Changemaking starts early in ‘Maisun’s World’

No one is too young to make a difference. This statement gets passed around a lot, but seldom do we come across someone who live their life as a genuine example of it.

There aren't a lot of names besides the globally famous few readily come to mind when thinking of a child leader. Even more rare is a local name who can take that mantle.

But at just 10 years old, Chattogram's Umme Maisun has started to stand out as a youth sensation. With her engaging social media content, she has already established herself as a young English instructor of the country.

It's not an easy task. Beyond just vocabulary and grammar, the language of English requires that someone also be good at accent, spontaneity, fluency and a whole lot more. Somehow, even at a such a young age, Maisun is proving to be capable in all of them.

In addition to this, one needs to have an eye for interesting content to thrive on social media, and Maisun steps up to the plate for that too.

A third-grader at a Bangla medium school of the port city, she went viral across the country after appearing for a Robi 10 Minute School video tutorial. The video, published on June 10, features her talking about how to greet people in English. It garnered around 1.6 million views.

Another video on how to introduce oneself in English, published the following day, ended up fetching a whopping 5.5 million views. Since then, Robi 10 Minute School has posted eight video tutorials on kids' English by Maisun.

June turned out to be a particularly good month for her. On June 15, Maisun took part in a World Youth Skill Day event titled "We are echoing Greta Thunberg -- No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference" as a guest speaker. Beside her, the programme featured speakers from USA, Australia, Kenya, and Georgia.

All of this recognition has led to her racking up 170K followers on Facebook and 55.1k subscribers on her YouTube channel "Maisun's World". Her parents help her curate and create content for her personal social media accounts.

When asked how it all began, Maisun told The Daily Star it was when her cousins from USA came home for vacation a few years back. "They didn't know any Bangla, so I was struggling to communicate with them," she said, "This kind of forced me to learn their language as fast as possible."

"I practised speaking English for hours in front of the mirror, along with reading English books and watching cartoons and movies. These exercises helped me catch up with the language," she added.

She said she is fond of reading children's novels by Muhammed Zafar Iqbal as well as Harry Potter, Princess Diaries and children's books by Geronimo Stilton. She's also a regular newspaper reader, specifically The Daily Star, she told this correspondent.

It may have been a short journey, but it has been a journey nonetheless, and Maisun has come out of it with wisdom aplenty. "To overcome fear is the first step of learning any language," she boldly said to this correspondent.

Besides English, Maisun said she's also fascinated by mathmatics and dreams of becoming a computer engineer in the future.