Berita Faizal

When Mohammad Faizal Ramly strutted his stuff to stardom on Akademi Fantasia 4 show on Astro television earlier this year, he was practically unknown to nine-year-old Zaidi Azmi.

That was mainly because the Standard Three pupil had no access to the satellite television and he could not watch the popular reality show on Astro Ria.

But that was nothing compared to how Zaidi felt when he could not join his friends at school when they talked about 'Bob the Builder' and other other cartoon characters.

He was not about to ask his plantation worker father, Azmi Rawi, 42, to subscribe to Astro as he knew it would be costly, so instead, he began selling watermelons, fresh from the family's one acre farm, by the roadside to earn some extra money to purchase an Astro decoder.

His efforts paid dividend when recently, a national daily wrote about his determination and the powers-that-be at Astro decided to reward him with a free decoder and one year's subscription to a mini package which include fun, learning and sports programmes.

On Thursday afternoon, not only his wish of having Astro came true when Molina Musa, head of malay segment marketing, presented him with the decoder, but he also had a chance to meet Terengganu's singing star Faizal in person.

Faizal and Astro representatives who spent some time at Zaidi's home in Kampung Tok Beris in Setiu later took his whole family to a breaking-of-fast at Marang Suria Resort.

It was really a Hari Raya dream-come-true for Zaidi who later admitted that he never thought that something wonderful like that could ever happened to him.

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