Kingdom Beyond Borders

One day when I came home from school, everybody was crying. I asked what happened, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. Soon I understood that my two older brothers, ages nineteen and twenty-one at the time, had been kidnapped by the Taliban forces while they were outside. We never heard from them again. The Taliban regime was now in complete control. Afghanistan was a nightmarish place to be. My uncle who was a Talib told us we should flee. This uncle had actually been visited in Samangan by Mullah Borjan, a high-ranking Taliban member and close friend of Osama bin Laden. He came to thank my uncle for his service to the Taliban cause. I remember he presented him with a briefcase full of American dollars. Once the decision to leave was made, things happened quickly. We sold all our livestock and many of our possessions. We buried a box under the floor of our house containing some important documents and pictures. We left in a great hurry at 1:00 a.m. There were thirteen of us in all, including my mom, sister, and me, my grandparents, two uncles and two aunts, along with four cousins. We made it to Kabul, then to Kandahar. We changed cars and drove to Pakistan. The next day, we arrived at Quetta. We lied to the border guards, telling them we were crossing the border to go to a wedding. They let us cross and our journey as refugees began. It was about a month past my tenth birthday.