Mother's pride at exam results amid family trauma

A woman who rescued her unwell mother from Sudan after conflict broke out there in 2023 has said she is "so proud" of her son's A-level results.

Nahla Abugusseisa travelled from Oxford to the Sudanese border in May 2023 to try to evacuate her mother, who had dementia and was unable to walk, speak or eat.

Her mother died in Egypt in April 2024, two weeks before her son, Osman, 18, took his A-level exams.

Despite this, he secured a space to study aerospace engineering at university, and his mother said she was "overwhelmed" and "spent the whole day just crying".

"The pride I had in that boy, doing all of this while worried about me, worried about his grandma," she said.

"His extended family is scattered all over, some of them still in Sudan, ravaged by this war - and he was doing his job, waking himself up, going to school, never missing a day."

She said he was "so worried" the day before the results came out.

"He was just pacing up and down and I tried to assure him, I told him 'you did your best in very hard circumstances'," she said.

Ms Abugusseisa said evacuating her mother from Sudan was "extremely hard", but Osman and his sister encouraged her to go and never made her feel she needed to be there.

"They gave me the chance to be with my mum in her last months and days," she said.

"Because we're Sudanese, we baby our children - our kids don't know how to cook or clean or do anything, we as mum basically do everything.

"But bless him, he learned to do it all."

She said her mother, who named Osman, was "larger than life" and would have been "jumping for joy" about his results.

"She was very close to him," she said.

"He was the apple of her eye so she would've been even 10 times as happy as me."

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