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T
he alphabet seemed to blend with each other and she
stood there horrified. Other parents quickly found their
child’s name cards and guided their children to their
desks. She closed her eyes trying desperately to remember how
to write her little boys’ name. But she couldn’t. And so she stood
there frozen wondering if the other parents were laughing at her.
Finally, it was Ahmad, her four-year-old boy who recognized his
name and guided his mother to his desk.
She kept a stoic composure until she reached the IC offices.
She then collapsed into a chair and cried profusely.
“I felt so stupid,” she said through her tears. “I’m sure all the
other mothers thought I was stupid. I couldn’t read his name.”
Hiam Abed al Rahman, 34, is a janitor at IC. Her job is to
keep the administration offices clean. Ahmad is enrolled at
school near her home. Abed al Rahman was forced to leave
school and care for her six younger siblings. The five older ones
were married off.
“My parents didn’t see the point of sending me to school,” she
said. “I was more useful around the house.”
An education was useless, she was told. Eventually, she will
get married and have a lot of children. That should be her only
aim in life.
When her father died, Abed al Rahman had to seek work to
help provide for the family. That’s when she landed the custodial
job at IC.
But parents and children were different here. “Everyone could
read,” she said. “Everyone wanted to learn. Young and old. And
look, mothers only had two or three kids and some only have
one and not ten. I wanted so much to be like them.”
She enrolled herself in an illiteracy course and learned the
basics of reading Arabic.
Since Ahmad’s birth four years ago, her life’s ambition
has become to educate him.
“He will go to university,” she says to anyone who
will listen. “He’s not going to be like me.”
For his part, young Ahmad seems to be do-
ing well at school. But that’s mostly thanks
to his mother who could frequently be heard
begging his afterschool day care center to provide him with
someone who will read to him a story.
“I don’t have much but I’ll pay extra if a teacher could spare
the time to read to him,” she said. “I can’t read. Please read to
him.”
A simple homework task – which mothers read with a simple
glance – sends her into panic. And so every day after work, she
takes a long bus drive with Ahmad to her sister’s house (her
sister refused to leave school and worked during holidays to pay
her tuition fees) so that her sister and child can do the home-
work together. She and Ahmad then take another long bus drive
back home.
“I want to give him the gift that was never given to me,” she
said emphatically. “The gift that all these children at IC have. No
matter what it takes, I want to give him
the gift of an education.”
A mother’s gift
IC Reaches Out
Happy Mother’s Day!