The Egyptian immigrant and mother of two GW alumni is the university’s longest-serving housekeeper.
By Rachel Muir
In 1967, Zeinab Ibrahim left her hometown of Cairo to come to Washington, D.C. She was 18, only had a sixth-grade education, and hadn’t been out of Egypt before.
“I saw an ad for a job in the paper, and I thought I’d try going to America,” she says. The ad was for a babysitter for the children of an Egyptian who worked at the World Bank, and Ms. Ibrahim got the job. She came over on the famed ocean liner the Queen Mary.
The D.C. climate was a shock. “Egypt is so hot,” she says. “I’d never seen snow before. I thought the sky was falling.” But the hardest thing was mastering the language. “I didn’t speak any English when I came,” she says. “It was frustrating; for a long time I couldn’t express myself.”
When things fell apart with the family she worked for—she says the man turned abusive when she “spoke her mind too much”—Ms. Ibrahim found other housekeeping positions but only earned $35 a week.
Ms. Ibrahim’s job at GW came about as the result of a marriage proposal. She says an Egyptian engineer who worked at GW wanted to marry her because she had a visa. “I told him no—if it’s not going to be a real marriage, I don’t want any part of it,” she says. “But to try to get me, he got me a job here.”
She started at GW as a general contractor in 1970. That year, she walked past Vietnam War protests coming into work at the newly opened Marvin Center. In July 1972, she became a university employee.
Four decades later, the university has changed tremendously, she says. “It’s so much bigger, better, so many more opportunities.”
Those opportunities extended to her two children—Mona, now 34, and Omar, 26. Both graduated from GW’s School of Business thanks to the university’s tuition benefit program. “There’s no way I could have afforded it otherwise,” says Ms. Ibrahim. Mona is a computer information systems specialist with a government contractor, and Omar is a special officer with the GW Police Department.
Her children’s education is particularly important to Ms. Ibrahim because she stopped going to school after sixth grade. Education in Egypt wasn’t compulsory, and she was unhappy with her teacher. “But when you have children you want more for them,” she says. “You want the best for them.”
Ms. Ibrahim is now the longest-serving housekeeper at GW. “If I’m happy with my job, why would I change it?” she says.
In her 40 years at GW, Ms. Ibrahim has worked in the Marvin Center, Rice Hall, Alumni House, the F Street House and other administrative buildings. She’s never worked nights or in a residence hall, she says.
She’s now based in Alumni House and the F Street House. Her shift is Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., which means she starts her day at 3:45 a.m. and takes a train and bus from her home in Alexandria, Va., to Foggy Bottom. “I love my hours, I’m a morning person,” she says. “I love my job.”
Ms. Ibrahim hopes to retire next year when she turns 65. Getting more exercise, volunteering, spending more time with her two grandchildren and starting an organic garden are among her hopes for retirement.
But she’ll definitely miss the campus and her work. “GW has been the best place for me to be,” she says. “It’s changed my life a lot.”