Save the Children in Egypt
April 6, 2016
“Communication with my sponsor helped me develop a clearer sense of what the most important values in my life are,” says Asmaa.
Asmaa is 14 years old and lives with her parents in Kom Al-Mansoura. Her mother is a housewife and her father a laborer. She has four siblings who are also enrolled in school. Their living conditions are below the average within their remote community. Asmaa’s father has to work really hard just to be able to cover their basic needs. He must travel to a neighboring village to find work, which means he is not available to his family most of the time.
Despite financial struggles at home, Asmaa is a very clever and ambitious student and has always been at the top of her class. She loves to write stories and read books. Her dream is to become a doctor and build a hospital one day so she can help people living in remote areas like her village. “All I wish for is to help the people in my village stop struggling to reach the advanced health services, which are only available in the capital,” she says. She wants her village to be as clean and modernized as Assuit, the capital city of this part of Egypt. She hopes that people will stop throwing rubbish in the street that leads to her school and start planting trees instead.
Asmaa participated in the School Health and Nutrition activities implemented by Save the Children at her school and was a member of the Students Nutrition Committee. As a member, she took the lead in spreading health messages to both peers and her family, raising students’ awareness about healthy habits and behaviors in school and in the community as a whole.
“I am very grateful, Asmaa taught me and her siblings many useful things about hygiene and healthy cooking,” says Asmaa’s mother. For example, Asmaa showed her mother how to clean cooking oil so that it can be reused. She taught her siblings about how unhealthy it is to eat chips and drink soda all the time, and now the whole family drinks milk and eats healthy snacks instead.
Asmaa tells us she always believed that a sponsor can make a huge difference in a child’s life– that sponsors help children learn about interesting things like different cultures and languages. Asmaa has fond memories of her own letter-writing experiences with her friend and former sponsor, Sofya. Now she delights in helping her brother read his letters with his own sponsor.
Sponsorship programming sends a ripple through the whole community, benefiting children and their families alike. Thanks to the life lessons Asmaa has learned through the kindness offered to her by her sponsor on the other side of the world, she is now even more determined to help others in her own life. Good luck in pursuing your dream of bringing better health care to the villages of Egypt, Asmaa. We believe in you!
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