The Story of My Life by Mir Tamim Ansary (2005, Abridged, Compact Disc)

This is audio is about 5 hours you will want to make time for all at one sitting because it is too amazing to not listen to the every drip of thought that is packed into this young girls story. This story was the making of Good Morning America asking people to write in true life stories and they would pick a winner and publish the story. No one ever imagined that twenty thousand people would write in. This is the winning story.

The main character is Farah, who is born in Afghanistan at a time when the mujahedeen and the soviets are at war and bombs are falling on her country day after day. At 6 years old she steps on a landmine on her way to school and loses her leg and her foot.

She is rescued from an Afghan hospital and sent to Germany to get medical attention and she must leave her family behind and go to get help in a country she did not existed and does not know the language. It is here she gets amputated and must learn to live with a prosthetic leg and foot.

For two years they cannot send her back into the war torn country and when she does arrive home the Taliban have taken over and the rules for women are very different. One day while out to market a bomb drops on her home and half of her family is killed and now the Taliban are taking all boys to join the army. Join or die. How can they fight along side of the people that killed their father and sister?

Her brothers are forced to flee and are never heard from again.

Farah and her mother also flee to Pakistan, and have trails and trials of events that would make any girl quit wanting to live, but at 14 Farah sees a star fall from the sky as she is talking to God and then at that moment she knows in her heart that it is time to begin an even harder journey: to get her and her very sick mother out of indentured servitude and to America.

I love this audio for teen girls especially, because it is a coming of age story not only for someone with a disability but of a girl finding herself and her power even in bleak circumstances.

It is a riveting tale and one that many will enjoy, learning about the impact of world aid programs, the differences a refugee sees and feels when they get to America, the burden of children who become heads of house in America because they need to translate this new world to their parents, the beauty of trusting that God will lead you to the places you cannot go alone, the importance of volunteer relationships, and of a girl growing to be a beautiful woman.