Asiya Tikeeva

When Asiya Tikeeva remembers the young woman she was twenty years ago, newly moved to Astana, she sees someone who was hungry for independence. She had worked in different companies, observed how people built structures around themselves, understood the rules of the game, and one day felt a quiet conviction rise inside her: “I could work for myself.” That simple thought, calm, confident, almost casual, became the beginning of her first entrepreneurial life. She founded a real estate agency, assembled a strong team, worked tirelessly, and tasted the exhilaration of earning well by her own effort. Those years were busy ones, filled with negotiation, paperwork, clients, the thrill of deals closing, and the steady rhythm of a career taking shape. But life, in its deepest lessons, does not arrive in business meetings. It arrives as a child.

When her daughter Madina was born, everything she understood about time, work, and herself shifted. The moment that should have been sacred, the first hours after birth, collapsed under words she still remembers verbatim, because they pierced into the softest part of her being: “Mommy, your child has Down syndrome. Better to leave her here, or take her far away so no one sees her.” The room swayed. The world blurred. What she had carried for nine months with tenderness was suddenly presented as something shameful, burdensome, unworthy of a family. The postpartum depression came like a wave with no edges. Hospitals followed one after another, heart surgery, oncology, a battle with cancer that lasted five years. She remembers crying constantly, as if tears were the only language available. “It seemed like life was over,” she says. And there is no metaphor in that sentence. For a long time, she could not give a speech at family gatherings without breaking down. Everything inside her felt unfinished, raw, and unbearably heavy.

But even in the worst years, one element of her identity survived, “the knowledge that she could earn.” She knew how to create, how to build, how to work. Sitting at home doing nothing was impossible; work had always been part of her sense of dignity. But Madina’s condition demanded constancy. She could no longer live in a 24/7 business rhythm. She needed a profession that could exist beside caregiving, not against it. So she began searching again. She studied franchises, took trainings, looked for fields where competence mattered more than presence in an office. Eventually she found certification work, enrolled in courses, and became a certification expert. Slowly, quietly, without dramatic announcements, she built a new business around her laptop and her phone. “Now I can work from anywhere,” she says. She hired assistants, delegated tasks, and learned to create a business that matched her life, not the other way around. But something else began to take shape. As her practical life stabilized, something inside her began to reorganize itself. Abai would call it the alignment of heart, mind, will. Asiya did not call it anything. She simply lived it. Acceptance did not arrive suddenly. It came years later, when Madina was in first grade. They were walking in the city, passing a mosque, when a new feeling surged through her, clean and unexpected: pride. Pride that this was her child. Pride that she had been entrusted with something sacred. Pride that she no longer needed to hide from the stares of strangers on buses or in cafés. “I realized that I wasn’t ashamed anymore,” she says. “And that the Almighty had entrusted this child to me.” And then came the most important insight of her life, a sentence she repeats to mothers even today:

That acceptance became the beginning of purpose. She joined parent chats. She met Aizhan Alzhanova and Gulsum Semyonova, mothers of daughters the same age, with the same diagnosis. At first they spoke about therapy, schools, doctors, paperwork, and the everyday labyrinth mothers of children with disabilities must navigate. But another question slowly formed: “What about the mothers themselves? Who helps them? Who teaches them to survive their own pain? Who gives them the tools to rebuild their lives?” They searched for psychological support methods, shared readings, attended trainings, talked to each other late at night. What began as a small mothers’ circle became a place of mutual holding, a space where someone could cry without shame and also plan without fear. Over time, the support group transformed into something larger, more structured, more intentional. By 2017, it became a public foundation, “Mama Pro.” Today “Mama Pro” has touched more than 5,000 women in Qazaqstan. There are training centers in Astana and Almaty, branches in regions from Kostanay to UstKamenogorsk, and a national network of nearly 30 staff. Most are mothers of children with disabilities themselves, women who walked into the room once with broken sleep and broken confidence, completed a training, healed, learned, and then stayed to help others.

