“I Have a beautiful story to tell.”
Simply put, that’s why Zahra Baho, Eritrean refugee and director of the Roxburgh Early Learning Centre, is among 20 finalists in this year’s Telstra women in business awards.
Baho’s story is not about her past but about what she has become. She admits to crying long and hard as she put her award application together; she was recalling the journey that brought her to Hume 22 years ago.
Baho fled war-torn Eritrea when she was 15, ending up in a refugee camp in Sudan. A year later she was forced into an arranged marriage and moved to the United Arab Emirates.
With three children aged under seven, she sought and gained asylum, arriving in Melbourne in 1990 as a 23-year-old single mother in a foreign place and with no work. “I always knew I’d be working to satisfy my own needs; I’d done that since I was 12, crocheting and knitting jumpers to sell,” she says.
“Straight away I got a job … because I knew how to type. But life is difficult with children when you’re working full-time and they are very young, so after three years I was exhausted. I left my job;
I said ‘nope, I’m going to do business’.”
Within 24 hours she had another job, this time closer to home, working with new refugees on their childcare needs.
She met her partner and 15 years ago their daughter Mona was born. Mona was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and it was this that determined Baho that she would not be an absent mum, that she needed to bring up her daughter to the best of her abilities rather than finding a childcare place for her.
Baho sold her house and set up her own childcare centre at Roxburgh Park, starting out with 65 places that were filled within three months. After the first year, she needed to expand and the centre now caters for up to 85 children and 130 families from more than 15 different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
There is another centre at Epping with 120 places, and both centres serve as training grounds for women to take on new learning as qualified childcare workers.
“My aim is to give opportunities to other women from disadvantaged backgrounds,” Baho says. “It’s not about money, it’s about belonging. There are so many people with no work, but if they find an environment they can fit into they do a fantastic job.
“You need to take a challenge as an opportunity and believe in yourself. If we can do it, anyone can.”
» Winners of the 2013 Telstra Victorian Business Women’s Awards will be announced on October 15 in Melbourne. Victorian winners will then be in the running for the national finals
