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...
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...
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...
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...
After school, I did a Bachelor degree in Psychology, which was quite unusual for a Hazara girl in Quetta at that time. But my father was a very broad-minded man. He told me to go and study whatever I wanted. Still, when I was ready to start a job he said it was time...
