15 July 2023 | St. Albans, England [David Neal]
When the invitation to attend the 2023 Newbold College of Higher Education Awards Ceremony arrived in the hands of Councillor Naheed Ejaz, the recently appointed Mayor of the Borough of Bracknell Forest, it triggered a 20-year-old memory. Of all the hundreds of invitations this Mayor will receive to visit to the many global corporation and industrial sites located within her UK Silicon Valley borough, the invitation to the Awards Ceremony is not the first time she had connected with the Newbold Community.
Ejaz, the mother of five children raised them on her own, and as she shared in her Awards Ceremony speech, “they were financially tough times”. To overcome this problem, she discovered a support group in existence at the time called “BRICKS”, which encouraged payment for goods and services through a cashless exchange system, where two parties trade goods or services directly without money being involved. At the time a daughter was falling behind at school with Maths and English, but it seemed that the “teachers had cast her aside” noted Ejaz. Something had to be done to address this situation, and Ejaz knew that the only solution was to get some private tuition for her daughter but was totally unaffordable.
Desperate she turned to “BRICKS” for help, “through the support of a wonderful lady” at Newbold School, the Adventist run primary school adjacent to the college. In exchange for Maths tuition Ejaz offered cooking lessons and curtain making. “If you go into Newbold School and you see red curtains in the big hall, they were made by me – and this is just to tell you the spirit of community I experienced”.
As a result of the private tuition, it was discovered that her daughter experienced Dyslexia. But with a great sense of a mother’s pride, Ejaz went on to tell that her daughter attended “Westminster University, and went on to become the youngest digital strategist for Pearson PLC (responsible for the UK and Europe desk), and who now works for Google in the same capacity.” For Ejaz the story is a “little Acorn becomes Oak tree” experience, but very definitely sees her story as connecting with the Newbold community.
For Trans-European Adventists, it’s a reality, and more than likely that civic leaders invited to attend our special events and celebrations first require a ‘briefing paper’ about who we are in order to give a speech that connects. It is more than heartwarming in this case, through an act of kindness 20 years prior to the mayor’s appointment at the Awards Ceremony – no briefing paper was required.
This is a developing story. Who was the person connected with Newbold School who offered personal tuition? And can we secure a photo of those red curtains? Stay connected to tedNEWS to read more about this story, and other stories to follow from the 2023 Awards Ceremony. For today, we end with a reminder of the comment C. S. Lewis once made about Adventists in the 1960’s. “If they have so much charity (and we might add kindness), there must be something very right about them”.
Featured image (David Neal) : The Mayor of the Borough of Bracknell Forest, Councillor Naheed Ejaz, flanked by Dr Steve Currow (right) and Professor Ivan Brown (left).
