“The day I saw her, I and her father were so confused. We did not feel anything. We were confused and did not know what feeling we were supposed to feel, but after we walked from there, we felt that we missed her greatly and our hearts got attached to her.” I am Marwa Hafez, and I went for kafala after 21 years of marriage without children. I presented it to my husband and he initially refused, but when he learned about the issue of breastfeeding and that the presence of a girl would no longer be forbidden or haram, he agreed that we would go for kafala. We made this decision in June 2021, and we began the journey of preparing the papers and submitted them on the 4th of July, 2021. The day of submitting the papers coincided with the day of Misk’s birth, and the procedures and approvals took about nine months. I swear it was like a pregnancy period. I was suffering during these nine months because I saw my daughter when she was 3 months old. Security check took a long time. I wanted to have her right away because she was sick in the hospital. I used to travel to Minya every 15 days for nine months until I received her on the 17th of March. It was only 4 days before Mother’s Day. It was as if God was comforting my heart and her father’s with her beautiful presence. It was as if my life started again. On that day, Misk came to our place, and we were preparing a party to welcome her. My sisters and my family were all happy. A week after we received her, we held a big party for her in a large hall. We invited all our beloved friends, friends of our friends, relatives and neighbors. All of them were happy and it was a day that we still talk about to this day. Praise be to God, it has been a year since Misk got in my life, and this is the year in which I was born. Every Mother's Day, I hold you in my arms, and every day I hold you in my arms is a Mother’s Day for me. May God not deprive me of her or her presence in our lives, me and her father’s.

I can’t remember how old I was when I knew about it, but it was roughly between the first and third years of primary school. My mother told me that we are not your real mother and father. Your father's name is such-and-such, and your mother’s name is such-and-such, and they died in an accident. Since that moment, my heart was racing and felt like I am drowned in a sea of thoughts. I kept asking myself the real question, which was: If they died in an accident, how did I stay alive? I was shocked to my very core. The shock was brutal and difficult. I don’t remember how many days I cried before sleep because it must have been years and I am not exaggerating if I said this because I could not imagine that I could lose my mother and my father who I am with now. The issue has affected me psychologically, physically and socially, and I feel that at this time I have become silent and do not talk much, and I have not been able to form relationships with those around me. I also stopped eating and threw away food. I barely ate and I wasn't even hungry. These are things I noticed when I grew up a little, but when I was young, I didn't understand why or I wasn't even interested in understanding why. All I could think about was, "We get punished when we do something wrong. Surely I'm a bad person, so this happened to me." And sometimes I feel that I seriously don't deserve anything. I don't deserve what they do to me. I don't deserve their love because as I said, I'm a monster. I wasn’t much popular because of my appearance, my weight, and my way of doing things. There are many things that made me unable to determine whether my childhood was good or not. My problem is that they never helped me with this matter. I don’t know if they thought that this was normal or that I would forget or what the truth was. I don’t know. I wanted them to tell me the whole truth and I would have accepted it as I accepted what they said before because I certainly had no other choice, but at least I needed someone to tell me the truth. This may be difficult, but it is not my fault, and I am not as bad as I thought, and there are many people like me. What I denounced the most is that every time I come to ask what exactly happened, they yelled at me for asking. For them, my questions mean for that they are not enough. I just want to know, and this is my right to know. I live in the hope that I will meet them when I die, and I will meet my mother in heaven, and I keep imagining what we would look like when we meet, and that thought and dream comfort me because at the moment when this happens, I will not be afraid again. I will not be sad again. I will not lose anyone else. If I decided to tell them that now, they will be upset. I just want them to understand that just as any father and mother love their children with the same love as each other, I can also love two families with the same amount of love, and that they both represent many things to me, because in the end, this is what made me the person I am now. If I go for kafala of a real child, I would feel that I am the happiest person in the world, because I am sure that I would give him all the love that I have. I am sure that I will read books or learn what is the right way for him to be raised well so that he can become a good person. He won’t feel inferior in any way, and of course he has complete freedom to miss his biological family, and I will respect that very much, and I will be happy to answer all his questions and discuss them and make him understand that his being like this does not mean anything other than that he is a special person to me, and that my love for him is unconditional. I love him because he is the person he is, regardless of anything else. This will surely make him love himself, and this will give him confidence not only in himself but in those around him as well. I know that the whole matter will be a traumatic experience at first but I will take him to a psychological counselor if I felt that he has dark thoughts. The most important thing for me is that he is able to share all his feelings about anything freely and without fear or such. Kafala in general is a beautiful thing, but it also has negative effects, and any child, no matter how big he is, deserves to know his truth, love it, accept it, and feel love from those around him. Also, the name of the author of the story was changed based on her desire.

