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Dona Paranayil
Saudi Gazette
In a world filled with growing misconceptions about Muslims, children are encouraged to learn in a unique way via Ummah Pals. Ummah Pals, a product by a company called Tabellae was successfully crowd-funded on LaunchGood last year. Adhara Nombrado Syed, a Canadian national created this product to connect children to the Ummah with monthly subscription packages delivered to their doorstep.
With each package they learn about a new country, its history and culture. Each country is represented by a Ummah Pals ‘character’ who writes the postcard and sends a souvenir of real money, quite similar to the pen pal experience. This also helps kids to start collecting currencies of different countries.
“We chose 12 countries, some of them were majority Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia or Indonesia and others like Vietnam were chosen because of our friends. We have a diverse group of Muslim friends from different backgrounds whose stories we wanted to share and honor. We wanted to highlight the deep history and contributions Muslims have made all around the world, so we researched each country’s history, arts, and culture. We hope to add many more countries for kids to collect and learn about,” Syed told Saudi Gazette.
He added, “We created a character for each country for kids to identify with. Saudi Arabia’s character is Saad. In the postcard, he discusses life with his family, school, and favorite games. The newsletter goes into more detail about the history of Saudi, as well as the culture of poetry.”
A chapter from the book ‘The Secret of Happy Families’ inspired Syed to start this project for kids. The chapter talks about the grit and resilience in children where it reveals that one of the key factors in making children resilient is learning more about family history. Syed explained, “If children know who they are, what the people in their family went through, what their family history is, then it will help to put their life challenges in perspective. I took this idea of building resilience a step further, and thought, this is what we needed — as a Muslim community we need to be able to share our stories. We needed to know the journey of Muslims before us, and learn about the different communities that make up the Ummah. I thought, if our kids learn about what we’ve accomplished within our communities, maybe the negative stories we hear about Muslims in the media can be overcome because we know who we are, we know where we come from and what our struggles have been, and how we’ve overcome and been resilient as a community. So, we began crowdfunding.”
“Crowdfunding is not as easy as it sounds,” added Syed. To crowd-fund this project, he had to first create a prototype and campaign hard. He said that no one was going to donate to a product if they didn’t believe in it, so initially, he asked his family and friends to support him. That is when a friend of his, shared a picture of his prototype on a social media platform and it became a hit. He then started receiving donations from all over the world.
Currently, Ummah Pals is available across Canada in select stores and is also available online for worldwide shipping.
