What is the ‘sameness moment’?

After 16 years in the corporate world, Lina Nahhas decided to focus her energy on building an empathy project that would enable humans to see each other beyond their identity masks.

From left, staff member Fiona Hepher with the co-founders of the [sameness] project Lina Nahhas and Jonny Kennaugh. Satish Kumar / The National

“The ‘sameness moment’ is when you look into the eyes of another human being, and culture and identity melt away – you see them as they truly are,” says Lina Nahhas, founder of the [sameness] project.

She coined the phrase sameness moment to describe what she hopes to achieve through her endeavour.

The 43-year-old Palestinian-Canadian has been striving to create sameness moments between people ever since she experienced one herself that was so profound it changed her life forever.

Eight years ago, right after her daughter, Jood, was born, Nahhas visited Palestine for the first time, with her new baby in tow.

“I had a moment with an Israeli mother,” she says. “Something dissolved between us and we both realised we wanted our children to live. We looked at each other and thought: ‘We have the same pain, the same joy, the same dream for our children’.

“For the first time, it hit me – we both had children and we were both children at one point. How can it be that we allow the world to do this to our children? It was very personal. And as difficult as it may be, it didn’t take away from my Palestinian identity, because it made my narrative as a Palestinian more valid for the human plight.

“If I could feel that way with my enemy, that means humans have within them a muscle for empathy, to see the other person’s pain. And we vowed to each other that this is the point where something bigger needs to be done – for my community, for the world, and for my child. I need her to grow up as a human being and not have all these identity layers in the way of her being seen. Those were the seeds that instigated my dream.”

Nahhas had just sold her UAE-based company Siraj, the first all-Arab boutique market research and consulting agency in the region. After 16 years in the corporate world, she started focusing her energy on working out how to build an empathy project that would enable humans to see each other beyond their identity masks.

Four years later, Nahhas told family friends Jonny and Aimee-Rose Kennaugh about her sameness moment. The couple were staying with her at her home in Dubai as part of a round-the-world trip.

“Those casual beachside conversations led to us sitting down and brainstorming how to make this idea of sameness a tangible experience”, says Jonny, a social worker from New Zealand. “After a few months, Lina asked if she could hire us. We decided to give it a go and see what happens.”

That was in 2011. Initially, Nahhas had to fund the project on her own, selling her Dubai apartment to invest in the venture. Last year, revenue started trickling in, with companies such as PepsiCo getting on board. So far, the [sameness] project has had nine different ventures, with the theme of creating sameness moments underlying each venture. The projects range from giving out water and showing appreciation to manual labourers to chatting to strangers in galleries on a “conversation chair”.

In one project, shoes were sold containing the life stories of maids on each sole – so wearers could literally “walk in their shoes”.

“As soon as I had my child, I started witnessing how some people behaved towards their nannies, it was just horrendous,” says Nahhas. “We wanted people to feel empathy for these women.”