Emirati boy tackles autism challenges with the piano

Shereen Afifi

What can a mother’s love do? For Ahmed Al Mousawi, the answer is, a lot! His mother’s love and persistence has positively steered his life towards success. Ahmed is a 12-year-old Emirati boy with autism who recently won first place in a piano competition at the Ammar Award for Supporting Creative People with Disabilities 2022 in Riyadh. Prior to that, he has performed in Abu Dhabi.

Gulf Today sat with Ahmed’s mother, Iman, to talk about his journey so far and how they achieved it, as well as Ahmed himself about his other hobbies and dreams for the future.

Diagnosis

“Ahmed is my second son, and finding out about his autism was difficult at the beginning, because until he was a year and half he was a very normal child, making eye contact and saying a few words.

Then, suddenly, he stopped making eye contact, completely lost his speech and became aggressive. We took him to many doctors, they all said nothing was wrong, and as every child is different maybe he was just being stubborn. Then we saw a specialist paediatrician who diagnosed autism and advised us to see a children’s psychologist, who made the necessary assessments and confirmed Ahmad is autistic,” said Iman.

Challenges

“Accepting that back then was so hard on us. I had heard before about autism but could not fathom what it meant, and then another chapter began in our long journey. We started taking Ahmed to speech, ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) and occupational therapy sessions at private centres that were limited and expensive, which affected our finances that time, about 10 years ago.

“Now, fortunately, there are many government-supported centres that offer these services for much less.

“For Iman enrolling Ahmed in normal streaming education was a big challenge and hard decisions had to be made.

“After Ahmed spent 2 years in an autism centre, his dad and I decided to take him out of it and enrol him in normal streaming education so he can learn normal behaviour from other children to help his integration into society. That was a difficult decision because some schools refused to register him. Then we managed to enrol him in his current school in Abu Dhabi, and brought him a shadow teacher. The school is very supportive and amazing, and his classmates love and encourage him.”

Piano talent springs

Iman was keen to find and develop a talent in Ahmed. “After feeling sorry for myself, and focusing on fixing Ahmed’s negatives, I tried to take another direction. I started researching on the positive qualities of autistic children, and I found out a lot of children with autism are talented in some areas, then I thought maybe he's good at something to help him in future.

When Ahmed was 7, a special needs music teacher told me he has a musical ear, and whenever he hears music he moves his hands like a maestro. So I tried to teach him playing tunes of the Happy Birthday song many times amid his rejection and my insistence until the next day I found him playing it alone without assistance. Then I knew we needed to develop this talent and got him a private music tutor who worked hard to hone his skill. Today he practises 2 hours a day except on weekends.

“I knew about the competition through my online research because I was keen to showcase his talent to the world and didn’t want Ahmed to stay in the shadows. So I decided to apply for him and the rest is history,” Iman added.

 Dreams and aspirations

Ahmed also spoke to us about his love for playing the piano and aspirations for future. Why do you love the piano? “Because piano is my voice when I could not talk or express myself.”

What did you feel when you won the award? “I felt surprised and happy and saw my mother was crying.”

What do you want to do next? “I would like to play in the Emirates Palace and Dubai Opera.”

Other than the piano, what would you like to do? “I like to play remix piano from DJs, and play stations.”
What would you like to be when you grow up? “I’d like to be a composer and pianist.”