Ibrahim Hamid Mohamed is one of those unseen heroes of Darfur. Very few people know him, but he is not interested in fame or acknowledgments. He is just guided by what his moral dictates and that makes him even bigger.
Mr. Hamid is a vocational teacher with no job but with an active life. Every day in the morning, he leaves his house in the countryside and walks two hours to reach the school in Um Maraheik, in North Darfur, to teach about sixty teenagers. If not for him, all these young people would have been left without education and either should get to work or have to move to schools in El Fasher (more than two hours by bus).
The United Nations mission in Darfur built last year in the village a new school with six classrooms, but for now the Sudanese Ministry of Education does not have funds to hire teachers. Thus, each day Mr. Hamid comes and put together boys and girls in a single classroom (in Sudan, schools are not mixed) and fills the hours of the day with all kinds of lessons: maths, language, history, physics and even sports.
“I did not want that all efforts to build this center were at the end useless and I decided to dignify it with the best I can do,” says the teacher.
Hamid Ibrahim is one of those people who make life worthwhile despite its injustices. Even in Darfur, where it seems that education is at the bottom of priorities.