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Two months ago I met her for the first time. She was coordinating a fund rising bazaar for refining a mosque in Downtown Montreal. Pak Pipip, who introduced me to her, mentioned that this lady with her organization successfully managed to collect 250,000 CAD for Tsunami victims; more than half was donated for Indonesia. She also has a shelter with a complete facility, free of charge for the needy people. I was totally amazed.

Looking at her, I see a very cheerful, humble, and active lady in her sixty. One evening I gave her a visit just to have a nice chat with her. For the past 6 months she has been working at a small fast food restaurant, 12 hours on every working day. She’s responsible for almost everything: from serving the food, cleaning up the dishes and the shop, to accounting. Around 9.30PM she leaves for home by public transport. She also works as a cosmetic distributor, specially during the weekends, where she invites some ladies for a free cosmetic demo. About her family, she’s married to a French-Canadian convert, an architect, from a prosperous family. So, maybe you’ll have the same questions as I did:

Why do you have to work that hard?
I need the money to give the needy people, as simple as that…

Why are you so devoted to the needy people? I mean you don’t get anything back from them, do you?
No, I just think that it’s a pitty if you think that you only live your life for yourself, whereas at the same time you can do a lot for others. There is a lot of people that needs help, so we have to think creatively and work as hard as we can to help them out. I have no child, so it’s no use to collect money for myself, where will they go anyway if I die?

What about your husband, does he mind with all your activities?
No, I am very lucky to have a very understanding and supporting husband. He gives me freedom to do my activities, because he knows that they’re all for good reasons…

All true and I am glad to have a chance to know this lady in person. But there’s another interesting lesson I learnt that evening. I was helping her closing the store when she asked me to sweep the floor in front of the restaurant as well. For a minute I was thinking that sweeping the floor in a public place is more challenging than giving a presentation in front of a big class. She saw that look on my face and said, "Hey, are you shy? Let me do it!" I was struck and ashamed that, indeed, I was shy to do it. Then I realized how our society creates wrong definitions of good and bad. Our society respects people based on their wealth, education, career, and other social stratifications. Where actually in front of God, we are all the same. What differentiate us is mainly our deeds, how much good deeds we do and how straight the path we live our life…

For sister Sabriyah, thanks for the inspiration…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.