When people meet Anosha Azeemi (TYP), the first question they ask her is always where she is from. The second question: Has she read The Kite Runner?"I read it twice, once for me, and once in English class at school," Azeemi, a native of Afghanistan, says. "In class, they were always asking me questions about it, like is it accurate and how it's fitting Afghanistan when I lived there."

When Azeemi was six years old, the Taliban took over Afghanistan. As she puts it, "Everything turned upside down."

First, Azeemi had to stop going to school because she was a girl, and her mother, who was a teacher, lost her job. Then the Taliban murdered her male relatives one by one, including her father.

After that, Azeemi doesn't remember much of Afghanistan.

"I was so young," she says. "The females were not allowed to go outside after that without a male relative."

Azeemi remained in Afghanistan for only a few months with her mother and siblings until they decided to move to Pakistan in 1993, leaving behind all their possessions and friends. At that time, there were over 1.6 million other Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 1.4 million refugees in Iran, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Because Pakistani schools are private, her family could only afford to send one child to school. Azeemi had to stay at home while her brother went to school.

"Since we couldn't afford it, [my mother] sent my brother to school, but she thought that it's not necessary for girls to get education," she says. "It still makes me mad when I think about it."

But Azeemi's drive to learn throughout her childhood was so strong that she home-schooled herself, teaching herself to read and write Farsi and to read Arabic.

She's humble, though, about her accomplishments and motivation to learn. "It's just when you know how to read a little, and read more and more, you learn," she says.

Azeemi is a short, tan girl with big brown eyes. Her hair is usually in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her dress is modern and doesn't stand out, but it wasn't always like that.

While living in Pakistan, Azeemi always wore a head scarf to cover her hair, and whenever she went to visit her grandmother in Afghanistan, she had to wear a burqa.

"Wearing burqa is like torture," she says. "I used to fall, like, every two steps because I couldn't see, and I couldn't breathe in it."

After Azeemi and her family had been living in Pakistan for seven years, they learned that they had been selected by a United Nations program for Afghan refugees to move to the United States.

Azeemi was thrilled. "Getting picked by the United Nations is like winning the lottery," she says.

Yet the chance to move to the U. S. caused problems within her family. Her Afghan grandmother worried that Azeemi and her siblings would become "Americanized."

"[In the Middle East] they don't see becoming American as a good thing," Azeemi says. "But my mom went against the family and she said 'No, I want my family to be educated.' She wanted a peaceful life for our family."

So Azeemi, at the age of 13, readied herself to leave Pakistan. Her flight to America was scheduled for Sept.12, 2001.

"We arrived in the airport and we found out our flight was canceled," she says. "I was crying the whole night. It sounds so bad, but I didn't really care what happened to the twin towers; I was just so upset that we couldn't go and that everything got messed up. I just thought to myself, 'it's just my luck, I'm finally going to the United States, and I'm going to school, and this happens to me.'"

Azeemi feared that she would have to remain in Pakistan for the rest of her life.

On Oct. 7, 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and thousands of Afghan refugees poured over the Pakistani boarder to escape the invasion. Even though Azeemi lived eight hours away from the violence, she still witnessed the effects of the war firsthand.

"It was horrible," she recalls. "You could actually see pregnant women who were just giving birth in the street because there is no place to go and they had to leave. There was no food, and it was wintertime and cold too."

That time in Pakistan, Azeemi says, made up the "worst five months of my life." Then, in January 2002, the U.N. told her family they could relocate to Houston, Texas.

"I still can't figure out why," she says. "Why Texas? Out of all of the states, why Texas?"

Once there, Azeemi, who knew no English, found herself face-to-face with even more obstacles. Even though she was ecstatic to be going to school for the first time since she was six years old, she still struggled with the move.

Despite the fact that, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service there were 60,000 Afghan refugees in the U.S. in 2002, and despite the fact that Azeemi felt she was in a diverse city, Azeemi felt that she had to hide her heritage.

"I was in a big city, and it was a multicultural city, but in the beginning, I couldn't tell people that I was from Afghanistan," she says. "I had to ignore the Afghanistan part of me. I tell them that I'm Persian because a lot of people-I'm not saying that they don't know, but a lot of people are not questioning what is Persian. They're like, 'Okay, you're Persian, maybe that's a country that we don't know.' Nobody questions it."

When she did tell people she was from Afghanistan, Azeemi says that she was often met with hostility.

"My classmates would ask me if Osama was my dad, or if I've seen him. I'm like, 'Yeah, I have dinner with him all the time,'" she says. "I guess I don't know why the reaction is like that. I guess it's more of a lack of education."

Despite the hostility and the language barrier, the most trying part of Azeemi's new life was getting used to a profoundly different culture and customs.

"I was a girl, and I couldn't talk to a male outside my family before," she says. "Then they put me in ninth grade, and I had male teachers and male classmates, and I didn't know how to react to that. I didn't know what to do."

Azeemi says that she still struggles with English grammar and American culture, but she's looking forward to experiencing more of her new life with her newfound freedom from her family in college.

"Even here in [the] United States, my family is kind of conservative," she reflects. "I just want to be away and find the real Anosha. Like what am I about without my family and what is my purpose in life."

So far, Azeemi says she feels comfortable at Brandeis, which she chose due to its emphasis on diversity. There are eight Afghan students at Brandeis, but only one undergraduate, and Azeemi is the only female Afghan student here, possibly due to the lack of education among Afghan girls her age.

When she meets people for the first time, she tells them she's from Houston. She only reveals her Afghan roots when people question her about her accent, but overall, she says, she feels accepted in the Brandeis community.

"A few people made fun of my accent, but I was just like, 'Whatever, I think my accent is cute,'" she said. "Besides that, some people are just like, 'Wow, you're the first Afghan that we meet,' and other people are just like, 'Okay,' and then move on, so it's good."

Hallmate and friend Liana Langdon-Embry '11 said that she was inspired when she heard Azeemi's story.

"It makes me feel like if she can do that, then I can do anything because seriously I think she showed so much bravery in the obstacles that she had to overcome," she said.

According to Prof. Maura Farrelly (AMST), who teaches Azeemi's class on international affairs and the American media, Azeemi isn't timid about sharing her story with the class.

In a recent class, Farrelly explains, two students were giving a presentation on the American media's lack of coverage about Iraqi refugees.

"[Azeemi] put her hand up and explained to the class her experience as an Afghan refugee," Farrelly says. "Her and her family had been real media darlings in Houston, and all of the stories about them were about how happy they were to be in America, so she was actually able to show the class examples of what we were discussing from her life."

Since living in America, Azeemi says she has noticed how the American media insuffeciently covers Afghan refugees.

"The way I see it, the media is not really covering the refugees' stories. The way media covered it, it's, like, all happy stories from families and happy stories that came from Afghanistan and now they're so happy here," she says. "But that's not really going deep to look at the other people who are still back there."

That's why Azeemi plans to use her Brandeis education to become an investigative journalist and to write the stories of women and girls like her growing up as refugees in the Middle East.

"I want to write the female stories," she says. "I think there's a big gap even in the Western culture and Muslim culture. In Afghanistan, it's different because women don't have rights. You don't see their stories on the news. Nobody knows about them, and I do."

Editor's note: Prof. Maura Farrelly (AMST) is the ombudsman of the Justice.