Moving Stories - “I was born in Kandahar, a Southern province of Afghanistan. My mother is from Kabul and my father from the Kandahar region. They met when my father was in Kabul for work. It was a marriage of love, not an arranged marriage…

I grew up in Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea, with my family of five. I have an older brother and a younger sister. My mother worked at a market stall her whole life. Growing up we were a pretty normal family like everyone else in Eritrea - we’d go to school, come home and eat something and then we would go out and play football or swim in the river. I had a lot of friends and we would have sleep overs or hang out together.

I come from the southern part of Cameroon which is the Anglophone part of the country. I come from a big family of siblings and step-siblings. My early childhood was a happy one, but when I was 11 my mother passed away and after that life was not so easy. My father remarried with a very dominating woman, and I had a hard time living under her rules.

I was born in Tehran to a perfect family: my mother, father, sister and I have always been incredibly close. My parents did not have a good education but they were so open minded about everything. Though my father is a Sunni Muslim, and my mother is Shia, it was never an issue and they would always encourage me to think for myself.

I was born in Iran to an Afghan family, my parents fled from Afghanistan when the Taliban rose to power in the 90s. I was born as a refugee, and have essentially been a refugee my whole life. I have two sisters who are married and one little brother, I also had an older brother. It was never possible to gain full citizenship in Iran, every year we had to pay a lot of money just to renew our temporary refugee papers.

I grew up in Damascus in a middle class family, we had a normal life: I have a younger brother and a little sister, my mother was a housewife and my father worked as a clothing designer. The political situation in Syria was never perfect but we managed to live relatively carefree, and within my family we were happy.