Her name is Wasima. She’s 39 years old and a mother of six. She lost her mother when she was just 10, growing up an orphan in a place where poverty is deep and women are barely valued. If anyone can tell you what it means to grow up motherless in such a world, it’s her.
At the age of 12, still just a child, she was married off. “At least my husband was a good man,” she says. But five years ago, war took him too. She was left alone with six children to care for.
Her eldest daughter’s husband left for Iran four years ago to find work. He never returned. No one knows if he’s alive or dead. Left with two babies of her own, she had nowhere else to go but her mother. So now, Wasima carries the weight of eight lives on her shoulders. In their tiny home, she is both mother and father. None of them have identity papers. If something were to happen to them, there would be no record, no one to ask questions. Just silence.
With nothing but two brushes and some shoe polish, Wasima took to the streets, shining shoes to survive. They rent a single-room space for 1,000 Afghanis a month (about 215 TL), where nine people squeeze in to sleep. Out on the streets, she has faced scorn and even physical assault just for working as a woman.
“I have no choice. Let them say what they want, let them beat me if they must—I’m forced to work. I have nothing else to give my children but my own life,” she says. And she means it.
It’s not just strangers who judge her. Even the women in her neighborhood whisper behind her back, shaming her for shining shoes. That’s why she tells no one about her work. Every morning, she leaves home, retrieves her supplies from a shop where she hides them, and sits quietly against a wall, earning just enough to bring home a little bread. Before heading back, she tucks her tools away in the same place, scrubs the black polish off her hands as best she can, and walks home as if she’s returning from nowhere.
Wasima is living proof of what it means to fight with everything you have. She lost her mother at 10, her children lost their father at young ages, and now even her grandchildren are growing up without one. It’s as if Afghanistan itself carries the weight of orphanhood from generation to generation—never breaking the cycle, only passing it on. And despite all her tears, Wasima keeps going. As if she knows the world will never stop taking, so she must never stop giving.
