Film About Family's Flight From Taliban Wins Peabody Award

All night Sahar Adish's family members had heard the rumbling of tanks moving out of Kabul. The next morning they woke up and saw that everything had changed. Bearded men in long robes and turbans were driving into the city. And in school that day, the principal came into her classroom and told the children they should go home.

It was 1996, Adish was 9 and religious fundamentalists had seized power in Afghanistan. On the radio and loudspeakers, her family heard about new restrictions imposed by the Taliban. Her mother could no longer be a teacher. And girls could not go to school.

"We were in shock," Adish said. "To just stay home, for nothing. It didn't make any sense. And our future was totally unknown."

She's now a senior at the University of Virginia, and today she will be honored for her film about how her family defied the Taliban and fled Afghanistan, seeking safety and an education.

Her story is part of "Beyond Borders: Personal Stories From a Small Planet," nine short works by young people from around the world, and will be presented with one of the broadcast industry's highest honors, the George Foster Peabody Award. "Beyond Borders" includes films shot by a boy in a barrio in Colombia who uses rap to escape the violence, by a child soldier in Sierra Leone and by a girl raised in a polygamist family in Utah, each linked by the ideas of fear and security.

In "Sahar: Before the Sun" (Sahar means "dawn"), Adish tells her story, which begins with a happy, well-educated family in Kabul. Her father was a prominent geologist, her mother a teacher trained in chemistry. Through the years of artillery fire and street fighting, they kept telling their daughter and three sons to study, that an education was the most important thing.

When the Taliban took over, Sahar Adish and her mother had to stay home. But Kamela Adish secretly began teaching her daughter. As months went by, other parents began to send their daughters; about a dozen children joined in the lessons in the apartment. Their mother was afraid, Sahar's brother Honishka Adish said. They were all afraid, but she kept teaching. "She did it because she did not want to keep my sister in the dark," he said.

One day in 1998, two men came to the door. When they saw so many children studying, the men started beating them, as the children tried to run away. They seized Sahar's father.

After several days, he was released with a warning that he and his wife would be killed if the classes resumed.

Some hours later, in the middle of the night, the family fled. That was the last time Sahar Adish saw Afghanistan.

After a few years as refugees in Pakistan, the family members asked for help: They wanted to come to the United States so the children could be educated. The International Rescue Committee brought the family to Charlottesville in 2002.

Within days, the children were enrolled in school in Virginia. Sahar Adish wasn't scared, just excited; even though it was weeks into the high school term, she signed up for advanced chemistry, pre-calculus and an advanced English class.

"It was like a beautiful dream," she said.

Her parents took housekeeping jobs, worked long hours and studied English late into the night.

What happened to the family in Afghanistan is sad, said Austin Haeberle, the creative director at Listen Up! youth media network who produced "Beyond Borders," but it's also hard to watch a scene of Sahar's father getting an order to deliver hand towels. He now works at a hotel.

Sahar Adish was still in high school when she and three other teenagers made the film, said Shannon Worrell, the founding director of Light House youth media center, which is a member of the Listen Up! network. She's now a striking young woman of 19, studious, fluent in English and with a sense of humor that sneaks up on people because she's so earnest about academics, Worrell said, adding: "She just has an incredible kind of optimism . . . she's radiant."

Honishka Adish just graduated from the University of Virginia. Their mother hopes to be a teacher again someday. And Sahar Adish, a biochemistry major, is spending her days in the library, studying for the medical school admissions test.

Someday, she hopes, she'll be a doctor -- and take her skills to Afghanistan.