The Justice

When people meet Anosha Azeemi (TYP), the first question they ask her is always where she is from. The second question: Has she read The Kite Runner?

"I read it twice, once for me, and once in English class at school," Azeemi, a native of Afghanistan, says. "In class, they were always asking me questions about it, like is it accurate and how it's fitting Afghanistan when I lived there."

When Azeemi was six years old, the Taliban took over Afghanistan. As she puts it, "Everything turned upside down."

First, Azeemi had to stop going to school because she was a girl, and her mother, who was a teacher, lost her job. Then the Taliban murdered her male relatives one by one, including her father.

After that, Azeemi doesn't remember much of Afghanistan.

"I was so young," she says. "The females were not allowed to go outside after that without a male relative."

Azeemi remained in Afghanistan for only a few months with her mother and siblings until they decided to move to Pakistan in 1993, leaving behind all their possessions and friends. At that time, there were over 1.6 million other Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 1.4 million refugees in Iran, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Because Pakistani schools are private, her family could only afford to send one child to school. Azeemi had to stay at home while her brother went to school.

"Since we couldn't afford it, [my mother] sent my brother to school, but she thought that it's not necessary for girls to get education," she says. "It still makes me mad when I think about it."

But Azeemi's drive to learn throughout her childhood was so strong that she home-schooled herself, teaching herself to read and write Farsi and to read Arabic.

She's humble, though, about her accomplishments and motivation to learn. "It's just when you know how to read a little, and read more and more, you learn," she says.

Azeemi is a short, tan girl with big brown eyes. Her hair is usually in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her dress is modern and doesn't stand out, but it wasn't always like that.

While living in Pakistan, Azeemi always wore a head scarf to cover her hair, and whenever she went to visit her grandmother in Afghanistan, she had to wear a burqa.

"Wearing burqa is like torture," she says. "I used to fall, like, every two steps because I couldn't see, and I couldn't breathe in it."

After Azeemi and her family had been living in Pakistan for seven years, they learned that they had been selected by a United Nations program for Afghan refugees to move to the United States.

Continued...

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