Widad in the midst of the graduates of 1957

Widad Massoud as she began in 1955

She is from my village, this dark young woman, and she is my next-door neighbor — I could call to her from the roof of our house if I wished. I present her to society as an ambitious young woman with her own field, of which she means to make an art. She is Widad Massoud.

She began going to the village dressmaker when

she was thirteen, for there was no possibility of continuing her secondary studies. Then came a summer in which a lady arrived in our village who taught sewing while she summered. Widad did nothing less than go to this summer teacher and finish the whole course in two months, at the end

of which she carried away a certificate in cutting and sewing.

All this might be quite ordinary; but the remarkable thing is that Widad began to dream: to dream of having a sewing and cutting school of her own. For many are the girls of our village who go

to no school at all, and there is no doubt that a school of this kind would help them in the future.

Ambition springs from within the soul, and where it exists, difficulties are smoothed away...

To carry out this project money was needed, and the consent of her family, and their permission to use the house as the school's home in its first