Fawzia Anwari

Fawzia Anwari was born in Afghanistan and came to London in 1991. A teacher in Afghanistan, she describes how hard she worked to qualify as a hairdresser in Britain. She is now a senior stylist.

Listen to Fawzia (in Dari, mp3, 943kb)

Transcript

Read transcript in Dari (pdf, 18kb)

'When I came home from work, I did the housework until 10pm. When I came home from college, actually I studied in college and also worked two days in a hairdresser for free, just to gain experience. When I came home I finished the housework until 10pm. Put the children to bed. And when they were asleep, then I sat doing my college work until four in the morning. Because I had to learn the first and second year’s theory.

'And I had problems with the English language: when I wanted to write a project, every sentence I wrote, I had to find every single word from the dictionary, and I put the words next to each other to make sentences. This was the hardest part of my life. When I studied the first year of hairdressing, this was the hardest time of my life in London, as I studied from ten in the evening until four in the morning.

'Sometime I used to write a project ten times and I used to tear it up ten times, then wrote it again and then tore it up again until I wrote something satisfactory. At the end of the second year of hairdressing my teacher used to show my work as an example to other girls in the class, I mean every project that I had written.

'When I wrote my first project, which was about health and safety, my teacher wouldn’t believe it, she said to me "tell me who helped you?" I told her I have nobody at home who knows English and who can help.

'But when I studied as a hairdresser, I went to college three days a week, and every day for an hour I went to the learning centre to get help with my English. But it was the hardest period of my life. I studied the two years of the hairdressing course in one year, which I am very happy about.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit