Mariam Ben Nakhi is not your usual teenager. Unlike most 13-year-old girls, she has a passion for fixing phones and computers. After school, Mariam can be found tinkering away in her family’s workshop in Tbilisi. Peering into a magnifying glass, the Georgian native connects tiny intercrate parts to breathe life back into defective devices.

“I like to replace the batteries or clean the fans, replace the paste that is used for cooling down the computers. I like how concentrated I am with connecting the small pieces,” she tells Scenes.

'Feed that curiosity’

Mariam’s interest in electronics was sparked when she was nine years old. Her stepfather, Thomas Burns, a former Hollywood cinematographer and self-proclaimed ‘electronic nerd’, was helping fix a friend’s iMac computer. The colourful wires and shiny components instantly caught Mariam's eye.

“When they took the screen off, there were a lot of small parts that I was interested in. Also, these wires just going through the computer and I was curious about them. I wanted to how the computer worked,” she recounts. “I was like, let me just ask him about what this is and what that is, and maybe I could help with the things that he's doing.”

With her father's help, Mariam replaced the iMac's hard drive. To cultivate and hone his daughter's interest, Thomas offered to fix more friends and family's broken gadgets.

“Mariam is a naturally very curious person. I wish I could say that I inspired her to follow this path, but it really came from her,” says Thomas. “The most important thing for me is that she feels free to pursue her interests without any limitations and that she's not afraid to feed that curiosity,” he adds.

Family business

It didn't take long for word to spread and referrals to start flowing in. Friends of friends began dropping off their broken hardware in the hopes the duo would restore them back to life. “At some point, we realised that we were one Facebook page away from an actual business and so we made it official, and now it is very much a full-time endeavour,” says Thomas.

In 2021, the father-daughter team launched their family business. “I called it ‘Mariam's Computer Repair’, not only is it projecting the fact that women can repair things, which I think is critically important, but it's also a point of pride for us as a family,” explains Thomas.

Media Story and Video - https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/08/15/meet-the-13-year-old-restoring-old-soviet-tech-in-georgia?f