RIO DE JANEIRO – The subject was taboo in childhood in Lebanon, whispered, but never discussed openly.
This came to light when Maha Mamo was 15 and, furious at missing a Girl Scout trip abroad, she confronted her parents.
It was then that Mamo learned that she and her two brothers were born stateless, ineligible for citizenship in any country and deprived of the basic rights that come with her – including the passport required for her Boy Scout travel.
Lebanon does not automatically grant citizenship to the children of immigrants who are born there, as she and her brothers explained their parents. And documents from his own country, Syria, were out of the question, his mother and father said, because their interfaith marriage was illegal there.
Ms. Mamo’s search for a homeland took her to Brazil, where in 2018 she and her sister, Souad, became the first stateless persons to become citizens under a new immigration law in the country.
Throughout her search for years, Mamo, who recently published a memoir about her ordeal, has become the most visible ex-stateless person and a singularly effective defender of the plight of millions of people who remain in limbo.
Years before getting a passport, Mamo, now 32, traveled the world using a special travel document issued to some stateless people, making passionate speeches at United Nations conferences and other events.
“Thanks to their public appearances and social media presence on different continents,” said Melanie Khanna, head of the United Nations refugee agency’s statelessness section, “thousands of people understood how one can end up without a country without guilt, and how they are the consequences of that are devastating. “
The number of people worldwide without nationality is difficult to estimate. There are at least 4.2 million stateless people in the 79 countries that report them, but the UN agency believes that this is a serious count and that the problem affects many millions more.
Statelessness arises from a variety of situations, including redesigned borders, discriminatory laws that prevent women from passing on their nationality to a child, unregistered births or mass expulsion from an ethnic group.
Ms. Mamo’s journey to become a writer and activist with a passport who makes perfect speeches, including a TED Talk in Geneva, started with years of discouragement.
Life in Lebanon seemed stifling for Mamo and his two brothers. Their parents were concerned whenever children crossed checkpoints in devastated Beirut, where Syrians used to be treated with hostility.
The money was tight, she said. His mother, who was a nurse in Syria, did not work in Lebanon. His father used his truck to earn money as a transport engine. Children received new clothes twice a year – during Christmas and Easter.
Since the children had no documents, their parents had to work miracles to enroll them in school, begging the authorities for exemptions and favors. When she was old enough to think about college, Mamo found only one university willing to accept her, which meant giving up her dream of studying medicine.
She pursued the longest hypothesis, including adoption by a friend’s parents. The Mamo family paid a small fortune to people who said they knew someone who knew someone who could make them Lebanese.
“We did everything you can imagine,” she said. “We lost a lot of money by paying people who said they had contacts.”
His brothers seemed resigned to their fates. But Mamo decided that he would not rest until he found a way out. She made a list of all embassies in Lebanon and sent each one an email describing the missed opportunities and dreams she had.
For years, most embassies ignored it and some sent short replies. In 2013, the ambassador of Mexico responded, offering to help find a way to get her there.
That possibility led Mamo’s sister Souad to try her luck too. She sent her own flurry of emails to diplomatic missions. In March 2014, the Brazilian embassy extended to Souad and, later, to Mrs. Mamo and her brother, Eddy, an invitation to travel to Brazil with a special visa for Syrian refugees.
Mrs. Mamo knew almost nothing about Brazil. “The only thing we knew was that it was an insecure country,” she said.
With the audacity that took her so far, Ms. Mamo flipped through Facebook to see if she could find friends who had been in Brazil and discovered that a scout from her former troop had stayed with a Brazilian family briefly.
She sent a message to the family introducing herself. To her surprise, the family invited her and her brothers to stay at their home in the city of Belo Horizonte.
In September 2014, when he was 26, Mamo boarded a flight out of Lebanon – after paying the government thousands of dollars in fines for exceeding his visa’s validity period.
Once in Brazil, she was initially dazzled by the size of the country and the hospitality she found. But she soon realized that there was no clear way to legalize her immigration situation – a fact that no one at the Brazilian embassy in Beirut had made clear.
“You start to get confused, like, what am I doing here,” said Mamo. “I don’t understand the language, I don’t understand the culture.”
Dona Mamo was doing odd jobs in Belo Horizonte, like distributing flyers on the street.
In March 2015, an interview she gave to a Brazilian television program on statelessness started her career as an activist. United Nations officials, who in the previous year had started a campaign asking countries to adopt policies to eliminate statelessness, took note.
They helped Mamo obtain a travel document, and soon she was flying around the world, telling her story and asking lawmakers to create legal avenues for citizenship for the countless millions without nationality.
The United Nations created two conventions on the rights of stateless persons after World War II, but obtained relatively few signatories.
This meant that even countries with a history of welcoming immigrants, including Brazil and the United States, lacked a path for stateless people who aspired to become citizens.
Mrs. Mamo was getting tired of dedicating so much work and time to activism that it was not bringing her and her brothers closer to resolving their statelessness. Then his brother Eddy was killed during an attempted robbery near his home in June 2016.
The death generated extensive news coverage in Brazil and gave urgency to Mamo’s activism. Officials in the capital, Brasília, took note. In 2017, when lawmakers updated the country’s immigration code, they included a new provision to provide stateless persons with a simplified path to citizenship.
In June 2018, Torquato Jardim, then Minister of Justice, invited Mamo and his sister to the capital for a ceremony in which they became the first stateless persons designated as eligible for citizenship in Brazil.
A few months later, Brazilian officials in Geneva surprised Mamo with her citizenship papers when she finished one of her speeches on statelessness, which she usually does with a Brazilian flag slung over her shoulders.
United Nations officials credit Mamo’s persistence in putting the issue on Brazil’s political agenda, which is among only 23 countries that currently have legal avenues to absorb stateless people.
Mamo said that he started to feel viscerally Brazilian, feeling at home in a nation with such a wide amalgamation of races, creeds and countries of ancestry. “Whenever they hear my story, no one will ask me: are you a Muslim, are you a Christian?” she said. “They value you simply for being a human being.”
In December 2018, during one of the first trips he made with his Brazilian passport, Mamo found himself releasing customs in Paris the moment a flight from Beirut landed.
She couldn’t help noticing that immigration control officers closely inspected the passports and visas of Lebanese passengers and asked many questions.
Unlike Lebanese, Brazilians do not need a visa to enter France. When she presented her passport, she was greeted with a warm smile – no questions asked.
“I was like, oh my God, I love my Brazilian passport.” she said. Seeing the Lebanese being more scrutinized, she was unable to avoid a little schadenfreude. “What comes, goes,” she said.