DIGITAL DIVIDE & ME: HEBA’S STORY
Muslim women typing on a laptop. Photograph by Cedric Fauntleroy from Pexels.
Thanks to your donations to our Digital Divide fundraising campaign, Success4All has donated a new laptop and connected Heba’s* family to the internet.
Mum of 2 Heba* arrived in the UK with her husband and two children nearly 10 months ago.
The family was recently granted refugee status.
When the family first arrived, they were placed in an ‘unlivable’ hotel for 5 months, which led to the deterioration of Heba’s mental and physical health.
It was only after a medical emergency that the family were relocated to a house where they were all together.
During their rough stay in the hotel, the children, one in Year 7 and one in Year 5 were completing long commutes to and from school.
“They didn’t have any space in the local school so they had to go to a school that was further away.” For the eldest, the commute added to nearly 9 miles there and back.
The commute, in addition to hotel meal timings, meant that the children had to be back before 6 pm otherwise, they would miss out on dinner and go hungry. This meant that neither child could take part in any afterschool activities or clubs.
Currently, asylum seekers in the UK are not allowed to work, so they rely on the support given to them by the government. For asylum seekers living in accommodation which provides meals, they receive £9.10 per person.
When the children arrived back at the hotel, the room they were staying in prevented the children from learning.
“My child loved to read but he couldn’t do this in the hotel. The lighting was so bad that they couldn’t read or do anything.”
Not only could the children not read in their spare time, but they also couldn’t complete their homework as the family did not have access to a laptop or the internet.
Similar to many families in our country, the children had to rely on their mum’s phone to complete their homework.
“Here we don’t have a laptop, so sometimes the children would do their homework on my mobile phone, so it’s difficult. Also, in our country, we were in a good life. We had everything. They were in an international school, they used to have a luxurious life, but we are here for political problems so we couldn’t move everything when we came.”
Since arriving, Heba has grown more concerned about her children’s education.
“For my oldest child, when we were in our country he used to do programming on applications like movie maker and Scratch but now he doesn’t do anything. I’m afraid that his skill might be lower.
“In our country, they used to speak English and French in school. Here, they don’t speak French.”
Heba wants her children to have access to the internet and a laptop so that they can catch up on their learning. She said, “I want to provide some videos or something on the laptop. My other child has a website to do some educational games, but now, to be honest I didn’t do it with him because I don’t have a laptop.”
With the new addition of the laptop and the internet, Heba is already feeling optimistic about her children’s future.
“They (donors) do a positive thing to other people who live here. This effort must be appreciated because if they didn’t fund projects like yours, then people like us will be in bad condition.”
*To protect the identity of the family, we have changed some identifying details.