When Asiya describes the mothers who arrive on day one, she paints a recognizable portrait: women with heavy emotional states; women in clothes that hide rather than express; women who haven’t washed their hair because there is no energy left; women whose backgrounds are full of exhaustion, guilt, confusion, and the silent dread of the future. “Their eyes are empty,” she says quietly. “Just empty.” But after two or three weeks of psychological support, something changes. The gaze lifts. The spine straightens. Interest returns. Possibility returns. A month later, the same women come with neat hair, lipstick, and laughter that doesn’t crack in the throat. In three months they feel like different people, not because “life became easy,” but because they are no longer drowning in it.

Asiya’s philosophy is clear: the path is twofold. First emotional rehabilitation, then economic activation. A woman cannot calculate unit economics when she has not slept or when she is crying through every slide. She cannot write a grant application when she feels unworthy of success. She cannot choose a niche when she feels life has chosen against her. But once she stands on firmer emotional ground, something miraculous happens, her mind sharpens, her will returns, and she begins to dream again in the language of action. “Mama Pro” helps her choose a niche compatible with caregiving. Helps her test demand without capital. Helps her learn cost margins, SMM, packaging, procurement portals, government grants. The foundation teaches how to start with nothing, a kitchen, a phone, a small batch, and build from there. And because each woman begins from necessity, not privilege, the work they build tends to be grounded, practical, and sustainable. Asiya has thousands of examples, but some remain in her heart like sacred markers of what human resilience looks like.

There is Shynar, who came home from the maternity hospital to her motherin-law’s words: “Don’t enter this house. We don’t need a child like that.” Who then lived five years in near isolation. When she joined “Mama Pro,” she could not say “My name is Shynar” without crying. Today she owns a production facility, a brand, a stable business, and a future she built line by line, grant by grant, refusal by refusal, comeback by comeback. When a commission tried to dismiss her, “give others a chance,” she walked out crushed, then remembered what she learned at “Mama Pro,” turned around, and fought for her rights. She won. There is Anara, mother of three adult children with disabilities, who entered the psychological course exhausted beyond words. Months later she wrote: “Asiya, remember what I was like when I first came?” Today she is married again, living with joy she once believed impossible. “I never thought I could just be a happy woman,” she told Asiya. There is a mother of a child with celiac disease who navigated family tensions to build a gluten-free semi-finished foods line that serves her son’s needs and honors her own dream. A quiet triumph, no banners, no speeches, just dignity restored.

And there is Saltanat Kaleyeva, who once wished for “five speech therapists.” Today she runs two rehabilitation centers serving more than 250 children with severe disabilities, entirely free, under full state support. Her journey shows that personal struggle can unfurl into public infrastructure, that pain can turn into policy, and that caregiving can grow into community architecture. Asiya’s work sits at the intersection of survival and purpose. Her foundation does not romanticize struggle. It does not package mothers as heroes. It teaches how to ask for help without shame, how to bring relatives into care rather than resent them, how to build businesses without abandoning the child’s needs, and how to find a pace that is both human and sustainable. “Mama Pro” is not only a women’s initiative. Fathers participate too; the “Papa Pro” program works with men who, like mothers, must learn, adjust, and heal. The Siblings project now supports brothers and sisters of children with disabilities, protecting their mental health and teaching families to speak openly about diagnosis without fear. If you ask Asiya to describe her work in formal terms, she says: “Emotional rehabilitation and economic activation of families raising children with disabilities.” But in what she calls “living language,” it is this:

Her journey, from depression to acceptance, from isolation to leadership, from necessity to purpose, embodies the slow flowering of the Tolyq Adam. She rebuilt herself not in sudden revelation, but in steady acts of will; she opened her heart not only to her child but to thousands of women; she used her intellect to build systems, structures, and tools that now hold families across a nation. Asiya’s work is not only entrepreneurship. It is repair. It is dignity returned. It is unity restored. And in that unity,mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers, policymakers, strangers who become allies, lies the echo of Abai’s wisdom: one person’s strength, when shared, becomes a whole community’s blessing.