By Farah Ahmedi with Tamim Ansary

Earlier this year, I helped a girl named Farah Ahmedi write her life story for a contest sponsored by Simon and Schuster and Good Morning America. Farah told me her story over the course of five days this January. I then translated the tapes of those itnerviews into English and rendered them into a book. Farah’s story won the contest and so her book is now available at bookstores and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Let me just note that Farah has had an astounding life. Before I met her, I could only cite the staggering statistics about the hundreds upon thousands of disabled orphans in Afghanistan, children who lost limbs to land mines and also lost their families to the endless war–heartbreaking enough as mere skeletal fact, but Farah is the living embodiment of that story. Read her book and you’ll find out how this plucky, gutsy, determined and somehow still ebullient girl survived the horrors of her life and made it to refuge in Chicago, virtually carrying her ailing mother on her back.

For more about Farah and her book, go to SimonSays

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