Imagine that you are a seven-year-old girl and you are being made to do things that you don’t want to do. This was my situation eleven long years ago… Let me tell you my story. My name is Laila. I am from Afghanistan. I was seven years old when my real mother put me into prostitution for money. I could not spend my childhood like other children. I was not allowed to go to school. I could not wear a school uniform, and there was no one to give me a pen. Instead of a pen, my mother, brother, and stepfather slapped and forced me to go out and be with strange men so that I could bring back money for them. I was beaten very badly if I did not obey them. There was no one to support me or to help me get out of the terrible life I was living. I felt hopeless. I thought everything in my life was finished and there was nothing to look forward to. But I was wrong. After my mother went to prison, Women for Afghan Women (WAW) took me to one of their Children’s Support Centers. I was scared …
WAW Client
Brought Together by Pain, 3 Girls Forced Into Marriage Have New Dreams
Published in The New York Times, 10/6/2017 By Rod Nordland Kabul, Afghanistan — Afghanistan is a place where all too often a young girl’s dreams die. But not always. So it has been with three Afghan friends, whose unrelated cases were all so awful that they are painful to talk about even now that the three are young women, years after the trauma. Each of them escaped a forced marriage as a child, is lucky to be alive, and knows it. Each of them has big dreams — despite what has happened, and because of it. For one of them, Gul Meena, 18, dreams have already started coming true. Last month she boarded a flight from Kabul to Östersund, Sweden, via Istanbul and Stockholm, accompanied by an American lawyer. It was Gul Meena’s first time in an airplane, first time out of her country, first time that, as she put it before, “I will be free.” Gul Meena’s first dream was to escape Afghanistan. Her next was to have a television set in her room. She said she wanted to see how her …
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Afghanistan Refugees: WAW Helps Women Adjust to Life in the U.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_hC_xjNY9Q&t=61s Al Jazeera America produced this mini-documentary in an April 2016 report that features just some of what we do at Women for Afghan Women's New York Community Center. WAW client, Sitara, and her daughter have made an incredibly successful adjustment to their new lives in the United States. Sitara now has a full-time job, her daughter is in our Girls Leadership Program and is doing extremely well in school. This client story is just one of the many great success stories that makes all of us at WAW so proud, and so sure we are doing right by our clients. …
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