Friday 11 January 2013

Meet Sharifah

This is my sister Sharifah who lives in Minden Heights, Penang. She works at the Consumer Association of Penang (CAP), near Masjid Negeri. She has a limited stock of my book, Biography of TEMD. She can be contacted at CAP.

Hajah Sharifah bt Haji Abdul Rashid
It is this sister who has kept my interest in history going all my life. Otherwise I won't even care to write the 2 books I did. She supplied photos from our mother's collection and information for Dr Che Lah's biography.

She only completed schooling until age 15 (Form 3) and then stayed home to help our family while both my parents worked till they retired. She continued to look after our parents in their retirement life till they both passed away. Though she has limited schooling, she has other skills and manages wells by herself. She continued to study from home and completed the MCE and HSC by postal studies. She has a diploma in catering from ITM in Shah Alam. With or without a catering diploma, she is a natural gifted chef and has cooked all our family meals since she left school in 1972. She cooks everything, you just name it and you only have to wait a few minutes at the dining table and she will deliver your ordered dishes direct from the home kitchen. In her spare time, she reads the Quran, fasts, prays and watches TV Al-Hijrah (30 minit bersama Ustaz Don). She took Arabic lessons at Masjid Negeri in Penang, and has a certificate in Arabic speaking. She also has a natural skill for speaking French which she picked up from I don't know where. You can ask her. Nobody speaks French in our family. My sister is one year my senior. As an elder sister, she handles the family estate, wasiat, etc and polices the siblings. She presently earns the label "millionnaire of Cangkat Minden" from her CAP colleagues as she inherits the family home. The houses here are worth approximately between RM3.5 million and RM5 million each. The house was only RM40K when my mother obtained it from her father in 1975. My sister said she is not selling her house.

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