Mary Edith Abu-Saba is Outreach Director at the Rebuilding Alliance. She joined the Rebuilding Alliance in 2002, shortly after the organization formed. With the news of cancer diagnosis in her family in 2004, she took an extended leave of absence, and returning as Outreach Director in the summer of 2009. She coordinated 177 house party fundraisers in those beginning years, made innumerable phone calls to stay in touch, writing great thank you letters and visiting our partners in Palestine and Israel. Mary recently coordinated the Rebuilding Alliance’s 2nd Annual Peacemakers Dinner with 210 people in attendance.
Mary Edith is a counseling psychologist by profession, worked in the Counseling Center of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and also had her own private practice, after she finished her Ph. D. from the University of Illinois. Back in the sixties, in her senior year of college at the Radolph Macon Women’s College in Virginia, Mary spent 30 days in a Virginia jail for sipping tea with black and white friends while integrating Woolworth’s lunch counter. Her late husband, Elias Abu-Saba, (d. 2006), is originally from Lebanon, and came to USA to earn his Master’s and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering.
In the book, Women and War in Lebanon edited by Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, Mary wrote, “Though out history, while some people wage war for their own purposes, other people, buffeted by those wars, struggle to keep the civilization intact in the face of untold suffering.” No secret who Mary is!
