'The Story of My Life' Winner Announced

April 22, 2005 — -- A young Afghan woman who has been in the United States for only three years has been named the winner of a nationwide contest in which Americans were invited to submit their life stories so that one could be selected for publication as a major book. The contest was sponsored by the ABC program "Good Morning, America," and publishing house Simon and Schuster.

The woman, 17-year-old Farah Ahmedi of Wheaton, Ill., was initially reluctant to join the 6,000 Americans who submitted their stories in essay form. However, a friend and sponsor, Alyce Litz, convinced her to try. After the stories were reviewed by a panel of authors and editors, Farah and two other finalists were teamed with professional writers to produce book-length manuscripts. Then, viewers of "Good Morning America" voted by phone and through the Internet after reading profiles of the finalists. More than 18,000 votes were cast.

"This kind of a contest has never been done before," said Carrie Cook, a producer who conceived and produced the project. "We are celebrating the audience -- that every life has a story."

Farah's book arrived in stores today. It is titled "An Afghani Girl on the Other Side of the Sky." The writer with whom she collaborated, Tamin Ansary, communicated with her in Farsi, since Farah is still learning English.

"The other side of the sky" is a reference to one of Farah's childhood fantasies. As an elementary school student in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the early 1990s, she thought of climbing to the sky on a ladder because she wondered what was on the other side. She was so enthralled by a teacher who answered her questions about the sky and the stars that one day when she feared being late for school, she took a short cut across a vacant lot near her home in Kabul.

That short cut led to disaster. Rival militias were fighting for control of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the collapse of the Soviet-installed government. Crossing the vacant lot, Farah stepped on a land mine.

"I was walking fast, and then -- just shocked," she said. "I was in the air, with this light, this bright light, and then I passed out."

When she awoke, a crowd had gathered around her, but no one offered help. Finally, one man in the crowd took pity on her. He wrapped her in a shawl and put her in a taxi for transport to a hospital. In the taxi, Farah looked for the first time at her left leg.

"It was so red, and the bone was white, and it was hanging. I said, 'I'm never going to look down any more.' "

Farah learned quickly how ill-equipped the Kabul Hospital was to handle the mounting casualties created by Afghan militias. Doctors and nurses were woefully short of medicine and disinfectants.

Finally, Farah was airlifted to Germany with 30 other children under the sponsorship of a relief organization. But doctors in Germany couldn't save her left leg. It was amputated. Her right knee was removed, and the thigh bone on her right leg was fused with her shin bone, held together by a metal rod.

She returned to Afghanistan with a prosthetic leg and new clothes from her stay in Germany. When she told her family that she wanted to dress again like an Afghan girl, her father, a tailor, promised to make the garments for her. She and her mother went to a Kabul market to choose the materials. But as they returned home from shopping, they were plunged into another disaster.

A rocket attack had destroyed their home. The bodies of Farah's father and two sisters lay in the street.

"My mother was crying, tearing out her hair, and hitting herself," Farah said. "The neighbors took me in their house, and then -- I just couldn't think what to do. I'm still shocked. Ah, so shocked."

Soon afterward, the Taliban army controlled Afghanistan. Farah's two brothers left Kabul to escape conscription by the Taliban. Concerned by the physical and emotional frailty of her mother, Farah took matters into her own hands.

Farah's prosthetic left leg had needed repairs. She patched it together with tape and glue. She could not bend her right leg because the bones within it were fused. But, aided by another family, Farah climbed with her mother across a mountain border into Pakistan.

To avoid living in refugee tents, which Farah believed would further endanger her mother's health, Farah took a job as a household servant to a family in Quetta, Pakistan, in exchange for a small room where she and her mother lived.

It became a Cinderella-like existence. Farah remembers being teased and constantly criticized by a girl in the household who was approximately her age. The girl lied to her mother to get Farah into trouble, Farah said. "And I couldn't say anything."

Finally, Farah, a Muslim, began praying. "I started [telling] God, I can't take it any more. I will die. I would like to die. I don't want to live like this."

On one of her worst nights, Farah said, she looked into the sky and saw a shooting star -- and took it as a sign that things would get better.

"I think that was a message for me, you know? 'You won't be here anymore. I'll take you from here.' "

Farah applied to the organization World Relief for one of the few opportunities being offered to go as a refugee to the United States. And, after navigating a maze of bureaucratic and transportation complications, she and her mother were accepted. In April of 2002, they arrived in Wheaton and were moved into public housing.

Shortly afterward, they met Alyce Litz, a World Relief volunteer.

"All I knew was that she and her mother were the only two surviving members of their family," Alyce said. "They didn't know anything of what to do, or how to handle things. [Farah] was just so anxious to get into American life."

Alyce and her husband, John, who have a grown daughter, responded to the spark of enthusiasm and determination that was immediately apparent in Farah. They helped arrange for transportation and medical care for Farah and her mother, who continues to suffer from chronic asthma. They also helped obtain a new prosthetic leg for Farah.

In the months that followed, they took dozens of field trips together, to introduce Farah to American customs and the Midwestern landscape. Farah quickly learned English, and is a junior in high school, where she already has won an outstanding student award. But Farah never has heard from or about her brothers since the day they set out to escape the Taliban; and her nightmares have never stopped.

"She has nightmares every night," said Alyce. "And her mother still has nightmares, so a lot of times they're up in the middle of the night, and then she gets up every morning and gets to school. But she does her homework. She's very dedicated to getting her homework done."

Describing her nightmares, Farah said, "My eyes are open, but my mind ... keeps going, keeps going. I can't help it."

The nightmares are mostly about her family, Farah said. She also dreams that she has returned to Pakistan and lost her passport, and can't get back to her new home in Wheaton.

Farah likes to go to playgrounds and sit on swings. Though she is 17 years old, Farah still enjoys dolls and other childlike things. And she loves to dress in costumes.

"Maybe it's to get a break from all the seriousness of her life," Alyce said. "We took her to Disney on Ice, and I'm sitting there watching the Cinderella segment of it, and ... I'm thinking will she see this magic someday? Is she going to have a future?"

At her high school, Farah was intrigued by a proposed fashion show in which students from different cultures would wear their native clothes. But, she said, another student intimated that Farah couldn't model for the show because she couldn't walk well enough with one leg fused and another prosthetic. That cut her to the quick.

"I went home and I threw myself on the bed sobbing," she said.

But Alyce Litz talked Farah into volunteering for the show, anyway. "And the teacher was thrilled that she wanted to do it," said Alyce. "And she had so much confidence when she came out on the stage. We were just so proud of her and I thought, 'She can do it!' "

"Our favorite song is Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up," Alyce said. We sing that a lot in the car. 'You raise me up, to stand on mountains; you raise me up to walk on stormy seas.' We both decided we do that for each other."

In some ways, Farah is now on the other side of the sky that she had wondered about when she was in second grade. One of the lessons that struck her most after her arrival in the United States as a refugee was that the country she came to was settled and built by refugees -- that the other side of the sky is sometimes a mirror image of the same dream.

"It made me happy that we have something in common," she said. "Because everybody comes and some make their dreams come true. So I'll be the same way. I'm going to do what they did."