One of Sara Wahedi’s earliest memories is of being four years old, living in a refugee shelter in Buffalo, New York, with a heavy sense of responsibility. Her mother, having been forced out of her job as an English teacher by the Taliban, had fled Afghanistan with her two small children, hoping to begin a new life in North America.
While she worked at the shelter as a cleaner, she tasked her oldest child with checking a bulletin board each morning showing the surnames of refugees who had interviews for asylum in Canada.
“That was my job every morning for I don’t know how many weeks,” Wahidi recalls. “Then one day, I screamed to my mom: ‘I saw our name on the board!’ And she burst into tears.”
