Finding her voice

Stuttering can leave the sufferer with low self esteem and make them introverts. Farah Al Qaissieh, founder of Stutter UAE, tells Sangeetha Swaroop how she overcame the problem and is now working towards helping others with the speech condition

‘Hi, my name is Farah and I stutter. Please bear with me.’

When 17-yearold Zayed University student Farah Al Qaissieh first introduced herself thus in 2007, it was an attempt at shaking off years of apprehension, insecurity and diffidence, and to slowly emerge from the shell she had deliberately closeted herself in. ‘The moment I spoke those words aloud in front of my class, I was admitting to myself that I stutter, and with that, I was taking control of my situation,’ she says. ‘Those words suddenly set me free – free from the fear of stuttering, and free from the introverted person I had turned myself into.’

This newly-gained confidence and steely resolve that she displayed in challenging herself, eventually led her to found Stutter UAE in 2013, a support platform seeking to encourage people who stutter to meet and interact while also helping raise awareness on the issue. Hundreds dealing with the disorder in the UAE have since been empowered to communicate effectively and confidently through this network of support and development.

Currently working with a government organisation in Abu Dhabi, 28-year-old Farah remembers that she had stuttered ever since she was a little kid. ‘I believe the initial years of school went just fine,’ she laughs, but an incident in Grade 7 forcibly made her conscious of her stuttering. Asked to read aloud a passage in Arabic, the scathing comments of the teacher was to have a traumatic effect on the young child.

‘I felt so humiliated,’ she recollects. ‘It was a painful experience to be mocked at in front of the entire class. In my mind, I could read clearly but when I spoke aloud, the words didn’t fall through the way I wanted them to. Almost overnight, I withdrew into a shell; from a bubbly, cheerful person, I turned into a loner.’

Shutting herself off ‘opened my eyes and ears to the teasing and the bullying – something that had escaped my notice until then,’ she says.

Farah’s solace and companion during these trying years was her younger brother, Mansour. ‘His stutter was more severe than mine, and I would seethe with anger at the constant bullying he endured. We knew that something had to be done – although we didn’t know what or how.’

Years of staying a recluse soon began to take its toll. ‘I felt trapped in the persona I was forced to become; it was frustrating to not be my real self,’ she says. Not wanting

to endure years of loneliness and living in fear of being laughed at, she decided to boldly confront her innermost fears as she embarked on university life.

‘The first time I spoke those words,’ remembers Farah, ‘I felt an immediate sense of relief. It was as if a weight had been taken off my shoulders. As I kept repeating those sentences to everyone I met, my fears dissipated, and I finally felt okay with stuttering. I had now begun to embrace my disability wholeheartedly.’

Up until she graduated, Farah believed that Mansour and she were the only two people in the world who stuttered. ‘Imagine my surprise therefore when I spoke to Faisal Al Hammadi, my colleague at office and found that he too stuttered,’ says Farah. ‘By sharing our experiences, we felt it helped us cope better. Just talking about it had a therapeutic value and we wanted to expand this to the wider community. That is how Stutter UAE came about.’

The idea was to destigmatise stuttering and create a space for people with the disability to meet and learn from each other, she explains. ‘Everyone who stutters should know they are not alone. More importantly, that it is not your fault. Stuttering will not go away but by socialising with people who go through the same struggles; we can learn to manage it better.’

Stutter UAE originated in 2013 as a Meetup group. For the initial eight months, Farah, Faisal and Aliya Paula Sardar, a speech-language pathologist in Abu Dhabi, were its only members. ‘That didn’t deter us,’ she says. ‘We knew it was not easy for people to accept they had a problem, let alone attend an event dedicated to people who stutter.’

Meanwhile, Farah’s Snapchat sessions in Arabic was gaining popularity. ‘I deliberately chose to do it in Arabic because I stuttered more in my mother tongue. With English, I tend to slide over just a few words, but Arabic is a completely different story – I struggle to even say my family name.’

Her hard work and self-discipline paid off for Farah is now adept at handling even live TV interviews in Arabic. ‘I still stutter; that is now part of the journey of my life,’ she says. ‘Today, I enjoy it as it gives me an opportunity to understand what’s going on internally that is causing me to stutter.’

Her infectious confidence and wholehearted acceptance of her condition soon got her social media followers with the disability or parents of those affected wanting to meet her. A newspaper article that appeared around the same time stirred the interests of many more. Soon, the