How school transformed a girl's life - and helped her village too
Awatif Morsy will never forget the day she heard that a new community school would be opened in her village. “Someone came to the house asking for the names of the children who weren’t attending class,” she recalls. “My mother gave them my name. I was so thrilled.” Like most eight-year-olds in Beni Shara’an village, Awatif’s life until then had been divided between back-breaking work in the nearby wheat fields and confinement in her home. The new school, built as part of a UNICEF initiative to build some 200 community schools in rural communities, was a dream come true. Not everyone in the village was so enthusiastic, at least initially. Some farmers complained that the school would deprive them of the cheap labour the children provided. Even Awatif’s own stepfather was unconvinced. “What does a girl need to study for?” he would ask. Happily, that was not the view of Farouk Abdel Naim, the elderly merchant who donated the premises for the school. “I’ve come to believe that a girl’s education is more important even than a boy’s,” says Mr. Abdel Naim. “A man can always make something out of his circumstances but a girl can’t. She needs to be educated in order to get on in life.” Eight years on, it’s hard to find anyone in Beni Shara’an who doesn’t agree. Ahmed Abdel Jaber, a shopkeeper but himself illiterate, sent his daughter, Rawia, to the school as soon as it opened. “Until Rawia went to school, my store accounts were in a complete mess,” he recalls. “But before long, she was taking care of all the books for me, as well as helping her elder sister to read and write.” In a village where illiteracy was the norm, there’s no shortage of stories about how a daughter’s education is making important differences: how the instructions on a doctor’s prescription or on a sack of fertilizer suddenly seemed clear or how educational programs on television began to make sense. And more important still how the example set by the children encouraged many older people to begin taking literacy classes themselves.
Awatif herself has built on the start the school gave her. In 2001, she was sent by Egypt to Kampala, Uganda to attend a major preparatory meeting for the UN Special Session on Children. She still remembers the excitement of her first trip abroad, and the sense of responsibility that came with leading one of the conference sessions. “If I hadn’t gone to school, I’d never have had that chance,” she says. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that through the achievement of these children, the eyes of a remote community have been opened onto the world.
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