By Omidullah Sadid
Shiren was born in a small village in northern Afghanistan, where winters were harsh, roads turned to mud after rain, and electricity disappeared more often than it stayed. Her father worked endlessly to feed the family, and her mother was only a teacher with a very low salary. Their house was simple, with a few small rooms made of mud, and a yard filled with dust in summer and snow in winter. Yet inside that poor house lived a girl full of impossible dreams.
From childhood, Shiren believed education could change everything.
Every morning before sunrise, she would help her mother fetch water, sweep the yard, and prepare breakfast, then walk long distances to school. Her notebooks were old and reused, their pages filled with erased words and faded ink, but she treated them like treasure. She studied under dim night lights, often wrapping herself in blankets against the freezing cold while memorising lessons others would forget by morning.
Becoming a computer science student for a girl in the village was a big dream, and many villagers used to laugh at it.
“A computer science student?” some would say. “For a village girl?”
But Shiren never stopped believing.
She became one of the top students in her school. Mathematics excited her. Computers fascinated her, even though she had barely touched one. She imagined herself sitting in a university classroom one day, typing code onto a glowing screen, building a future her younger self could not even describe.
For years, she carried that dream carefully inside her heart.
Then came 2020.
The year she graduated from school was the happiest of her life. When the Kankor exam results were announced, her hands trembled so badly that she had to ask a relative who had internet access for the results. And there it was, she had been accepted into the computer science faculty of one of Afghanistan’s top universities.
That evening, her family celebrated with tea and simple homemade food. Her mother cried quietly as she started folding new dresses for her daughter’s university life. Her father looked at her with pride hidden behind tired eyes. For the first time, Shiren felt the world opening before her.
She bought notebooks, a school bag, and carefully prepared clothes for her first days at university. She imagined crowded classrooms, libraries, new friends, and long walks across campus. After years of struggle, hope finally felt real.
But hope can disappear very quickly.
By mid-2021, fear had spread across the country. The security situation worsened day after day. Villages whispered about districts falling. Roads became dangerous. Families stopped talking about the future and started talking about survival.
Still, Shiren refused to believe her dream would end before it even began.
Then came August 2021.
Everything changed.
The government collapsed. The Taliban took control of the country, and suddenly Afghanistan felt unfamiliar even to its own people. The streets were filled with silence, fear, and uncertainty. News spread rapidly: women were being removed from workplaces, girls’ schools were restricted, and universities began closing their doors to female students.
Shiren waited.
Days passed. Then weeks.
She never set foot in her university classroom. Never sat behind a computer in the faculty she had dreamed about for years. Never did the journey begin that she had imagined every night before sleeping.
Her university life ended before it even started.
At first, she tried to stay hopeful. She kept her books close, as if the dream could still return if she waited long enough. But every passing month felt heavier. Around her, millions of women and girls were slowly disappearing from public life. Futures collapsed quietly behind closed doors.
Eventually, Shiren made the hardest decision of her life.
She left Afghanistan.
Leaving home felt like tearing herself apart. She crossed into Pakistan carrying little more than clothes, documents, and fading hope. Like thousands of others, she believed another country might evacuate her, might give her a second chance to study and live freely.
Months passed in uncertainty.
She filled out applications, attended interviews, sent emails, waited for responses, and spent time beneath burning heat. Every message notification made her heart race. Every silence broke it again.
Then one day, hope returned.
She was told she might be relocated to a Western country. For the first time in a long while, she smiled without forcing it. She imagined university again. A classroom again. A future again.
But later, the promise disappeared.
The acceptance never came.
The door closed before she could enter.
Once again, Shiren found herself standing in the ruins of another dream.
Still, she refused to completely surrender. She enrolled in online courses, studied through weak internet connections, and eventually got accepted into an online university program. She studied from tiny rented rooms, surrounded by uncertainty and homesickness. But survival in Pakistan became increasingly difficult. Rent, food, paperwork, and daily expenses slowly consumed everything.
After a long and exhausting struggle, she made another painful decision.
She returned home.
When she arrived back in her village, little had changed. The same mountains stood in silence. The same dusty roads stretched endlessly ahead. But Shiren had changed. The girl who once packed dresses for university now carried invisible grief inside her heart.
Today, she lives quietly like millions of other girls in Afghanistan whose dreams were interrupted by history. Some still study secretly. Some still wait. Some no longer allow themselves to hope too much because hope has become painful.
Yet somewhere inside Shiren, a small light still survives.
A fragile belief that maybe one day she will sit in a classroom.
Maybe one day she will become the person she dreamed of becoming.
And until then, she remains suspended between hope and hopelessness, living a life that feels forgotten by the world, in the middle of nowhere.
Note: The name of the character in the story has been changed.
