She is actively enjoying the realization of her childhood dreams she's an Afghan American, free to learn, work, support herself, and choose her own path. She may be haunted by her past, but she is no longer enslaved by it. Thanks to a number of good people who crossed her path at critical moments, Farah is thriving. In Kabul, a schoolgirl wears a black dress and a white headscarf in America, girls need the right jeans and trendy tops. In Kabul, they cancel school because of rockets and bombings in Chicago, Farah might have a snow day. It deftly interweaves a childhood in Afghanistan, where the classrooms are naked chambers with only chalkboards on the walls and are filled with more students than seats (and no books), with an American adolescence, where teenagers struggle to decide whether to try out for school plays, whom to take to the homecoming dance, and where to go to college. The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky recounts an epic journey. She begins to learn-slowly-that ordinary people, often strangers, have immense power to save lives and restore hope. When Farah steps on a land mine on her way to school, her world becomes much smaller than the dreams and hopes in her heart.

The sounds of gunfire and fighter planes are as normal to Farah as the sounds of traffic or children playing are to a schoolgirl in America. Bombs are falling all over her country, and her native Kabul is swelling with hundreds of thousands of people looking for homes and jobs. All I heard was a loud ringing in my ears.'įarah Ahmedi is born into the world just as the war between the mujahideen and the Soviets reaches its peak in Afghanistan. Their lips were moving, but I could hear no voices. They were all staring down at me with huge eyes. I woke up on the ground, surrounded by a crowd, men and boys.no women. I remember a shower of soil and then nothing. And then suddenly a fire flashed in my face and the earth seemed to move beneath my feet. 'I was late to school, and that's all I could think about.

The Story of My Life by Farah Ahmedi