“I took Mostafa under guardianship seven years ago. I met him when he was four days old, and I knew he was my son the second I saw him,” says Rasha Mekky, kafala mother, and founder and executive director of Yalla Kafala, an NGO providing adoptive families with the support and education they need to create loving homes for their children. For years, Mekky dreamed of having children. Little did she know that her medical condition would make her chances of getting pregnant very low. “I underwent four trials of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure over 11 years in an attempt to get pregnant. This process exhausted me financially and emotionally, and ended in a divorce,” she explains. After her second marriage, her husband introduced the concept of kafala to her, and encouraged her to pursue it. Adoption, which entails legally taking another’s child and bringing it up as one’s own, is forbidden in Shari’a (Islamic) law, upon which the Egyptian constitution is based. However, kafala (guardianship) exists. Kafala is the Islamic term for adoption, with the difference of the transference of inheritance rights, and the change of the…
