Rabia Alizadah was four when her parents decided to flee Afghanistan. Now she and her family have six restaurants in Tilburg, Den Bosch, Utrecht and since this month also one in The Hague. It is the result of the lesson that the children Alizadah received from their parents when they came to the Netherlands: there is a train that moves very fast and you are not on it. You will have to work very hard to get there. And that’s what she did. Rabia Alizadah talks about it on Wednesday in the program ‘KRAAK asks door’.
The Alizadah family fled to Russia via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Rabia still remembers that they had to go to the market in Russia to sell things. There she met other children in school uniform, who led a normal life. That was what she wanted too. When the family got a home in Tilburg in 1997, that dream came true. “Then I got a normal childhood life again. As it should be,” she says.
Rabia was then 8 years old. “I hadn’t held a pen in eight years,” she says. She wanted nothing more than to learn, to become a lawyer. She also graduated as a lawyer, but later decided to join the family business. It started with Sarban, the Afghan restaurant in Tilburg. There are now four of them, and also two restaurants based on Central Asian cuisine.
As a child she already thought: I want people to look at me and say: he is doing something good for society. Perhaps that is why the family now trains young asylum seekers ‘from dishwasher to entrepreneur’. She says: “I’m proud of our restaurants, but even prouder when I see someone who hasn’t gotten out of bed for months now doing the dishes laughing and singing.”
‘KRAAK asks through’ will be broadcast on Wednesday at 5.15 pm and then repeated. The program can also be viewed online.