In tribute of HOPE

In tribute of:

Hanan Mohamed, Abrar Ibraheem, Aya Medhat, Azza Abdel-Azeem, Margaret Sameer, Cristina Magdy, Mohamed Hammouda, Mohamed El-Sayyed, Mostafa Mahmoud, Marwa Hamdallah, Amira Ghallab, Sally Samaan, Doaa Rushdi, Sarah Mohamed, Eman Mohamed and Ragya Abu El-Nabayel.

BBSA/GRP batch # 14 – Suez, September 2009

 

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I feel obliged to write something to you as a kind of modest response to your generous gift. In our situation today, a gift can mean either or both of the following: it can be a parting gift; to say goodbye, and/or a sign of appreciation. Personally, I don't like to think of it in terms of the first. And if you meant the second, sincerely, the small card with your words was enough and much appreciated. Whatever you did it for, thank you very much indeed.

However, let me elaborate on this memorable incident in my life.

It is not the first time I receive a gift from people who happen to come to my class; it is perhaps the second. When I find myself in that situation, I find it effortful to withhold my tears. I just don't feel I deserve it. I don't know why people care to do it to me. They keep telling me it's the least they can do for me in return for all what I did for them. I simply look at what I did and try to find out what was so special about it to discover that it was simply my regular work. Whatever I do is just fulfilling my job description, no more. Sometimes I do it willfully – I mean happily – and some other times I do it as a matter of course. How I do it would depend totally on the people in class. For this reason, I do believe that if there's someone to thank, it's you, and if there's someone to be thankful, it's me. The simple fact of the matter is that I just R E A C T to what is happening around. It might not be a very good quality to maintain; to be reactive, but at the very least it can tell that I rise to the situation to meet other people's expectations. Did I?

Time and again, I'm not trying to exercise modesty or look humble – although those are quite good qualities to have. What I'm trying to get at is that you need to place your focus on the right spot which is YOU. I would ever believe and maintain that people who come to where I teach – the FGF I mean – come for a purpose; they come to achieve certain goals. If they succeed, it's their success, and if they couldn't make it the way they planned, it's because of … it might be because they missed some factors while planning it. Probably I seem to be helpful, but we should always remember that if anything happens to anyone, it's because they worked on it … they not anyone else.

Another point I would like to articulate is that we should place people in their right positions. We shouldn't make a hero of someone who simply isn't. OK, I would agree that I did a wonderful job; a great job. So, how did I do it? Did I wave a magic wand to make everything all right? I'm trying to say that whatever achievement there was was a natural outcome of teamwork in which I had the least role. Come on, can't you see it? Who went online to collect data? Who compiled the report? Who generated the presentation script? Who worked on the desktop presentation? Who stayed up late to do all that? Who spent money on printing and other stuff? Who had to stay late after study hours at the centre to work on the expense of their rest? Did I do all this? No I didn't. And who bore all the stress that the coursework brought about? Maybe I was in the background of all this, but the background doesn't make the picture; the foreground does. Thanks to the quantum leap in picture editing software, the background can easily be changed, but the foreground will always be there. I never heard of someone who wanted to edit the foreground of a picture, has any of you done?

Don't ever underestimate yourself or what you can do. Don't ever think that what YOU achieve is because of someone else; what YOU do is because of YOU. It is of course ok to recognize other people, but without ignoring yourself.

I sort of have a firm belief that our nation lost a lot because of this; because we fail to recognize ourselves well. All the time we're eulogizing other people. I believe it's now time to make the change we should have made a long time ago.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I started your class at a critical moment in my life – my personal life. I was greatly demotivated. It was the "ever good" will of God to find people like you in my class. Very soon after we started, I found myself restoring my level of motivation again. Every day I wanted to come to class to see you and talk with you. The discussions we had really enlightened me and lifted my spirits. Thanks to you, by the time we approached the final days of English class, I had already restored my usual level of motivation. Thank you very very much for what I couldn't have done without you.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much for coming to my class, thank you very much for helping me get through a most difficult time of my life and thanks a lot for the gift. The best thing I liked was the small card with your nice words on it. I appreciate it very much. I am the kind of person who cherishes words so much. This does not at all mean that I didn't like the other gifts; on the contrary, they were fantastic too.

Before I finish up I need to remind you of something. In the beginning of the course I asked you to pick a name for the class. For any reason, we didn't. I feel it's now time we picked one that would glue us together. I suggest we call it "HOPE". To me, it stands for Happiness, Oneness (a peaceful feeling of being part of a whole), Peace (a feeling of being calm, happy, and not worried) and Empathy (the ability to understand other people's feelings and problems). This is really what you mean to me.

Finally, let me tell you that I would be much delighted to continue to keep in touch with each and every one of you. I'm available on both Gmail (langnling) and Yahoo (englishsociety2001).

Good luck.

God bless you all.

Essam Abulkhaire
Berlitz Chartered Instructor of English
Westwood Misr for Training and HR Development
Suez Unit