Ammar Dicko

I was born in a West African village of Guinea to an illiterate father who was a career goat herder and part-time diamond dealer. My mother, much like most women of our community, was a housewife whose duties were to bear children and attend to household chores. My father viewed modern western education as unnecessary, even dangerous for his children. I remember when a village teacher noticed me peaking into his classroom window and repeating the letters of the alphabet along with his first graders whom I played with outside of school. The poor man was chased out of our house by my shoe-wielding father when he thought it a good idea to ask him for his blessing to get me in school. The path that led me to America and saw me rise the corporate ladder to the title of Director of Operations is as unlikely as being struck twice by lightning, and is one that can only be described as dumb luck combined with an unshakable will.
The first and most important milestone of my life was reached through a life altering decision by an eight-year-old boy. My uncle, upon his return from achieving a post graduate degree in France, came to visit his sister, who he later told me had sacrificed her dreams by marrying my father in order to support his college education in the capital. At the end of his two-week visit, I had decided that he would not be returning to the capital without me. As his driver was loading his SUV, I showed up with my backpack packed with all my earthly belongings, which could not have been more than two shirts and shorts, a pair of shoes, and a raggedy toy car I had built out of discarded condensed milk cans and metal wires from an old umbrella. My uncle told me that, no matter how much he would like to, the decision to take me with him rested with my father. Whether he was forced by a higher power or feared the wrath of my mother who was already disgruntled at him for sending my older brother to his family in Mauritania a few years earlier, my father gave me his blessings, and allowed me to become my uncle’s adopted son.
On the nearly one week trip back to his house, my uncle asked me what I hoped to accomplish in the big city. I told him I was eager to go to school and follow in his footsteps. He put me, along with his youngest sister, who he had also adopted, in a makeshift summer school on the porch of a retired teacher’s house. At the end of that summer, he enrolled us in a newly built private school and my aunt tested for the fourth grade and I for the second. Within a school year we both managed to skip two grades by ranking top of our classes in each semester. Two years later, when I was in the fifth grade, I tried out for the high school entrance exam and passed with honors, essentially skipping the sixth grade and joining my age group in high school. I then tested for one of the two best high schools in my country, and was among one hundred out of a thousand candidates accepted in the seventh grade. After earning a government-sponsored scholarship to a Moroccan university for testing among the top fifty students of my country in the nationwide high school exam, I was bent on joining my aunt who was then studying in Philadelphia at a University called Temple. I quickly declined the scholarship offer in Morocco and had my aunt register me in Temple’s IELP Program. The U.S. Embassy rejected my student Visa application on the basis that I did not need to learn English, since my high school transcript showed a high score in English as a second language. I applied again in the summer of 2000 and was granted a student Visa. With it, I set out for the third milestone of my life.
Temple’s IELP Program taught me to eloquently put my thoughts into words. In two semesters, I passed the TOEFL exam and won a departmental writing contest, which came with a gift card. As much as I would have loved to continue my higher learning at Temple, my uncle had lost his job, and with it, I had lost my financial support. I transferred to the Community College of Philadelphia with the hope that my recently acquired six dollars an hour parking attendant job would help me pay my way. I was rather quickly disillusioned, when I found myself incapable of making payments on my first semester. I sadly dropped out of school and focused on my job and, on my one-year anniversary; I was promoted to Assistant Manager. In the spring of 2004, I decided to go back to school again by registering at Camden County College in New Jersey. After two semesters, I stopped again when my then job of Zone Manager made it difficult to reconcile work with school. I went back to Camden County again in 2009 and dropped out after my second semester, when I was promoted to Director of Operations, amidst internal company turmoil that led to the firing of my company’s General Manager. I finally registered for classes again in the fall of 2014 and I am determined to stay on track until I acquire a Masters in Business Administration.
Form having a father who did not believe in the benefits of education to becoming a dropout international student, who could no longer afford the cost of tuition, I have always, somehow, found a way to make a path for myself. That path has led me from a village in West Africa to a home I call my own in Philadelphia.
Today I am a husband with a loving wife, and a father of a bright four-year-old girl. I am a Director of Operations in a thriving parking company, and I hope I will soon be adding the title of Temple Alumnus to that list.