Baheya Ali Suleiman was 32 years old when her world fell apart.
Her husband suffered an accident that left him unable to move or work, and from one day to the next she became the sole breadwinner for her three children in Beni Suef, Egypt.
First, she drove the family’s tuk-tuk. Then she entered the construction industry, carrying bricks and sand alongside dozens of men who would not leave her alone.
To escape the harassment, she made a radical decision: she cut her hair, exchanged her veil for men’s clothing, and worked for years under the name “Bakar”.
By day she built walls; at night she climbed back into the tuk-tuk to earn a few extra pesos. Even that was not enough. Her debts were so suffocating that she ended up selling one of her kidneys for about 800 dollars just to pay them off.
When her story reached Egyptian television, an entire country discovered that behind “Bakar” was a mother who had risked her own body for her children.