by nhoa | Dec 12, 2020 | Uncategorized
One day, when I was 12 years old, I had just finished making lunch when suddenly we heard bombs falling in our suburb. Outside, we saw houses being destroyed around us and people being killed so everyone just started running. I lost my family in the chaos, but I ran...
by nhoa | Oct 31, 2020 | Uncategorized
When I was 10 months old, my parents bought tickets to escape Vietnam on an overcrowded fishing vessel with 363 people onboard. It was really scary for them because they had heard many stories of boats capsizing, and of pirates. They had got married just before the...
by nhoa | Oct 17, 2020 | Uncategorized
My father was a freedom fighter against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. When I was 3, he sent my mother and us kids to Pakistan to give us a better life. As a result, I grew up in Pakistan, but visited my father in Afghanistan every few months. In that time, he...
by nhoa | Aug 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
When I was a child in El Salvador, there were often helicopters firing bullets from the sky. I remember sometimes my parents would make us get up in the middle of the night, crawl on the floor and put mattresses up against the walls. Then we had to try to sleep under...
by nhoa | Apr 11, 2020 | Uncategorized
My father was executed by the government after the Islamic Iranian revolution in 1989. I was only about 5 at that time, so it’s all a bit blurry. But I remember waking up one early morning and Mum saying, ‘We're leaving’. We didn’t even get a chance to say...