My name is Jeanne Yacoubou, founder of Alaafia Kids Company. My last name is that of my spouse, Malik Yacoubou. We met in his home country, Benin, in my third year as a Peace Corps volunteer. Click here to find out where Benin is. I was a high school chemistry/physics teacher in Benin and Malik was one of the most influential and most loved people in his town with great political aspirations (although I didn’t know all this at the time!)
Malik joined me here in 1996. He was busy mastering English at the local community college while I completed two more Master’s degrees to complement the one that I had earned in philosophy before joining the Peace Corps. One was in chemistry, a natural outgrowth of my Peace Corps work, and another, in English as a Second Language (for obvious reasons). With Malik, I became aware of the trials and struggles of being foreign born in the United States. These realizations also contributed to my creating Alaafia Kids as a way to raise awareness of the experiences of different kinds of Americans and develop products with them in mind.
Our first child, Amira, was born in 2000. Latif, with one partially blue eye, a remnant of his caucasian side, was born two years later. In 2004, our third Alaafia Kid, Jamil, was born. I am transitioning out of a full-time teaching job into being a work-at-home, homeschooling mom. Malik is also involved in a work-at-home business, FDI. We are enjoying our life raising and educating our children together at home.
