A life less ordinary

Dubai: Fatima is no ordinary 10th grader. At 30 years old, the Syrian woman has seen so much - forced into marriage at age nine and going through two forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed midwives that damaged her ability to conceive again.

But she has surmounted all odds, first finding refuge in the UAE and then being nominated for the Shaikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Award for Education after resuming her studies.

Fatima who was born near Syria's northern city of Halab, was partly paralysed after a bout of Malta Fever at the age of five. In 1989, when she was nine, a medical team from a Syrian university treated her, helping her to walk again.

Child marriage

Then her father gave her away in marriage at the age of nine to a man 35 years her senior. In her married life, Fatima was physically and emotionally abused.

"My husband and his first wife used to beat me, keep me locked up and treated me as a servant," she said. In 1991, at age 12, she got pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy who lived only for three months. Fatima said she suspected her husband and stepmother suffocated the infant to death after they sent her away on an errand.

"He refused to even name the baby," she said. "I know he killed him but I don't have proof."

The husband did not stop at that. In her second pregnancy, he forced her to have an abortion by hiring an unlicensed midwife, while she suffered severe bleeding during another forced abortion that prevented her from conceiving again. Syrian authorities later arrested her husband and the midwife and the court ordered him to divorce her.

Her hopes were rekindled when she arrived in the UAE in 1999, after her uncle who worked for a Dubai company took her to live with a family friend of his.

Top of the class

After coming here, she continued her studies. Being at the top of her class, achieving an average grade of 97 per cent at the Umm Ammar Centre for Teaching Adults, Fatima has been nominated for the Shaikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Award for Education's outstanding student award. Winners will be announced in April 2010.

She also learned to play the keyboard while working in the kitchen at the Dubai Folklore Society. There she met Emirati Anis Al Sa'adi, 35, a Dubai Police officer, whom she later married.

"I felt she was different when I first met her," Al Sa'adi said. Fatima said she is keen to pursue studies in medicine.

Muna Jawad, Awards Coordinator at the Ajman Educational Zone, said that Fatima embodies what the Shaikh Hamdan Award is about - "talent and ambition can defy life's odds".