My Life in the Village

I was born in a small village in Ghazni, Afghanistan — a place where most girls never had the chance to go to school. My father passed away when I was one year old, and my mother — a woman who never had the opportunity to learn — raised me and my five siblings alone. She couldn’t read or write, but she understood that education was the only way to change a girl’s destiny. This is a picture of the village that I was born.