Dubai: Twenty-year-old Jordanian Ruba Tawabini never in her wildest dreams imagined that her Facebook post would change her family’s fortunes in just a few hours.
It all started when her father returned home this week dejected because, for a third day in a row, there were no customers to his recently-opened shawarma shop. And he told his family that he will soon shut it down.
After hearing her father, Ruba did not think twice. She grabbed her phone and posted the family’s predicament on her Facebook account.
Ruba, in her post, said that her father worked hard for more than 20 years in several restaurants in Jordan and other countries around the Arab world, before he lost his job.
With no option left, he took some loans and opened his own restaurant with the hope that his family could survive. However, his dreams were shattered with no customers coming to buy shawarmas from his shop.
After sharing her family’s heart-breaking story, she sought support for her father, the sole breadwinner of the family. Hours after publishing her post, thousands of social media users shared her post and the number of fans on Suhool Sahab restaurant page skyrocketed to 149,000, up from just 97. Then followed a deluge of orders for shawarma besides hundreds of customers thronging the shop located south of the capital Amman.
Ruba thanked the Jordanians for their overwhelming response in standing by her father in their toughest times, stressing that this kind of outpouring of support was not strange for the Jordanians.
This was not all. Minister of Labour Nayef Stetieh visited the restaurant and praised the young woman for supporting her father and thanked the people for their response.
“I am proud of my daughter and what she has done to help me and her family. “I did not expect this huge response from people which turned the family’s grief into joy,” said the father, surrounded by a crowd of customers.
The news outlets, however, did not reveal the name of the woman's father.
