Book list
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Courage is the third in the I, Witness series of first-person personal narratives. Jan recounts the story of her family’s escape from Taliban-occupied Herat and her eventual resettlement in Texas. The narrative voice is raw with emotion, and readers are not spared any details of the horrific treatment of Jan’s people, the Hazaras (an ethnic minority in Afghanistan that has long been persecuted and marginalized), or the hardship of being displaced. Even when she attends an elite secondary school in Kabul, Jan is ostracized by the other Afghan students from different ethnic backgrounds. Supportive teachers, along with an unparalleled reserve of determination, a dose of luck, and other factors, enable her family to escape to India and Jan and her sister to attend school in the U.S. Coupled with the personal narrative is a hefty dose of Afghan history, which might make for interesting inquiry projects. A cursory online search leads to news media reports about Jan that supplement this title.