The scholarly achievement of a Yemeni national and the peaceful environs of Kerala has prompted him to settle in the State to pursue higher education and raise his family.
Having gone to great lengths to obtain documents to travel from his strife-torn nation and get himself admitted in the University of Kerala, 31-year old Eassa Ali Mohammed Ali had managed to top in the M.A. Linguistics programme. He has no plans to rest on his laurels and return home.
“My journey has only started. I have applied for the Ph.D. programme at the university. My elder daughter Maram is a UKG student at a school in Karyavattom and has begun to learn Malayalam. Manar, the younger one, goes to a daycare nearby. My wife Abeer and I am are expecting our third child. She hopes to follow my path and enroll for Masters in Linguistics at the Karyavattom campus at some point,” he says.
Life has not always been a rosy journey for Eassa, who used to teach at Sana’s University. He had taken a gamble to accept a scholarship provided by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) for higher education, eight months after Manar had been born in 2015. The idea of leaving his family behind when Yemen was in the throes of a civil war could have dissuaded him from taking the step.
“Those were difficult times. I could not afford to lose the opportunity to pursue my Masters degree. While I had applied for admission in either the Osmania University and English and Foreign Languages (ELF) University in Hyderabad, the ICCR had offered me scholarship at KU,” he explains.
Having not heard of Kerala in the past, Eassa was in for a pleasant surprise after he arrived at the State after an arduous journey that involved taking a risky trip to the seaport in Al Maha, passing through war-torn areas, and taking a boat to reach the Indian Embassy at Djibouti, from where he had taken a flight to Mumbai.
He says his stay in Kerala has been a satisfying one with his family, whom he brought down a month later, feeling at home. “I have never been treated as a stranger. We have not faced much difficulties here, except having to get used to the spicy food,” Eassa quipped.
Eassa yearns for the day when those, who left Yemen in search of quality education, returned to the country to drive the nation forward. “The people of Yemen are counting on us. I hope to become a decision-maker and help rebuild the country,” he says.
