A Writing Life

"In the future, I will be a writer," says Bibi Shahabodeen with great certainty. "It makes me happy to read and write, and I have so many stories to tell." But her path wasn't always so clear.

Shahabodeen, now 40, grew up on a sugarcane farm in Guyana, a small country located on the northern coast of South America. The fourth of nine children, she helped care for her brothers and sisters while her mother worked full-time on the family farm. Her formal education stopped when she left school at the age of nine to work alongside her mother in the fields. At the time, she recalls, leaving school didn't seem like such a bad idea because the "teachers whipped you all the time." At 16, she married and started a family of her own. As she embraced her new responsibilities, her childhood dreams of writing were put on hold.

In 1992, Shahabodeen came to New York and settled in the Bronx. After several jobs as a cook and a domestic worker, she felt frustrated. "In New York you see people wearing suits, with good paying jobs, and having a quality life. I knew I wanted more and that I was going to have to go back to school in order to get ahead," she notes. But, in between work and caring for her children, there was little time for school. To keep her spirits up, Shahabodeen bought books and magazines and tried to teach herself to read in her spare moments ­ a new habit that changed her life.

One day in 1996, while helping her son with his homework, Shahabodeen realized just how much she had learned. Armed with that extra confidence, she enrolled in an adult literacy class at a local branch of the New York Public Library. "It felt great going back to school. I love learning, and now I know it's not too late to make a better future for myself and family," she says of her experience.

Shahabodeen's dreams of writing remain alive and well. Currently, she attends a computer-training program and writes essays about "life." Most important, she has developed the self-reliance that makes continuing her studies even easier. "I don't have to ask people for help reading anymore," she says. "I understand things now. And that's a wonderful and exciting feeling."