KHADIJA Kamal knows nothing will ever bring back her precious two-year-old daughter, Maryam.
The Truganina mother-of-six still weeps daily at the horror of finding her youngest child unconscious in the family car on a hot summer’s day on 3 January.
Maryam had somehow got into the car, which was parked in the backyard of the family home. Her mother thought she was upstairs at the time.
The frantic, but unsuccessful, efforts of paramedics to revive her daughter still haunts her when she sleeps.
But Ms Kamal and her husband, Kamal Omar, say they will ensure Maryam’s memory lives on by building a school in Somalia in her name.
“I have never been more driven to do anything in my life,” she said.
Ms Kamal, 35, a Melbourne-born Muslim convert, has already raised $5000 toward a target of $100,000 for the Maryam Bint Kamal International School, through the Unity for Sisters charity.
The school is planned for Hergeysa, a town in the country’s north, near where her husband is from, and still has family.
“Maryam is not able to grow up and be educated but I want other children to walk in from the dirt and say, ‘this is what my country could be like’,” said Ms Kamal, who also uses the name Umm Rasheed.
The project is one of the most ambitious undertaken within Australia’s rapidly growing 16,000-strong Somali community.
In a country plagued by factional warfare, poverty and corruption, only a lucky few families can afford the equivalent of about $10 a month to send their children to school, she said.
“This school will be for the whole community, those who can afford to pay as well as poor and orphaned children,” she said.
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The couple hope to have the six-room primary school operating within three years, then move to Somalia.
Mr Kamal, a science teacher at the Werribee Islamic College, will be the director of the school, which will use the Australian curriculum and with lessons in English.
The couple’s dream to help build a prosperous Somalia first started after they took their children, including Maryam, to Somalia for four months in early 2005.
“It was really another world,” she said. “It was such a contrast to what we are used to.”
A good friend of her children – who are all Australia-born – lived in a stick and cloth house, and died of tuberculosis when the family was there.
“The whole experience changed my children and it changed me,” she said.
“The softness in my heart towards others has grown, especially since Maryam’s death,” she said.
Adapting to a new way of life is nothing new for Ms Kamal.
A former marketing executive who used to live on the Gold Coast, she converted readily to Islam more than 10 years ago after learning about its philosophy.
“It made sense to me straight away,” she said.
She now practises one of Islam’s most strictest form of veiling, which includes a niqab, a cloth that covers all her face, except her blue eyes.
For information or donations about the project, contact www.unity4sisters.org.
