The choice nobody mentions

In a village outside Minya, a sixteen-year-old girl starts reading with the younger children on her street after school. There is no programme, no title, no one who handed her the job. She decided that the children who were not reading would read, and she sat down with them.

A great deal works against someone like her. She is young, she is a girl in a place where that narrows the options, and nobody has spent much effort telling her she might be the one to start things. Most people around her have absorbed the idea that leading is something given to you, by age or position or family name, and that until it is given, you wait.

That idea is wrong and it is costly, because it hides a choice that is open to almost everyone, almost every day.

The choice does not come in equal portions. Some people are trusted on sight, and others have to earn it twice. Some doors are simply heavier. None of that is fair, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

But the unfairness does not remove the choice. It only makes it harder to see. In a family, in a classroom, on a street, in a shop, there is usually something nobody is doing and someone who could decide to do it.

The girl in Minya is not waiting to be told she is a leader. She is leading, on a mat outside her house, with a book and four children. The title, if it ever comes, will arrive late.