Beyond the Border - A First-hand account
“If my country had not experienced the hardships it has, life would be easier. I am a young Afghan girl from the persecuted Hazara ethnic group, who at the age of eighteen find myself residing in Pakistan with no family members. This is my story.
I was raised in a low-income family in a remote rural region of Afghanistan. In spite of our modest existence, I had a lot of high aspirations. I always wanted to be self-sufficient and able to stand on my own two feet. I also wanted to assist other females in gaining access to education to provide them with employment and support their independence. In addition, I had a strong desire to interact with individuals from all over the world and learn more about their cultures and viewpoints. To further this end, I decided to learn the international language, English.
I was a seventh grader when I began studying English in an English-centered classroom. One of the main challenges at the beginning was the distance from the location where I was learning. The second challenge I faced was getting the money to pay for books and notebooks, and the third was finding time to study the material while needing to also work in the fields with my parents and learn my regular school subjects. Despite all of these difficulties, I persisted in my quest and never gave up. After putting in two years of intensive study I was able to write, read, and talk in English.
In 2021, when I was a grade ten high school student, I made a plan to help and instruct anyone who would like to learn English, but on the 15th of August, 2021, my country fell and the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. It is impossible to express in words how difficult that dark day was. I thought life had ended, because we no longer had our fundamental rights of education or freedom to speak.
In 2022 again I started to work with female students to teach them English. This was one of the most beautiful memories of my life and I was so happy with that until the end of 2022. Then at the beginning of 2023 the Taliban announced that girls and women are not allowed to go to universities or educational centres, and they forbade women and girls from working outside of their homes. After that, I decided to just teach the girls who were the same age as me. I knew that according to the Taliban’s perspective, the education of girls was awful, and teaching them was illegal, but I had a lot of passion to continue assisting them in learning a language. I taught students in many different villages. Those villages were far from my house, and sometimes I used to change my location so that the Taliban would not realize that I was teaching them English. The Taliban consider that the English language belongs to people who are not Muslim, and are inclined to believe that learning English is a crime. So teaching English was a dangerous job.
Unfortunately, the Taliban were informed of this activity that we had. I can remember how horrible and stressful that day was for me. I was forced to leave my home and family. I escaped to a friend’s house in the mountainside, further from my own house. I stayed there for some days. That house felt like a cage and prison for me. I did not know what happened to my family after I left home, and I had no contact with them. My friend’s father assisted me in going to Kabul from my hometown. On the way, I wore a burqa to cover my face. Fortunately, I arrived in Kabul safely in one day. I stayed in Kabul for more than a month. Like staying at my friend’s house, living there was pretty hard and I felt like a prisoner. I desired to have a free life with no fear and not to hide. I wanted to go outside and talk to people, but I could not, because of the risk of being arrested by the Taliban.
In the room I stayed at in Kabul, I met some guests. These people had a similar story to mine. They were also in danger. They wanted to leave Afghanistan and go to Pakistan so I talked to them about traveling to Pakistan together. Fortunately, I had a friend who along with his wife assisted me in paying the visa cost. I got a Pakistani visa and moved from Kabul at 2 a.m. one night to the border of Pakistan. I left Kabul with a world of hopelessness and no clear future.
The border was crowded with masses of people but we finally crossed the border to Pakistan at 6 p.m. For sure it is Jesus’s miracle that I could pass the border and get to Pakistan safely.
Now I am here as a refugee with no family members, which is pretty hard. I have no clear future or obvious destination and no right to be educated or work. Besides that, the government of Pakistan deports Afghan refugees who do not have passports and visas. I am worried about my future and am searching for asylum in other countries that accept refugees.
The Hazara people in Afghanistan have experienced the most persecution, because the fundamentalist Taliban do not accept the Shiite faith as true Islamic belief. Even before the Taliban took control of the government, the Hazara people were often targeted by the Taliban. Deadly suicide bombings have often targeted girls’ schools and even maternity hospitals in Hazara areas over the past decade.
Returning to Afghanistan is entirely impossible for me. In fact, returning to Afghanistan is a commitment to suicide for me. Afghan girls, especially Hazara girls, have experienced much violence from the Taliban. The Taliban have arrested hundreds of girls from the Dasht-e-Barchi area of Kabul on the pretext of not wearing a proper Hijab, which can not be a logical reason. They have tortured these girls while they were prisoners, and even raped girls and women. When these girls were released from Taliban prison they committed suicide. Each of them had a deeply painful story. I believe that if I were arrested by the Taliban today, I would be one of those girls.”