Taroudant- This story is about a woman -my mother- who earned her first degree in her late fifties. At the age when all her peers all over the world retire, she started her academic career with great passion, and exceptional commitment.
My mother, like millions of Moroccan women, didn’t have the chance to enroll in school in her childhood, simply, because there was no local school for her to attend. The only places of study available at that time were mosques. Teachers were usually the imams of mosques, and students were exclusively boys. Conventionally, there was no rule or explicit statement prohibiting girls from attending those classes, (generally, Quran recitation, religious chants and classical Arabic grammar) but parents were reluctant to send their daughters to receive such lessons. They believed instead that the most useful lessons, which little girls desperately needed, were those they would learn with their mothers at home and on the farm.
She had never been a student; to be more precise, she had never been a child. At the time when she started to recognize her existence, she was moved to live in a different house apart from the family and neighbors she knew. In other words, she was married to my father. Being still a little child, the concept of marriage hadn’t been clearly materialized in her little mind.
She thought that she would go back to her parents’ house after a short visit. Soon she understood that she would spend the rest of her life with new people and new surroundings. Fortunately, she managed to live a peaceful, though very busy, life with the same family up until now.
Her dream, to go the mosque and learn like the other boys of the neighborhood, never saw the light during those forty years. As time passed by, she performed her prayers with the very limited Quran verses she memorized somehow throughout her life. The worships she used to say imploring God were phrased in her mother tongue (Berber) in the form of improvised supplications.
She started to study only recently when the courses offered by the Moroccan program for literacy were available in her small town. Launched in early 2000, the program targets the illiterate aged, and those who dropped out of school at an early age.
Thanks to that initiative, she started to believe that her everlasting dream – to know how to read and write- would finally, though late, come true. She showed a dedicated commitment to the classes offered by a female teacher. She never missed willingly a session and she spent a lot of time at home revising the lessons she had in her notebook. She practiced handwriting and dedicated a lot of time to reciting the Quran verses assigned by her teacher, again and again.
The day she received her first level certificate (a degree for successfully completing the first level of the literacy program) with an honorable grade was one of her most triumphant moments. Finally, she has the official recognition that she knows how to read and write, an extra added value in comparison with her illiterate friends.
Since then, my mother has developed a funny hobby. She has the habit of reading street placards and news headlines on the TV screen. When I go with her for a walk she would read everything she comes across, sometimes loudly enough so that I can hear her. I don’t think she is showing off, but maybe that I have to be proud of my mother who knows how to read and write. Even though sometimes she does this excessively, I always love to hear her pronounce the words correctly.
The story of my mother is the story of many women who had strong determination and great passion for studies, but to their bad luck, they were born in the wrong place and time. I just wonder how such women with aspiring dreams and an immense thirst for learning would have been if they had been given a seat at school when they were children.
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