newsobserver.com: by Mandy Locke.
CARY — When Salma Azam graduates from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Sunday, her degree holds a delicate promise abided by a woman and her mother.
In Salma’s senior year in high school, she felt the weight of her mother’s long-delayed dream of going to college. So daughter Salma, 21, and mother Marriam, 40, made a pact: They would tackle UNC together. The two grabbed a dry-erase board and started to make a schedule.
Marriam Azam’s family valued education. In her Ahmadiyya Muslim community in London, women were as educated as men. She always intended to go to college.
When she married a family friend, Naweed Azam, at age 18, Marriam started squaring away plans to enroll in college in America, where her husband’s family lived. The University of North Carolina-Greensboro accepted her. A few weeks before she was to begin classes, she got pregnant with Salma and suffered horrendous morning sickness.