This young man from Guinea, West Africa, had a big dream: to be accepted to the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He didn't even have money for a flight to Egypt, but that didn't bother the ambitious young man: he got on a bicycle and set off on a journey of thousands of kilometers, not even sure he would be accepted.
The protagonist of this inspiring story is Mamadou Safayou Barry, a 25-year-old father of one child. He set out four months ago from Guinea and headed east, crossing the border into Mali and then Burkina Faso, both of which are controlled by military juntas and both have Islamist terrorist organizations. Then South turned into Togo and Benin, then flooded into Niger and Chad, also countries that have undergone coups in the past two years.
"Riding through these countries was very difficult because they don't have security," Barry said upon arriving in Egypt. "They have so many problems and the people there are very scared. In Mali and Burkina Faso, they looked at me like crazy. I saw military men everywhere with their machine guns mounted on pickup trucks." Barry said he was arrested twice in Burkina Faso and once in Togo.
When he arrived in Chad, after 4,200 (!) kilometers by bicycle, a local journalist discovered his story and posted it online, prompting a quick collection of money for a plane ticket to Cairo, where he arrived two weeks ago. He was thus prevented from riding through Sudan, parts of which are at war.
"I want to deepen my Islamic knowledge, but I didn't have money to fly or pay for my studies," Barry explained. It seems that Al-Azhar University was impressed by the ambitious young man and awarded him a scholarship. "I have no words to describe how happy I am," Barry said. "The hardships of the road have been forgotten – erased with joy the possibility of being called a student at Al-Azhar."
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