My earliest memory is a piece of paper.
I was so small it is almost a miracle I remember it at all. My baba used to write his Sunday song list every week, whatever he wanted on his next CD, his handwriting careful and deliberate across the page. And I, being whoever I already was at one or two years old, would snatch the pen from his hand and scribble all over it. Nonsense. Chaos. The marks of a child who could not write but understood instinctively that the pen was where the power was.
I still have that paper.
My scribbles on it. The rip where I tried to snatch it too hard. My baba's handwriting. And in the middle of his song list, in his own hand, the words: that Hafsa is my little kitten. She is annoying.
And me still scribbling. Unbothered. Unstoppable.
He saw something in me that day that he never stopped seeing. He fuelled it, fed it, stayed hell bent on polishing it even when it was inconvenient, even when it kept him up, even when his little kitten was hiding under her bed with a star shaped light reading long after she was supposed to be asleep.
Not once. Every night. Because the day never felt enough. Because there was always one more page, one more world I was not ready to leave. Because something in me already understood that whatever was in those books was building something that nothing else could.
They found the light. Took it.
I already had another one hidden.
They took that too. I found another hiding place. This went on because the hunger was simply stronger than everything they could take away. They loved me. They gave the light back in the morning.
My baba is gone now. But his work shows up every day in who I became. People reach out to my family sometimes just to say we pray every night our children turn out like your daughter. And every time I hear that I think the same thing.
It was him. All of it was him. Because he saw the scribbling child trying to steal his pen and instead of taking it away he made room for her at the page. And somehow that one decision, to see her and say yes, built everything that came after.
I have a room full of books, read and unread and read so many times the spines have surrendered. I chose my own education. I pick up whatever calls me and come back years later when I am ready for more. I have lived a thousand lives between pages and pens and every single one made me more alive, more human, more capable of understanding this world and my place in it.
The freedom to fill my mind in whatever direction it wants to go is the greatest privilege of my life. The thing he gave me before I could even spell my own name.
Not every girl has a baba who does that.
There is a girl in Afghanistan right now with the same hunger.
The same thing pressing against her ribs that says more, further, deeper, do not stop. She had it before the doors closed and she has it now and it has not gone anywhere.
It just has nowhere to go.
Her light was taken too. Not by parents who loved her and gave it back in the morning. Taken and not returned. Three years of mornings now with the door still closed, the books still out of reach, the hunger still there with nowhere to land.
Maybe she had a baba who stayed up late too. Who pressed books into her hands and watched her eyes light up and thought yes, that, more of that, because he recognised something in her that the world was going to need. Who fuelled the hunger before the doors closed and now watches helplessly as everything he built in her has nowhere to go.
She is me under that bed.
Except nobody is giving the light back in the morning.
Her hunger is not nothing.
It is the most important thing about her. It was put there for a reason. My baba saw it in me before I could hold a pen properly and he spent every day of his life making sure the world could not take it from me.
Nobody is doing that for her right now.
She wakes up every morning with the same fire, the same hunger, the same child who would snatch the pen and scribble and refuse to stop. Except her paper keeps getting taken away and nobody is writing her name on it.
I have lived a thousand lives between pages and pens.
Give her at least one.
Your donation today is the baba who sees her. The light given back in the morning. The room made for her at the page.
It is the smallest thing you will do today.
It is the only thing that will matter to her.
For every girl still hiding something to read by,
Hafsa