From The Village Voice (New York)
by Irene Chidinma
Ahlam Ahmed is determined to become a New York City firefighter. The petite eighteen-year-old of Yemeni descent stands five feet tall, weighs just 105 pounds, and is well aware of the physical challenges inherent to the job. But she is resolute.
In a dining room at the FDNY Academy on Randalls Island, Ahmed is the only observant Muslim in a group of about 60 women. They range from military veterans and teenage members of the department’s Explorer program to college athletes and hopefuls who have already taken the department’s most recent firefighter exam. They’re all here to participate in the FDNY’s first-ever Women’s History Month Female Outreach Event, created to help inspire more women to join the department.
“I want to see what the FDNY has to offer,” Ahmed says matter-of-factly. She is dressed in jeans and a red sweater. A white scarf artfully conceals her neck, ears, and hair.
Ahmed, a senior at Al-Ihsan Academy in Queens, signed up for the event last year while attending a career fair at Kingsborough Community College. One persistent recruiter at the FDNY booth inspired her. “At first, I was like, ‘I can’t do that,’ ” she says. “I’ve got strict parents and I’m a girl and I’m small.”
But the recruiter wouldn’t have it. “[He] told me, ‘Do it! Do it! Sign up! You never know what’s going to happen,’ ” Ahmed recalls. “I liked that pressure. I appreciated him pressuring me to do this.”
Because of that pressure, Ahmed agreed to join the other FDNY aspirants on this chilly Saturday morning for a series of training exercises, mentoring sessions, and panel discussions about careers for women in the department.
“A lot of other candidates might have family on the job where their family members would bring them to the firehouse,” says Sarinya Srisakul, president of the United Women Firefighters, a sororal group for female firefighters. “That’s how the guys do it. They go as kids. They ride with their dads. They get a little bit excited and they have someone to emulate.”
Not a lot of women have similar experiences. There are more than 10,400 firefighters in the FDNY, and only 44 of them are women. Srisakul counts the event, which her group organized in conjunction with the department, as one of UWF’s successes in addressing the scarcity of female firefighters.
