FREEDOM by Shannon Brennan photos by John McCormick


HUSNIA FINDS


Editor’s note: To protect Husnia’s identity, neither her last name nor photos showing a clear view of her face will be used. Find out why.


kite, or swim — much less speak her mind. She had to go to school in secret — in the


W 14 LC MAGAZINE Spring 2012


houses of people brave enough to risk teach- ing girls under Afghanistan’s brutal Taliban regime. Husnia knows girls in her city who were killed for attending such a school. “I pretended I was going shopping,” she


said. Husnia carried her notebooks in a shopping bag and, in the escort of a brother, took different routes to the house where she learned about all the things the Taliban didn’t think girls should know. Her courage was even more amazing given


the fact that her father had been beaten to death by the Taliban when she was only six.


hen Husnia came to the U.S., she had never been able to walk the streets alone, ride a bicycle, fly a


He had gone to visit his sister and was jumped in the street. Husnia said her family specu- lates that he was attacked simply because he was Hazara, an ethnic group targeted by the Taliban because of their efforts to keep the Taliban from gaining control of the north- ern part of the country in 1998, the year her father was killed. Husnia’s secret struggle for knowledge


ended after the U.S. invasion, which knocked the Taliban down, but not out. Beginning in third grade, Husnia attended an all-girls school openly. She also sought out a private tutor to help her with English.


A new life Two years ago Husnia left Afghanistan for Virginia as part of an exchange program that allowed her to go to high school in Potomac


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52