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Case Study: It is Never too late!!

Case Study

T. Bibi is one of our elderly Bangladeshi Female clients, who is over 68 years old. She has been living in the UK for over 35 years, and in all her time in the UK, when her husband was alive he prevented her from going out or attend courses like ESOL due to his cultural prejudice about women and education.

He passed away a couple of years ago. She allowed some time to bereave for him, and then decided she wanted to do something for herself.  T. Bibi’s children are all grown up and have their own families to look after so she was a little ignored at home. She has grandchildren who all speak English more than Bengali, which motivated her to come out and learn English, so she can communicate with them. That’s when she registered with the Limehouse Project, to join the Personal Development Course, which is a pre-entry course before joining the ESOL course. I met T. Bibi during these sessions and encouraged her to participate in some of our Community Engagement Workshops to utilise her spare time and make new friends. She participated in our Discussion Based workshop on Culture and Diversity, as well as participated in our Art Workshop for the Paper Mache session. She really enjoyed this as she has never heard of Paper Mache before.

Although she is one of our elderly clients, she oozes a lot of energy. When casually asked why is she so desperate to learn English, she responded with ‘for years she listened to her husband and didn’t pursue the language course at his request, and now that he isn’t around anymore, she wants to learn English before she dies’. This was really touching to hear, but also reinforced why it is so important to work with people like T. Bibi and why it is never too late to help people like her with their aspirations. She doesn’t want to learn English so she can find employment, but she wants to know the language and British culture so she can communicate with her beloved grandchildren who understand the British culture/language more than their parent’s mother tongue.

Shumi Hassan

Community Engagement Officer April 2009

We thought of highlighting this particular case study, due to T. Bibi’s age and persistence to follow her desire to learn and engage.