My story with sponsorship began more than seven years ago, when Muhammad and I sponsored our only son, Mustafa. When I was young, I dreamed of having many children, but I couldn’t because I discovered that I had endometriosis, which is a chronic disease that makes pregnancy rates very low. I got married and traveled to America, changed my career from tourism, and directed my interest and studies to children, and then opened a nursery. I did not lose hope in becoming a mother and entered the cycle of artificial insemination for 20 years. I tried it 4 times. This period consumed me financially and psychologically and ended up with my divorce in 2004, so that I could begin a new chapter in my life after that. In 2012, my life changed 180 degrees after I met Muhammad al-Iraqi and we got married. Although he has two daughters from a previous marriage, I did not object at all to the idea of kafala, which I learned about from my friend’s sister by chance. He knew that my whole life was for children, and that I had never forgotten my dream of being a mother. With him, I started looking around and asking to find out everything about kafala in Egypt. It took us a whole year to finish the papers and procedures, and finally it became possible for us to do kafala a child. I was terrified and asked myself a lot, I wonder if I can be responsible? Will I be able to raise a child and play with him when I am 45 years old? Should I continue on my own and not pursue the dream of motherhood? In the end, Muhammad's encouragement and my desire to be a mother won, and we began to go around the orphanages to choose our son. At first, I was dreaming that we would have a beautiful girl who would look like me and Muhammad. Over the past years, I had been collecting girls’ clothes in the hope that God would honor me. I was looking for a girl in FACE Maadi. I thought that I would be overwhelmed the first time I saw her, but that did not happen. I saw a girl who looked like us. I decided to wait when I found out that there was a girl and a boy coming tomorrow. I decided that I would come again tomorrow to see the girl, but when I saw her, unfortunately, she appeared blonde and her eyes were blue, not like us at all. For a moment, I lost hope that I would find the child I dreamed of, but the surprise was when I looked at the boy with his eyes wide open. My heart skipped a beat, and I knew that this was my son. I kept carrying him for five hours, feeding him and changing his diapers. I was afraid someone else would take him, and I remained behind them until they changed the baby’s name instead of the girl I was settled on . When I told my husband, my family, and my friends that I had chosen a boy, no one believed me. They all knew that I was having a girl, but this is what happened. My son, Mustafa was my beautiful destiny. I wanted to live the full experience of motherhood. I started an artificial breastfeeding course. When we took Mustafa home, my life was complete. Finally, I had the one thing I ever wanted. When Mustafa entered my life, my life was complete with his presence. Even though I gained weight and my fear and anxiety increased for him and his future, I was happy with the experience, and I knew that kafala is not easy, but it is worth it. All the time looking at his face, I smile and wonder to myself, what did I do to deserve this amazing gift?. After 4 months, we traveled to America again, carrying with us the newest member of our small family. We had to go through other procedures because Mustafa’s papers are not done yet. I believe in complete honesty, and that is why I share my experience with all people in the family, at work, and on social media. That is why I created the page “Sponsor a child in your home, adoption story in Egypt” Things escalated and we have a website about all you need to know about kafala in English and Arabic too. Not only that, we also formed a non-profit organization called Yalla Kafala in California and in Egypt. People started getting aware of kafala. This is not just a story of Rasha and an ordinary page on Facebook, we became a large team of volunteers who helped with whatever they could to deliver the idea. We help more children and families live the dream of motherhood. Mustafa himself wishes that we have other children, and if I had known about kafala early on, I would have more children. That’s why people in Egypt need to have greater awareness about the issue in order to help more children, and this is what we are trying to do now through Yalla Kafala.