Poor said: / When winter comes / Death comes / Cold house / No electricity / No fuel / No warm clothes / No food / No chance to work / On the street / Streets filled with slosh, mud / Where should we work?
I am one of those girls who always wished to see her family happy, especially her mother and father, but since I came in this world, I saw my mother and father argue and make each other sad. I still remember those nights when my mother sang me songs of suffering. I would ask, “Why are you singing this song? I want to hear a nice one, not a sad…
My mother works for the United Nation Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, (UNAMA). One day, in March 2006, she came home from Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar Province very upset about a case. I asked her what worried her. “Is it something again about a female?”
“Yes, my dear,” she said. In the hospital was a girl of 13, Shukriya, from Helmand Province, who had tried to commit suicide.
American thinking about Afghanistan these days is largely focused on figures: troop numbers, casualty tolls, war chests, withdrawal dates. It can be difficult to see individual Afghans standing in the shadows. This is the story of one of them, a woman whose narrative is both uniquely her own, and emblematic.
She’s a wonderful writer, and she should be telling her own story. But she cannot risk it.
I used to think big. When I was six, I made my mom let me go to school, and I loved it. My father told me: “If you stay at the top of your class until the end of your studies, I will do two things for you. First, I will let you go abroad to continue your education. Secondly, I will buy you a car and let you drive.” With the encouragement of my father, I was a superstar in my classes. He was my first English teacher and he always called me “my scholar daughter.”
English