt. The current process in the yeast factory on site is not as harmful as it was in the past.
One of the major problems caused by the torrent every year is that during the year, garbage and old waste that comes out of building houses or carrying out any work is thrown in the streets or in the neighborhoods on the edges of the torrent. When it rains in winter, the water rises above the banks of the torrent and often causes flooding in some of the houses near it.
Previously, the municipality only focused on the torrent path areas to prepare them for rain before winter, but this is the first time that work has been done along the torrent path after the exciting discussion between the mayor and the youth in the session when the mayor promised that this time the work would be done all along the path.
Managing flood problems is not the responsibility of Russeifa Municipality alone, but there are six entities and ministries involved in managing this problem. This makes solving the problem a big issue because it is not an individual decision. Here comes the importance of the good relations that the forumZFD project and Athar organization managers have established with all the concerned entities to improve the efforts they are making in the right direction.
ForumZFD is committed to community peacebuilding projects, based on environmental peacebuilding. The project is a pilot project based on the stress and tension caused by resource scarcity, and the transformation of resource conflict, in order to conduct research.