It was Nowruz 2024 when, after much insistence, we convinced my family that my younger sister and I should travel via smuggling routes to Pakistan so she could continue her education. First, we went to Kandahar, then to Helmand, and from there we set out toward the Pakistani border. After a week of travel, we finally reached Quetta.
I am a 23-year-old Afghan woman living in Quetta, Pakistan. For the last two years, I have been living in this city with my sister, who is now 17. She was in sixth grade when the republic in Afghanistan collapsed.
These two years have brought a series of relentless challenges to us, from rejection by family members to the absence of a safe place to live.
After three months in Pakistan, my parents decided to return to Afghanistan, leaving me and my sister to continue living here on our own.. We were forced out of the first house when our lease ended. For an entire month, we searched everywhere for a place to live, but found virtually no one willing to rent a house to two unmarried girls without a male guardian.
Finally, we found a house with the condition from the landlord that we must have a housemate. We accepted, just so we could have a roof over our heads.
I looked for work outside our home to pay for language classes, my sister’s school fees, and our basic needs. But Quetta’s society is not very different from today’s Afghanistan; in some ways, one could even say it is years behind. My family strongly opposed the idea of me working outside the home. “You cannot work here,” they said. But I did not give up.
I also sent my resume to several places in search of online work. Eventually, with the help of one of my teachers, I was able to take part last year in Zan Times’ analytical journalism training workshop. That lit a small flame of hope in my heart.
But that hope did not last long.
On August 27, 2025, I was forced to return to Afghanistan because my father had a medical emergency. I stayed there for six months and took care of him.While there, I held painting classes for girls in one of the rooms of our house so I could earn enough money to return to Pakistan.
While I was in Afghanistan, my younger sister was alone in Pakistan. It was around then that Persian-language schools were shut down by the Pakistani government, tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan intensified, and land and air borders were closed. My parents insisted that my sister should also return to Afghanistan. But we pleaded with them for time, hoping that the Persian-language schools would reopen.
Despite all these challenges, I decided to return to Pakistan. On December 9, 2025, I went to Kandahar with my father to start that journey. We stayed in a guesthouse, waiting to find a family containing at least one woman or girl, so I could travel with them. But almost no one was travelling to Pakistan through smuggling routes due to the intensity of border clashes at that time.
After three days of repeated calls with smugglers, I finally said goodbye to my father in Kandahar. He returned to Kabul, and I got into a vehicle where all the men wore turbans, had long beards, and carried guns at their waists. They spoke Pashto in a thick Kandahari accent.
We set off for Spin Boldak.
We spent one night inside a narrow, dark enclosure near the border. We were supposed to be taken across the border at midnight, but at 9 a.m. we heard that 12 people had been caught the night before and that one of them had been wounded by gunfire. The border was closed until further notice.
In a sudden decision born of desperation, I left Kandahar with an unknown smuggler and another family and went to Helmand along another smuggling route.
The smuggler bought me a burqa for 5,000 Pakistani rupees, so that my identity as a Hazara girl travelling alone would remain hidden. Through the tiny holes of the burqa, I could see almost nothing. I felt severely suffocated, and every few moments I placed my hand on my throat to make sure I was still breathing.
He drove us through an area full of ruined buildings until he finally stopped the vehicle near one of those ruins.
The smuggler confidently said he would get us there within two days, but the second day came and we were still lost in the desert.
At the end of that second day, I got my period on the road. I told the daughter of the family travelling with us, who spoke Pashto but understood a little Farsi, to please ask her father to tell the smuggler to stop the vehicle somewhere so I could change my sanitary pad. But she did not take my request seriously. With every jolt of the vehicle on those rough roads, my bleeding grew heavier, and I writhed in pain.
Late that night, we stopped in the middle of the sand. In the absolute darkness, I hid behind the girl and changed my sanitary pad under the burqa.
When I returned to the vehicle, I saw small stains on my skirt, and I burned with shame. But I thanked God that the blood had not reached the burqa.
By the end of the third day, we had entered Pakistani territory, but the journey was still not over.
On the way, we encountered a group of Pakistani Baloch thieves. For a while, we were stuck in a swamp, where I fainted. After paying them a bribe, we were let go, but every two hours we would run into another group of armed men and be forced to stop again.
All those breathless, terrifying moments made me regret having been born a girl, because at any moment, anything could have happened.
At the end of the fourth day, I was told that the next day our route would pass in front of a checkpoint belonging to the terrorist group ISIS, and that I had to be extremely careful and pretend to be mute.
Those words were enough to make me feel as if I were two steps away from death.
We spent the night behind a mountain and set off the next morning before sunrise. The closer we got to that house of horror, the harder it became for me to breathe. My body had frozen.
After about two hours on the road, through the tiny holes of the burqa, my eyes caught sight of their flag mounted high on the mountain. We had arrived.
One of the armed men put his head inside the vehicle and began inspecting us. I could not even breathe.
They made the smuggler get out of the vehicle and took him into the checkpoint. He returned about half an hour later, his face marked by slaps and his shirt covered with dusty footprints from where he had been kicked. But he was laughing.
He started the vehicle and drove away from there as quickly as he could.
At the end of the fifth day, he said we would again reach Pakistan territory the next day, but on the sixth day we were still lost in the sand.
By the end of that day, we reached the junction where the borders of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan meet. I had no way to let my worried family know that I was alive as my phone had been dead since the beginning of that six-day journey.
At 11 p.m., we spent the night in an enclosure near Quetta, and the next day we set off again. Along the way, we were constantly moved from one vehicle to another.
In one of the vehicles, the space was packed with men piled on top of one another, complaining about the heat and the lack of room. I was simply grateful that I was still alive.
Finally, at the end of the seventh day, I reached Quetta.
Our landlord’s mother opened the courtyard gate, and I was able to lift the burqa from my face and breathe again.
Lala Rahimi is the pseudonym of an Afghan woman living in Pakistan.
